Dr. Peter Chang is the Deputy Director of the Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya. He works on a more applied ethics trajectory, exploring how a rejuvenated Confucian tradition may shape the evolving character of the Chinese milieu and in turn impact the global community.

He is also analyzing the opportunities and risks associated with the Belt and Road Initiative. He is examining this from the perspective of China’s soft power, specifically the Chinese traditional as well as pop-cultural imprints upon Malaysia, and the world at large.

Dr. Pramod Jaiswal, Strategic Affairs Editor at Khabarhub spoke to Dr. Peter Chang on China-US Relations.

How far has the Biden administration continued Trump Policy in dealing with China? Do you think the Biden administration has a clear strategy with regard to China’s policy?

I think at the outset, there are two parts to this answer. The first part is there isn’t really much change in terms of American bipartisan consensus that China is an existential threat, so whether you change from the republican to democrat administration, in general, the approach is trying to contain China.

That is where America has arrived at right now and it’s the bipartisan perception that the rise of China has become an existential threat to the existing world order and also in some ways to America’s hegemony as well.

So, I don’t see that has changed when it comes to both parties as well. But, the second part is that there are some nuances, there are some strategic tactical steps that will be somewhat different from Trump and the Biden administration.

As you know, Donald Trump was very much a unilateral and polarising figure and he basically really centered on ‘make America great again’. His worldview was America right at the center.

And he has somewhat discounted and alienated traditional American allies, especially those in Europe and the West. So, he has gone his own way, the way he wanted to, the ‘American way’.

Whilst Joe Biden has been much more diplomatic and much more conciliatory towards America’s traditional allies, in a sense Joe Biden is a lot more multilateral.

Multilateral in the sense of trying to bring the American alliance together to address the global issues that America faces and one of those issues is China and you can see that happening-Joe Biden going to Europe, re-establishing relationships.

The AUKUS is one outcome of the effort and there’s an emphasis on Quad and others. So, you could see that the Biden administration wants to move together, form an alliance to confront and to contain China.

Next Monday, there’s going to be a summit of the democracies, like-minded allies that are coming together on the world stage to make a statement about how they feel about China’s place in the world.

So, overall, there is a strategy of containing China but the Biden administration has been much more multilateral in its approach towards containing China.

What do you make out of the Biden Administration’s decision to replace ‘great power competition’ with ‘strategic competition’, as the guiding idea of policy—especially with China, in US national security and national defense strategies?

Yeah, I think that it’s strange when Biden says ‘we will cooperate and compete with China when necessary and we will confront and contain China when we must’, that suggests there will be a much more calibrated approach towards China.

China is not completely a rival that America has got no room for cooperation; there will be a room where the two superpowers could come together to work alongside each other to address some of the common issues they have. So, I think there will be a slight change of tone.

I think when Joe Biden says there is a change from competition to containment to engagement and cooperation, I believe there are some changes that are happening right now.

Later on, I think we can talk about today’s virtual summit held between President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden. There appears to be a frosty relationship between the two countries.

Unfortunately, it is the containment, the threat narrative that captures the headlines most of the time. As much as the Americans and the Chinese want to work together, suddenly from the west side they still feel very uncomfortable with a rising power that doesn’t fit into their value systems and their worldview.

So, the narrative of having to confront and contain China still dominates the discourse and the media coverage and that I think is somewhat unfortunate.

What has the Trump-Biden transition meant to China so far? How does Beijing view hegemony and multilateralism in the Biden Era?

I think the Chinese, like the rest of the world, were perplexed by the previous administration, the Trump administration.

It really worked up the whole system, the international system, international relations, all the conventional norms that we tend to understand, was thrown out of the window by this very extraordinary leader.

So, when Biden won the election, there was a sigh of relief and I think the Chinese also had a sigh of relief that at least we will return back to some normalcy.

And the Biden administration did provide some sort of back to normalcy kind of thing- ‘America is back again’, America is part of the WHO again, Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris accord and now Biden is back in to join and address the environmental issue, the question that we will address later on.

