What Xi Said is a weekly rundown of the top ten emerging issues from the past seven days shaping US-China commercial relations.
What Xi Said is for global communication strategists and C-Suite executives.
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Memo: What Xi Said | Edition 10 | March 15, 2021
1. The United States has blacklisted 87 percent of China’s cotton crop — one-fifth of the world’s supply — citing human rights violations against Muslim Uighurs in China’s northwest Xinjiang region.
“Companies can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse. Customs and Border Protection’s message to the trade community is clear: Know your supply chains.”
2. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan will meet with Yang Jiechi, a ruling Politburo member, and Wang Yi, the foreign minister. The meeting represents the highest-level in-person exchange between the two sides since President Biden took office in January. The meeting will take place in Anchorage, Alaska.
3. China has a plan to win in a post-pandemic world: The message at the National People’s Congress was one of optimism about the strength of its economy and of struggle against an array of internal and external challenges.
4. ‘The East is rising’: Xi maps out China’s post-COVID ascent: Xi Jinping has struck a confident posture as he looks to secure China’s prosperity and power in a post-Covid world, saying that the country is entering a time of opportunity when “the East is rising, and the West is declining.”
5. A confident China seeks to insulate itself from the world: Its new five-year plan is vague on growth but clear about self-sufficiency.
The new five-year plan does not mention America by name, but it does not need to: every official knows that competition with America looms large in China’s strategies.
6. Winter Olympics: Is it time to boycott Beijing 2022? Last month, the Canadian House of Commons voted unanimously to lobby the IOC to move the Winter Olympics from Beijing, although PM Trudeau and his cabinet abstained. A group of US senators has also introduced a resolution urging the IOC to remove the Games from China. Asked last week about a possible boycott, Secretary of State Blinken refused to rule it out.
7. China is not ten feet tall: Ryan Hass writes the more the United States can restore confidence that it is the country best prepared in the world to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, the better it will be able to focus attention where it matters most: not on slowing China down but on strengthening itself.
8. China is not a technology superpower. Stop treating it like one: Paul Triolo writes: When is China going to be able to develop “self-sufficiency” in cutting-edge semiconductors? Maybe never. Semiconductor manufacturing equipment? Maybe never. An alternative software stack for the cloud? Perhaps for China, but not one that can compete globally. Enterprise software? Same.
9. China — by far the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gas — has held back from a commitment to cut emissions within five years, in a step that has dismayed environmentalists.
The country accounts for 26 percent of global emissions, compared with 15 percent for the US and about 1 percent for the UK.
10. Red history in Xi’s China: As the party approaches its 100th anniversary in July, its leaders urge the public to contrast China’s economic rise and social stability with economic decline and political chaos in the West. That is a Deng-style appeal to performance legitimacy.
