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El punto ciego sudamericano de Biden

En los últimos años, China ha expandido significativamente su presencia económica en Sudamérica, superando a Estados Unidos como el mayor socio comercial del continente. A pesar del fuerte compromiso del presidente norteamericano, Joe Biden, de contrarrestar las ambiciones geopolíticas de China, en gran medida ha subestimado la creciente presencia del país asiático en su propio vecindario. Es algo que resulta desconcertante y alarmante, sobre todo por el papel crucial de Sudamérica en la lucha contra el cambio climático.

A comienzos de abril, el presidente brasileño, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, instó a Estados Unidos a dejar de “alentar” la guerra en Ucrania.…  Seguir leyendo »

Do We Really Need to Have a Cold War With China?

I wore red underpants for much of last year.

It was the Year of the Tiger, my Chinese zodiac sign, when tradition says that ill fortune will seek you out. Red underwear is supposed to keep you safe because Chinese demons supposedly fear the color red.

It didn’t work.

It was a rough year. For most of 2022, we remained sealed off from the world by China’s strict pandemic policy. Shanghai, my home for the past decade, endured a particularly traumatic Covid lockdown that kept us confined at home for two months starting in late March, scrambling to obtain groceries. While locked down, we found out that my wife, who is Chinese, was pregnant.…  Seguir leyendo »

TikTok... a la globalización se le acaba el tiempo

Tal vez algún día recordaremos el espectáculo del interrogatorio al director ejecutivo de TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, que tuvo lugar el 23 de marzo en el Congreso estadounidense, como un punto de inflexión en la historia de la globalización. Durante más de cinco horas de agresivos cuestionamientos, Chew —que no es chino sino Singapurense— defendió magníficamente el hecho de que su empresa sea China frente a la limitada comprensión del mundo tecnológico que tiene el Congreso.

El gobierno de Biden considera a TikTok como una posible amenaza para la seguridad nacional y desea que la empresa china controlante, ByteDance, venda la plataforma a una empresa estadounidense o enfrente una posible prohibición.…  Seguir leyendo »

Being an Open and Democratic Country Does Not Mean Being a Sucker

There’s growing momentum in Congress to ban TikTok, the social media app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, for reasons of national security. Last week, the White House expressed support for a bipartisan bill in the Senate that would give President Biden the power to ban the app, and the White House is also reportedly pressing ByteDance to sell the company.

The security concern is not that we’ll be corrupted by goofy videos but rather that the Chinese government could use the TikTok apps installed on millions of American phones as a form of spyware — collecting sensitive data and personal information, including where we go and what we do.…  Seguir leyendo »

A War With China Would Be Unlike Anything Americans Have Faced Before

A major war in the Indo-Pacific is probably more likely now than at any time since the Second World War.

The most probable spark is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. President Xi Jinping of China has said unifying Taiwan with mainland China “must be achieved”. His Communist Party regime has become sufficiently strong — militarily, economically and industrially — to take Taiwan and directly challenge the United States for regional supremacy.

The United States has vital strategic interests at stake. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would punch a hole in the U.S. and allied chain of defenses in the region, seriously undermining America’s strategic position in the Western Pacific, and would probably cut off U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

China has accused the United States of “an obvious overreaction” and “seriously violating international practice” after US military jets on Saturday shot down its suspected spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. This after it had loitered over the US, including sensitive national security sites, for more than four days last week. My reaction to this indignation? Poppycock!

(China has claimed the balloon was for “civilian use” and to monitor weather, and that it only entered US airspace by accident.)

The history of China’s responses to US assets operating in international waters and airspace near mainland China strongly suggests, if the tables were turned, its reaction to a similar scenario would have been precipitous, crude and escalatory.…  Seguir leyendo »

On May 1, 1960, an American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, took off from a military airbase in Peshawar, Pakistan, in a top-secret U-2 spy plane to fly 3,000 miles across the Soviet Union, and take high resolution photos of military facilities.

His specially-designed plane, flying higher than any other, out of the range of Soviet interceptors, was thought to be impervious to identification or attack. Wrong.

