Hi, China Watchers. Today we’ll look at how the Biden administration’s deadlock with Beijing on curbing Russia’s slaughter in Ukraine is sparking Congress to deter or punish China. We’ll also unpack China’s “wrong side of history” sensitivities, taste-test the looming relaunch of McDonald’s notorious Szechuan Sauce and profile an award-winning analysis of the “coolie myth” in our “One Book, Three Questions” section. Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at [email protected].

Let’s get to it. — Phelim

The Biden administration’s efforts to enlist Chinese government support to isolate and punish Russia for its Ukraine invasion have hit a brick wall.

China is maintaining its diplomatic, economic and rhetorical alignment with Russia and is disavowing any meaningful role in leveraging its influence with Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN to end hostilities that both the European Union and the U.S. State Department say have included war crimes against Ukrainian civilians.

That positioning has provoked public dismay that is boosting the rollout of congressional initiatives to deter China from economic or material support for Russia’s war machine and to impose stiff penalties if Beijing provides such assistance.

“I think it’s time for us to recognize that to get at Russia, there are elements of our policies that have to touch China,” H.R. MCMASTER, national security adviser under President DONALD TRUMP, told a media roundtable Monday at the Hoover Institution. “We can’t let China get away with this double-speak with their engagement, calling on all parties ‘to respect sovereignty’ — it is time for us to be really tough on the Chinese Communist Party.”

Republican Sens. MARCO RUBIO and RICK SCOTT of Florida and TODD YOUNG of Indiana channeled some of that exasperation with their Crippling Unhinged Russian Belligerence and Chinese Involvement in Putin’s Schemes (CURB CIPS) Act designed to block China from providing Russia financial system access to evade Western sanctions.

Those tools include the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, China’s domestic version of the SWIFT interbank transfer system that the U.S. and its allies earlier this month blocked some Russian banks from accessing, and Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages. “[CURB CIPS Act] would freeze or terminate any U.S.-based accounts connected to Chinese financial institutions — or block the U.S.-based property of such institutions — that engage in transactions with a Russian financial institution using either CIPS or SPFS,”a statement issued by Rubio’s office said.

And that’s just for starters. Possible Chinese economic or material support for the Ukraine invasion has prompted Rep. SCOTT PERRY (R-Penn.) to make a renewed push for House Foreign Affairs Committee support for his H.R. 5286 Protecting Americans from Corporate Human Rights Abusers Act. That legislation will curtail Chinese state firms’ access to U.S. capital markets.

“Continued Chinese alignment with Russia must be definitively dealt with, and this legislation offers the Administration a way to do just that,” Perry said in a statement. “I am working on additional legislation that more narrowly focuses on applying capital market sanctions against the PRC … if the Administration will not move on applying secondary sanctions against Chinese companies doing business in Russia, my colleagues and I would be more than happy to fill the void.”

Rep. FRENCH HILL (R-Ark.), a member of the House Committee on Financial Services, is positioning approval of his Special Drawing Rights Oversight Act as a means to prevent Russia from accessing Chinese currency, the renminbi, to help underwrite Putin’s Ukraine invasion. Hill introduced the bill earlier this month to limit the U.S. Treasury Department’s ability to approve funding for the International Monetary Fund that could benefit hostile regimes.

“We should be particularly concerned about Russia’s ability to exchange its [IMF Special Drawing Rights] for RMB, especially as Russia is increasingly turning to China for trade and liquidity in response to our sanctions,” Hill said in a statement. “Since China has not mirrored these sanctions, Russia’s SDRs and RMB reserves remain available to Putin.”

Such legislation will further sour a U.S.-China bilateral relationship already roiled by persistent trade tensions, disagreements over human rights and worsening friction over Taiwan.

“China’s public position [on Russia] adds fuel to the fire in terms of how its motives are perceived in Congress and the administration,” CRAIG ALLEN, the president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said in a statement. “The bilateral relationship is likely to worsen before it gets better. That’s a tragedy.”

President JOE BIDEN’s video call Friday with President XI JINPING, brokered via a seven-hour meeting four days earlier between national security advisor JAKE SULLIVAN and China’s top diplomat, YANG JIECHI, failed to prod Xi to use his influence to end Russia’s aggression in Ukraine or to even use the term “invasion.” The call instead provoked Xi’s criticism of the alleged U.S. role in fomenting the crisis, perceived U.S. meddling in Taiwan and bitterness toward threatened U.S. sanctions against China if it aids Russia’s war effort.

Since then, the Chinese government has doubled down on messaging its unwillingness to help stop the slaughter in Ukraine. In an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Ambassador to the U.S. QIN GANG said China will maintain “normal trade, economic, financial, energy cooperation with Russia.”

McMaster is skeptical. “Of course they’re going to give arms to the Russians. That’s what that [response] means,” said McMaster.