So, America is back on and has taken on what we traditionally understand as its leadership role on the world stage and be part of the international community.

So, I think we were expecting that and they did in that regard, Biden did deliver on that but what they didn’t expect was the almost same aggressive stance that the Biden administration continued to take.

Much of the trade war tariffs were in place; Biden kept it all in place and there wasn’t much room for maneuver, toning down of rhetoric in terms of Xinjiang or Hong Kong or Taiwan or for us in Malaysia, the South China Sea.

The hard-line stance that the Trump administration adopted on these issues, the Biden administration, at least for now, ten months into the administration has not really shifted a lot.

So, we just really do not know how much room there is for the Biden administration to shift, to sort of step back a little bit, we will have to see.

This is something that is ongoing, is changing and very fluid but I think the Chinese were expecting a little bit more, a cooler, sort of stationery relationship between the two powers when they saw a change in the white house but certainly, for the first 10 or 11 months it didn’t happen.

We are not to sore what today’s meeting that they had, the two presidents had, will bring about but it is certainly something that we will have to continue to watch and the Chinese would certainly like to see some sort of progress made between Washington and Beijing in terms of cooling down of the relationship now that the Biden administration is coming one year into its office.

In one of your articles in the South China Morning Post, you argued that the US needs to learn to peacefully coexist with China. In your assessment, how is this possible in light of China’s expanding military prowess, and its nuclear arsenal developments?

The coexistence question is something that the Chinese have always used. Basically, I think the subset of this coexistence plea is that China is asking the Americans to “treat us as equals”.

The assumption is that the Chinese feel they have not been treated as equal. In what way they have not been treated as an equal?

It’s very hard to exactly pinpoint specifics but one is the political, ideological debate about values. The Americans and the west tend to say that ‘if you want to be part of the international order, you need to undergo political reform, embrace liberal democracy, and undergo the kind of structural changes in your political governing system’ where a one-party state or an authoritarian government system does not fit in, with what we have been understanding to be our world view of the world order.

And that creates a lot of tension and anxiety between the two. The Chinese are basically saying, even if we may not have the same political system or order or ideology as you, you should still accept us as one, as a global actor that has a role to play in global governance, even though we may not be a liberal democracy.

So, that  I think is the subtext to this contestation about being treated as a coequal and it’s a matter of values and worldviews, so the Chinese want to be accepted at that level.

Right now, the fact that the Americans keep having on what they perceive as the lack of freedom in China, the abuse of human rights and that sort of thing, it’s a put down on the Chinese.

The Chinese have felt that they have done fairly well with their governance, that they have achieved quite a bit, eradicated abject poverty, done remarkably well in terms of their own progress and yet are constantly being told saying that they are not up to it or up to the level where they can become a legitimate member of the international order; so that frustration is there.

To the second part of the question, China is really building up its military power in general, and more specifically in the last few days, we have been reading a lot about them ramping up their nuclear arsenal. Let me just put it all in the broader context.

As with any other country, you need the military for national defense, for self-defense but China is not an ordinary country that needs national defense; China is a global power and has got interests spread out across the four oceans as they would like to say, in South-east Asia, in Africa.

So, their navy just protecting their immediate shores is not enough; they will need to have a blue navy as well, they will need it to patrol, protect their economic interests along the strait of Malacca, the Indian ocean and others.

So, it comes with the territory, the military comes along as your economic interests expand, you will need to protect it. So, I think that’s a part of it.

The other dimension to it is that there is, in the last six months or in the last year, a very worrisome development of possible open military conflict between the two superpowers. It’s always been known that America is the sole military superpower, almost to the point of asymmetrical balance.

America’s nuclear warheads outweigh, outnumber everyone else. They could just immediately eliminate anybody. It’s so asymmetrical that there’s no one else that could stand up against the Americans.

And the Chinese do not want to be held hostage to that. So, the only way you could not be held hostage to that is to try to counter-balance it and the nuclear strategy is to be able to bring to the table and to say that if you want to go to nuclear power, it would be mutual self-destruction because we will probably have the capacity as well to retaliate.