The Soviets knew it was coming, and fighter jets shadowed it from below as soon as it entered their airspace. Eventually, as it passed over an advanced air defense location, a Soviet S-75 surface-to-air missile shot it out of the skies.…  Seguir leyendo »

Dongfeng-41 intercontinental strategic nuclear missiles during a military parade celebrating the 70th founding anniversary of the People's Republic of China in Beijing on Oct. 1, 2019. Liu Bin/Xinhua via Getty

Shortly before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was slated to depart for Beijing on the Biden administration’s first cabinet-level visit, the trip was postponed. The last-minute schedule change came after a Chinese surveillance balloon was confirmed to be floating above sensitive U.S. military sites, including potentially an active nuclear missile silo field in Montana. Over the weekend, the balloon was shot down by a U.S. F-22 fighter jet once the expected debris no longer posed a threat to civilians.

The incident is reminiscent of those that occurred during the Cold War involving the United States and the Soviet Union—and it comes at a time when many are debating whether Washington and Beijing are now headed toward a similar relationship.…  Seguir leyendo »

U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bali, Indonesia, November 2022. Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

For all the talk of how we have entered a new global era, the last year bears a striking resemblance to 2008. That year, Russia invaded its neighbor, Georgia. Tensions with Iran and North Korea were perennially high. And the world faced severe global economic challenges.

One notable difference, however, is the state of Chinese-U.S. relations. At that time, self-interested cooperation was possible even amid political and ideological differences, clashing security interests, and divergent views about the global economy, including China’s currency valuation and its industrial subsidies. As Treasury secretary, I worked with Chinese leaders during the 2008 financial crisis to forestall contagion, mitigate the worst effects of the crisis, and restore macroeconomic stability.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Biden administration is determined to challenge China’s high-tech aspirations. After a series of smaller moves, it has in recent months launched new export controls that broaden and deepen its denial of semiconductor technology to China in dramatic fashion.The rules add three big restrictions. First, they go beyond targeting specific companies and now start by denying exports to China of any chips that perform above a certain threshold. Second, they prevent any American citizen, green-card holder or company that does not have a licence to do so from working with any Chinese company to manufacture chips. Third, the new rules restrict the use of American tools, equipment or software anywhere in the world to manufacture and export advanced chips to China.…  Seguir leyendo »

Biden needs allies to keep China and Russia in check

For those who believed that the American era was over, 2022 was a rude surprise. Faced with the biggest land war in Europe since 1945, the United States led a multi-country effort to assist Ukraine. Faced with a belligerent China, the United States embarked on a concerted strategy to arrest Beijing’s military-industrial rise. The Biden administration improvised new tools of statecraft: the freezing of Russia’s foreign currency reserves; the capping of the price paid for Russia’s oil exports; the embargo on semiconductor exports to China. Sweden and Finland opted to join an invigorated NATO. Japan, South Korea, Australia and India were drawn deeper into U.S.-led…  Seguir leyendo »

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

El fracaso de la política de COVID cero de China está dando lugar a una reevaluación del poder chino. Hasta hace poco, muchos esperaban que el PIB de China superara al de Estados Unidos en 2030 o poco después. Pero ahora, algunos analistas sostienen que aún si China alcanza ese objetivo, Estados Unidos volverá a tomar la delantera. ¿Será, entonces, que ya hemos presenciado el “pico de China”?

Es tan peligroso sobreestimar el poder chino como subestimarlo. La subestimación alimenta la complacencia, mientras que la sobreestimación atiza el miedo; pero ni una ni otra puede conducir a errores de cálculo. Una buena estrategia exige una evaluación neta cuidadosa.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Illusion of Controls

In October, the Biden administration announced a series of new, unilaterally imposed export controls designed to freeze China’s advanced chip production and supercomputing capabilities. The strengthened rules came less than a month after National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced a major change in U.S. technology competition strategy. Previously, the United States sought to deny the export of chips or other technologies to China if such items were designed or likely to be used for military purposes, or if the transfer would impair the U.S. ability to maintain an advantage over competitors in cutting-edge commercial technologies that might also have military applications.…  Seguir leyendo »

Estados Unidos y China después de las medidas de Xi

China atraviesa por un periodo particularmente convulso de su historia. Tan solo unas semanas después del XX Congreso del Partido Comunista de China, en el cual Xi Jinping reafirmaba su liderazgo al frente del Partido, las principales ciudades del gigante asiático eran testigo de unas insólitas protestas contra la política de ‘cero-Covid’ del propio presidente Xi Jinping.

