Can US president-elect Joe Biden walk and chew gum at the same time? If walking is managing domestic pressures and chewing gum is pursuing a balanced foreign policy, the answer is far from clear.
The tension between bipartisan calls to contain China and the imperative of cooperating with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on climate change is a case in point.
Biden plans to marshal a broad alliance of democratically minded Pacific and European countries to check China’s expansionism. In Xi’s view, China might be able to use the promise to cooperate on climate change as a source of leverage with which to thwart Biden’s containment strategy, especially in light of Republican opposition to climate action and hostility toward China.
The stakes could not be higher. Humanity faces a truly calamitous future if the world’s two largest economies — and largest carbon dioxide emitters — do not commit to cooperating to address climate change. Yet the grim prospect that the Sino-American geopolitical competition will hamper climate cooperation is rarely discussed in either Washington or Beijing.
In the US, the prevailing wisdom is that curtailing its carbon emissions is in China’s self-interest. Beyond being the world’s largest carbon emitter, China is the world’s leading consumer of coal, accounting for 52 percent of global use.
High levels of pollution threaten to undermine support for the ruling Chinese Communist Party among a growing Chinese middle class demanding a cleaner environment. International pressure is also mounting.
Unfortunately, this view fails to account for China’s belief that, on climate change, the West needs it more than it needs the West. It will thus demand a high price, especially from the US and its European allies, for its contributions. To avoid losing the international community’s goodwill — or overplaying its hand — it will likely proceed in a calculated manner.
The first prong of China’s strategy is already visible. At the UN “Climate Ambition Summit,” Xi reiterated his pledge to reach peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
Xi also vowed to meet even more ambitious climate goals by 2030. These include lowering carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 65 percent from 2005 levels; ensuring that renewables account for a quarter of primary energy consumption; and increasing total installed wind and solar capacity to more than 1.2 billion kilowatts — roughly three times China’s installed capacity last year.
Such declarations aim to boost China’s international profile — and put the US on the spot.
The second prong of China’s strategy has not yet been unveiled, but it is reasonable to expect it to try to leverage its apparent climate leadership to secure economic and political concessions.
China would first call for broadly cooperative, nonconfrontational international dialogue and request tariff reductions — outgoing US President Donald Trump’s administration imposed a 30 percent tariff on Chinese solar panels — and clean-technology transfers, to help it meet its climate commitments. Besides these pragmatic demands, China’s leaders would be tempted to pressure the West to tone down its criticisms of Chinese human-rights abuses, particularly the crackdown in Hong Kong and the mass incarceration of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
This two-pronged strategy would put Biden in a bind. If his climate pledges fall short of the international community’s expectations, China would look like the more responsible power. If he commits to ambitious climate goals, Republicans would undercut his credibility by sabotaging the relevant policies in US Congress and the courts.
Even if Republicans do not manage to block climate action, there is the risk that a Republican administration — possibly even led by a second-term Trump — could reverse them in 2024, as Trump did when he became president in 2017.
At the same time, given bipartisan antipathy toward China in the US, Biden would probably not be able to grant even modest concessions on tariffs or technology transfers, and he would be under intense pressure to confront Xi over human-rights abuses. China could then use this as an excuse to adopt a similarly hardline stance, insisting that Biden make irrevocable climate commitments — an impossible demand given Republican opposition — before it takes more action.
The resulting stalemate would appear to be the US’ fault, undermining its position on China on the world stage. It is from a climate perspective that this scenario would be truly catastrophic. A Biden administration must recognize how easily it can happen — and do everything possible to ensure that it does not.
Pei Minxin is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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