So, it’s part of psychological warfare. You want to avoid war by telling the other side that you will be mutually self-destructed.

I think that is the calculation that is happening right now with this huge nuclear arsenal, it’s kind of an arms race, and it’s a very unfortunate kind of arms race for humans because accidents can happen, you don’t want to play with nuclear weapons like that.

As you know, the previous US administration, the previous president, the chief of staff of the US army was worried that something could happen, a miscalculation.

He had to contact his Chinese counterpart and assure them that there will not be any attack on China. You have that kind of scenario which is really, really sad for us.

For a small country like Malaysia in Southeast Asia, we are caught; the South China Sea will probably be an arena where this will happen. It’s very sad. I mean, you can blame both sides, both sides were escalating the war, but we hope that the temperatures will come down and people with rational minds will take control of the narrative and we will pull ourselves back from that.

I just want to say that China, historically, has not been a military power. If you look at the 2,500 years, primarily a geo-economic power. Its primary concern was economic, it was a very mercantile kingdom or empire.

It was just interested in trade. It wants to trade that’s all. Its military power has always mainly been defensive; it has never gone on to the track of colonization, wanting to send its army into faraway land either to democratize them, liberate them or Christianise them, or whatever.

The Chinese civilization has never done that; it does send out its military, mainly to protect its economic interests. It’s quite different from the west.

The west has got this missionary sort of aspiration; inserting itself into Afghanistan, to want to build a liberal democracy, to want to send an army in to do the job.

That will never happen with the Chinese; the Chinese, for example, will not send their army into Sudan to build a Marxist state or something like that.

How has the US and China’s strategic priority evolved over the years? Can you briefly reflect on both the nations’ current ‘Grand Strategy.’?

Yeah, that’s a good question, it’s going to follow through with what I just said just now. The west and the Americans in general and the east Confucian in general- are both viewed as very different.

I am trained in comparative philosophy, so that’s my background. I look at different religious worldviews and they do shape not only our individual behavior but also our country’s worldview of how we view the world.

The Europeans have a very missionary impulse; it’s very well intended, it’s intended to change the world, it’s a very Christian virtue.

They believe that they have the right message for the world and that’s the right way to gain salvation and go to heaven.

So, they went out with a very good intention of wanting to save the world; the missionaries, the churches don’t do that anymore because they recognized that, in the process of doing good, they have caused so much harm.

They have harmed so many indigenous civilizations. The churches don’t do that anymore. However, America really, it’s a very unique founding of the United States of America.

They found themselves as a new country, a new republic and felt that they also have a mission, just like the church, to change the world but not in terms of spreading Christianity, but in terms of spreading liberty, democracy because the Americans fled from persecution in Europe and they were so glad that they found this land where there is so much freedom for them, so much liberty.

And they said this is it, this is what the world should have- freedom and liberty and they really wanted to share it with the rest of the world; and they did it.

Almost that Christian missionary zeal that you must embrace liberal democracy in order to experience what the real true human experience is.

Even today you can see the Christian leaders and American leaders, filled with that kind of aspiration of wanting to change the world for the better.

The intention is very sincere, as I said, but the problem is not everybody shares the same view because other people have other kinds of views of what the ultimate good is, which brings me to the east, the Confucianists.

The Confucianists are polytheists, the Christians are monotheists; the Christians believe that there is only one god, one way- things have to be done this way, whereas the polytheists say there are many ways to be happy, there are many ways to be good, there are many ways to get to heaven, in fact, the Chinese believe this anyway.

This is reflected in their political system in some way, not all the time but in general, they have this worldview that- let the world be as it wishes it be.

There is no absolute right or wrong as long as you don’t harm one another, you should be able to coexist with one another with differences. So, the American grand strategy is articulated in the post cold war, after the fall of the Berlin wall by the Francis Fukuyama thesis called the “The End of History”.

The ‘end of history’ means liberal democracy; the world has to liberalize and democratize and that will be heaven on earth.