Sullivan said there were no indications that China had provided military aid to Russia, but that the administration was remaining vigilant and would raise the issue at today’s NATO summit. “The President will certainly consult on the question of China’s potential participation in the conflict of Ukraine while he’s in Brussels,” Sullivan said at a Tuesday press briefing.

Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister MYKHAILO FEDOROV on Tuesday called on Chinese civilian drone producer DJI Technology to electronically disable its drones used by the Russian military to coordinate missile attacks. The firm said that it is “available to discuss these issues.”

Qin indicated that China would restrict its involvement in the conflict to providing Ukraine “foods, medicine, sleeping bags and the baby formula.” That prompted a withering response from IRYNA VERESHCHUK, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister.

“As a member of the Ukrainian Government, here is what I want to say to our Chinese friends: This is absolutely not serious and not worthy of the status of a great respectable country!” Vereshchuk said in a Facebook posting. “We don’t need blankets and bedding. We need weapons to defend our land. And we call on China to stop supporting those who bomb residential areas of the Ukrainian cities!”

The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., reiterated its lack of sympathy in a video press briefing on Wednesday. “Condemnation doesn’t help, and sanctions only exacerbate the tensions,” embassy spokesperson LIU PENGYU told reporters. “China believes that one country’s security cannot be at the expense of others.”

China’s lockstep with Putin extends to objection to any moves by the U.S. to punish Russia by revoking its membership in the G-20. “No [G-20] member has the right to strip another member of its membership,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson WANG WENBINsaid Wednesday.

“We are at a potential inflection point. If China uses its unique relationship with Russia to mediate an end to this Russian invasion, sentiment on Capitol Hill toward China could improve,” STEPHEN A. ORLINS, president of the New York-based National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, said in a statement. “At the other extreme, if China should supply Russia with military equipment, U.S.-China relations will drop to levels not seen since the establishment of diplomatic relations.”

TRANSLATING WASHINGTON

— CHINA TRADE UNDER FIRE: Reps. CHRIS SMITH (R-N.J.), TOM SUOZZI (D-N.Y.) and TOM TIFFANY (R-Wis.)introduced legislation Tuesday to revoke China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations status.H.R. 7193 aims to punish China “for its heinous human rights atrocities — especially and including the regime’s ongoing genocide and forced labor of Uyghurs and other Central Asian minorities,” Smith said in a statement.

The bill’s passage will be a heavy lift. “There is little prospect of the China PNTR withdrawal legislation passing but given the Russia PNTR withdrawal legislation that is likely to pass, these members of Congress probably thought it made sense to piggy-back off all the publicity the Russia measure was getting and to introduce their China bill,” SIMON LESTER, president of China Trade Monitor, told China Watcher.

— U.S. IMPOSES ‘TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION’ PENALTIES: Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKENannounced Monday that Chinese government officials implicated in human rights abuses either inside China or abroad will be barred from visiting the U.S. “We again call on the PRC government to cease its acts of transnational repression, including attempting to silence Uyghur American activists and other Uyghur individuals serving the American people by denying exit permission to their family members in China,” Blinken said in a statement.

That drew a sharp response from Beijing. Blinken’s statement “maligns and smears China and wantonly imposes restrictions on Chinese officials,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson WANG WENBIN said Tuesday.

“It’s a first step towards accountability, but it cannot be the last,” said OMER KANAT, executive director of the nonprofit Uyghur Human Rights Project. “Members of the Uyghur diaspora live in dozens of countries, so it will be up to these governments to take similar steps to protect those who are vulnerable.”

— PENTAGON WARNS ON CHINA’S MILITARIZED ISLETS: China’s People’s Liberation Army has equipped three disputed islets it took possession of in the South China Sea with anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems, U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Adm. JOHN C. AQUILINOwarned Sunday. “The function of those islands is to expand the offensive capability of the PRC beyond their continental shores,” he said. “They threaten all nations who operate in the vicinity and all the international sea and airspace.”

Not so, according to Beijing. Those islet fortifications are “necessary defense facilities on [China’s] own territory,” said the Foreign Ministry’s Wang on Tuesday.

“From a warfighting perspective, those islands are extremely easy to neutralize,” MICHAEL AUSLIN, research fellow in contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, said at a media roundtable Monday. “I think there is some verbal jousting going on, reminding the Chinese and our allies that [the U.S. isn’t] taking its eyes off [the Indo-Pacific].”

— FCC: PACIFIC NETWORKS A ‘SECURITY RISK’: The Federal Communications Commission last week revoked the operating license of telecommunication firms Pacific Networks Corp. and its wholly owned subsidiary, ComNet (USA), due to ownership links to a Chinese state-owned firm. The two firms sold retail long-distance calling cards. “The companies’ ownership and control by the Chinese government raise significant national security and law enforcement risks,” the FCC concluded. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson ZHAO LIJIAN called the FCC’s move a “flagrant abuse of the national security concept and the use of state power to hobble Chinese companies.”