Como resultado de las protestas, las autoridades chinas han protagonizado un cambio radical en sus políticas contra la COVID-19 al levantar las restricciones impuestas como resultado de la pandemia. Aunque las estadísticas oficiales no siempre ofrecen una imagen del todo fidedigna de lo que sucede dentro del país asiático, nadie cuestiona el hecho de que se avecina un periodo de serias complicaciones en lo que respecta a la contención del virus en China.…  Seguir leyendo »

The U.S. Needs to Change the Way It Does Business With China

In a recent  speech, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo suggested an incremental shift in how the United States approaches “competitiveness and the China challenge”. She recognized the serious threat from China, explaining that the United States “will continue to press China to address its nonmarket economic practices that result in an uneven playing field”. She noted, though, that “we are not seeking the decoupling of our economy from that of China’s”.

America’s China policy does need to change. The ruthless repression of its Covid-policy protesters is the latest proof of that, but the greater urgency is that the status quo has things moving to the disadvantages of the United States as well as to the benefit of China.…  Seguir leyendo »

A woman in Shanghai reaches through a barricade to receive a package delivery in May. (Chen Si/AP)

China’s response to the covid-19 pandemic is widely acknowledged as a costly failure: Its draconian lockdowns have made it hard for ordinary people to get food or medicine and are depressing economic growth. President Xi Jinping’s “zero covid” policy sparked the biggest protests since 1989 and finally led, on Wednesday, to an easing of testing and quarantine rules in what is an implicit admission of failure by Beijing.

It’s easy for Americans to feel cocky by comparison — particularly those Americans who opposed our much milder lockdowns. We have returned to normal life, more or less, while China is still mired in the pandemic.…  Seguir leyendo »

It took two years after Joe Biden was elected US President before the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries could finally speak in person, but when Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping finally met in Bali, Indonesia, on Monday on the sidelines of the G20 summit, the timing could not have been any better for the United States, for democracy and for the world.

With democracy suddenly looking like it’s on firmer ground and key autocracies facing serious problems, it was an ideal moment for Biden to speak frankly to Xi about areas of disagreement between the two superpowers while trying to build safeguards to prevent the rivalry from careening into conflict as the relationship has deteriorated to its most tense state in decades.…  Seguir leyendo »

La reunión de Biden y Xi olvida a Ucrania para concentrarse en Taiwán

Es difícil imaginar una reunión más transcendental que la que los presidentes Biden y Xi acaban de mantener en los aledaños de la reunión del G-20 en Bali. La ausencia de Putin, sin duda, ha facilitado la redacción de un comunicado final en el que la mayoría de los miembros del G-20—aunque no todos— deploran la invasión de Ucrania por parte de Rusia y solicitan que las tropas rusas se retiren. En cambio, el resto —entre los que se encuentra China— declara de manera abierta no ver las cosas así, haciendo referencia expresa a las sanciones como problema. A pesar del comunicado, la guerra en Ucrania no parece haber sido el fondo del diálogo bilateral entre Biden y Xi, sino Taiwán.…  Seguir leyendo »

La pugna entre Estados Unidos y China por la primacía mundial ocupa todos los escenarios posibles. Desde el cultural y económico hasta el militar y tecnológico.

Aunque Washington es todavía el enemigo a batir, Pekín ha reducido notablemente la distancia con su competidor en los últimos lustros. Más de lo que lo hizo nunca la Unión Soviética.

Este avance invita a pensar que el adelantamiento por la derecha del gran dragón de Oriente es inevitable y que el Tío Sam, en los próximos años, hincará la rodilla frente al inevitable ímpetu chino.

Sin embargo, los americanos parecen haber despertado a tiempo.…  Seguir leyendo »

Chinese military conducted live-fire military exercises to intimidate Taiwan after a high-profile visit by Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, to Taipei in August. Lai Qiaoquan/Xinhua, via Associated Press

Competition and conflict between the United States and China have continued to intensify. On Aug. 2, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taiwan to showcase congressional support for the self-governing island, defying Chinese protests that her visit was inconsistent with the “one China” policy of the United States. China responded by ringing the island with live-fire military exercises, missile tests and other operations in the Taiwan Strait.

On Oct. 7, the Biden administration ordered sweeping export controls to prevent China from acquiring the most advanced semiconductors and the equipment required to manufacture them, and forbidding any American or foreign company to sell to China any such equipment that uses American technology.…  Seguir leyendo »