That was the American grand strategy, to bring liberal democracy to the whole world. That, however, hasn’t quite happened yet.

The Chinese grand strategy is very economic, they just want to do trade and they believe that if they do trade, they could help, incidentally help poor countries to come out of whatever economic stagnation that they have and other things.

The main motive for the Chinese that will drive the human being from poverty and suffering is trade and economics; it’s not valued, it’s not human rights per se, it’s not teaching you to write sort of doctrines or theory, it’s basic, just get the rice on to the table for everybody and that’s how they see it.

Their worldview is that they have to take care of themselves first; China has to be strong and sustained. If China can be strong and sustained, it can help the rest.

Whether they can help the rest or not is really up to the rest, if they want it or not. China is not going to impose its values, it hasn’t got a political system to share with the rest of the world. It’s not exporting Marxism, it’s not exporting socialism with Chinese characteristics to the rest of the world. It’s more like- ‘We have done it.

If you think it’s good for you, it’s right for you, you are welcome to copy it but if you don’t think it’s right for you, good for you, by all means, do it your own way’. So, I do think that they represent a different kind of grand strategy and a different kind of worldview.

What will follow the ‘US’s War on Terrorism’? Is it the ‘War on China’?

I just want to say the word ‘terrorism’ here certainly withdraws from Afghanistan. The Americans want to close the chapter, and they want to do so because they now see the threat as rising from further towards the east which is China Terrain.

I’m not exactly sure that, America wants to close the chapter means that the chapter will be closed because the war on terror has inflicted a lot of wounds, especially with the Islamic war.

The Islamic war may not present a threat right now because there has been a lot of pain and a deep scar that it has left. I’m not sure whether the Islamic war and the West have come to the point of reconciliation as now.

There are still many unsettled issues between the two that are right now off the radar because China has a central stage. But I think the line of the cracks between the two civilizations is just beneath the surface.

It could re-appear again very quickly. If both sides are not careful in managing how they relate to one another. I don’t want to be an alarmist, I don’t want to be a scaremonger but I just feel that simply by turning your eyes gaze to the other side and looking at China doesn’t mean that the problem in the Middle East or Central Asia is closed.

So, my point is that it’s very complicated,  very complex. I look at the Xinjiang issue right now. I’ve written a piece on Xinjiang recently.

Malaysia is a Muslim country, we are very concerned about what’s happening in Xinjiang. Our grass root NGOs have gone to the streets, marched in front of the China Embassy in Kuala Lumpur to protest, our government has launched official complaints expressing our concerns about what’s happening in Xinjiang.

But we have roughly kept a distance from the western US-led campaign to punish China on Xinjiang, the ban on cotton, sanctions on Chinese officials and now they are calling for the boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

The Islamic World is concerned about what’s happening in Xinjiang but they are very skeptical about the west’s motivation.

There are still a lot of residues and a lot of suspicions and somewhat even I would say anger towards the west. So, I’m not sure about this war on terror as much as the Americans want to close it.

They are closing it not because it has been resolved, they are closing because they have to face a much more urgent threat which is the threat of China.

I think I said it early that the threat of China is much more comprehensive, the war on terror was by non-state actors that launched terrorists’ attacks on Americans.

We all see the Chinese challenge is very systematic and it’s an all-dimensional challenge- primarily the economic challenges are going to overwhelm the American Western World Economic order because China is going to dominate. It will very quickly be one of the leading world economic powers.

And on the technological front, they are progressing really fast. They are leading in the digital economy, they are leading in their own research,  they have overcome the Americans.

There is a decoupling in terms of the internet and in terms of AI research. Once upon a time, the Chinese had to learn from the Americans which they did, they learned a lot and for some reason, the collaborations collapsed because of this mistrust and the Chinese have gone on their own right now.

They just said, we have set our own standards. The international space station is a very good example as well, the Chinese just basically built it on their own.

If you don’t want to share it with us then that’s fine, we will do it on our own. It’s a little bit sad for us as we live in a global village, an increasingly globalized world but yet there is a decoupling between the two.

I really feel that because of the fear of China,  the reach of open conflict is very worrisome.  Taiwan is one issue and the South China Sea is another as far.

At least, in the South China Sea, as ASEAN countries we feel that we can voice out, we don’t want to take sides, please try to co-exist.

And for us, while watching from Kuala Lumpur about what’s happening at Taiwan Strait it’s very frustrating because we cannot say anything as it’s not really our immediate concern.

But we are very worried that something could trigger a move that can lead to an open conflict in the South China Sea.

So, the prospect of war on China, whether it is a cold war or a hot war, there is a lot of indication that it is already in a cold war stage.

But we pray that it will not slide into a hot war zone. So, I’m not very optimistic. I think it’s good to be cautious and to be worrying about this rather than being caught off that (unintelligible) that it could happen.

But at least we are aware that there is the danger of open conflict if we don’t get the right kind of leaders in place.

Do the US and China’s recent surprise announcement to work together on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the Cop26 summit pave the way for future collaborations on tackling global crises?

Yes, I think that is a very good thing. This comes back to the earlier question you asked about the Biden Administration.

I think Biden’s administration has been very quietly working in the backroom and John Kerry has been quite effective, didn’t want to take the center stage but quietly worked at the back to build consensus, to build bridges between the two powers.

The Chinese were very reluctant very initially to want to be seen as working alongside the Americans because of the snub.

They felt that they had been snubbed by the Americans during the Alaska meeting. Their first meeting, a high-level meeting between the two in Alaska, and they felt that they were treated very badly by their American counterparts in Alaska.

But fortunately diplomacy at least at these stages, as far as you can see from the outside seems to work and we are able to bring the two countries together as we come up with the joint statement.

Whether it’s enough or not it’s up for discussion right now. There are lots of people working through it and say it may not have gone far enough to actually deal with problems but at least some would spin it in such a way that there are at least joint announcements by the two powers to work on it.

I just want to say a couple of points here; the climate change issue is very difficult. I think the Chinese side will be a little more reliable because if they say they would do it, they will probably do it.

The reason is they’ve got only one party, that one party is going to be ruling, President Xi is going to be around for a long long time. It’s the American side that is a little bit less predictable. Joe Biden is reaching out,

he is going all the way to want to provide the American leadership, what happens after Joe Biden’s Administration, what comes next?

If the administration changes every four years a new policy comes out with regard to climate by different American administrations.

It’s very hard not only for China but for the world to know how to respond to this kind of unpredictability where we have so many global sorts of challenges confronting us.

What do you anticipate out of the upcoming Xi and Biden virtual meeting? What does the future hold for US and China relations?

I haven’t been following it bit by bit, but from the readout that I got, I think it was an important meeting. It was a sign that the two powers, the two leaders, realize that they need to talk to each other otherwise, the world would be in a dangerous situation where they might misunderstand one another.

The two superpowers might miscalculate each other’s motivation and steps and other assumptions. So, I think overall it’s a very important development.

But my own concern is that President Joe Biden is facing some really difficult domestic challenges. His legislative agenda faces a very divided congress and senate and he faces basically very domestic constituents that in general are still very hostile towards China.

And rightly or wrongly they blame China for part of the problem they are facing right now. So, if Joe Biden comes as being soft on China, which Donald Trump says that he was gonna be tough on China, he might have some difficulties trying to explain himself in the midterm elections.

So, he has a very delicate dance to do, he needs to appear tough at home with China, and yet on the international stage, he needs to be talking to China. He talks to China in such a way that he appears to be tough.

So, it’s very delicate. I think the complexity, the bigger challenge is on the American side. On the Chinese side, as far as we can see from the outside, President Xi seems to have a very steady hand on China.

He doesn’t face the same kind of problem that Joe Biden faces there within America. In either case, Joe Biden has to come strong on both sides, strong against China at home and strong in terms of being a friend, someone who is willing to work from China for the sake of the global good. It will be interesting to see how he will be able to manage that.