— BLINKEN BOOSTS BURNS IN BEIJING: Secretary of State Blinken tweet-praised U.S. ambassador to China, NICHOLAS BURNS, on Wednesday. “We are lucky to have @USAmbChina Nicholas Burns as our Ambassador in Beijing. He will soon complete his required quarantine and begin his work to effectively manage the U.S.-PRC relationship at this critical time,” Blinken tweeted Wednesda y. That followed Burns’ official Twitter account launch on Tuesday teasing “more tweets next week." 

Hot from the China Watchersphere

— EU PLANS ‘TOUGH MESSAGE’ FOR CHINA : The April 1 EU-China summit will make it “absolutely clear” to Chinese President Xi about the “severe consequences” for China if it sides with Russia by providing military support or circumventing sanctions, POLITICO’s STUART LAU reported today. “This is not an ordinary summit. This is the critical moment where the two presidents have to send an unmistakably clear message to Xi, whose decisions alone will decide how the EU sees China in future,” a Brussels-based EU diplomat said. “It’s incumbent upon them to send Xi a tough message — without sounding like a threat.”

— JAPANESE FEAR CHINESE INVASION OF TAIWAN: Two public opinion surveys published last week reveal that Russia’s Ukraine invasion has boosted Japanese citizens’ fears that China will eventually invade Taiwan. A Kyodo News poll released Sunday revealed that 75 percent of Japanese feel such an invasion is inevitable. A similar survey published Saturday by Saitama University’s Social Survey Research Center and the Mainichi newspaper revealed that 90 percent of Japanese are concerned about a Chinese invasion of the self-governing island. “I think the poll results would further justify Tokyo’s plan to increase defense spending and introduce [military] strike capabilities,” said TETSUO KOTANI, senior fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs.

— CHINA WANTS UKRAINE OFF G-20 AGENDA: The Chinese government wants to ensure that Russia’s Ukraine invasion is off the agenda of the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao last week said the G-20 is “not an appropriate platform to discuss political security issues such as Ukraine.” Xi made the same point the next day in a call to Indonesian President JOKO WIDODO, suggesting that China is trying to leverage Indonesia’s G-20 rotating presidency to exclude discussion of Ukraine.

— CHINA OBSTRUCTING COVID ORIGINS RESEARCH: International researchers probing the origins of the virus that causes Covid-19 are hobbled by inadequate information sharing from Chinese government sources. “We are all trying to find out what the bloody hell happened, but we are hamstrung by the data available,” the scientific journal Nature reported last week, quoting Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Translating China

— CHINA’S ‘WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY’ SENSITIVITIES: “China is already on the wrong side of history when it comes to Ukraine and the aggression being committed by Russia,” Blinken declared last week. Foreign Minister WANG YI pushed back by insisting on Saturday that “China’s position is objective and fair … and time will prove that China’s claims are on the right side of history.”

Wang was likely triggered by the memory of President BILL CLINTON finger-wagging at Chinese President JIANG ZEMIN during a joint press conference in October 1997 that China’s repression of human rights put the ruling Chinese Communist Party “on the wrong side of history.” Jiang tried to justify those abuses on the basis of China’s “historical and cultural traditions.”

That’s a sore point for the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which prizes its domestic control of China’s historical narrative.

“The CCP’s legitimacy lies in history,” China’s vice president, WANG QISHAN,said in 2015. And the CCP takes its defense of that narrative seriously. “The Chinese people will never allow any individual or any force to distort the history of the [CCP] or smear the Party’s nature and mission,” Xi said in 2020. He has backed that rhetoric by criminalizing as “historical nihilism” any public challenges to the CCP’s historical narrative.

The problem? The CCP’s governance record makes it uniquely sensitive to the power of accurate historical documentation and made manipulation of the historical record an institutional fetish. The Party has airbrushed its role out of the great man-made famine of 1958-1961 that killed up to 50 million Chinese along with Chairman MAO ZEDONG’s Great Cultural Revolution that inflicted nationwide chaos and brutality from 1966-1976. And a generation of Chinese citizens have grown up unaware of the June 4, 1989 military massacre of thousands of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing.

“Wang Yi’s super-sensitivity to an Antony Blinken comment shows a lack of inner confidence,” said PERRY LINK, who teaches at the University of California, Riverside. “If the CCP were truly convinced that it is on the right side of history, it would simply ignore what an outsider says.”

Wang Yi’s defensiveness reflects the CCP’s insecurity about its viability, ANDREW J. NATHAN, Class of 1919 professor of political science at Columbia University, told China Watcher.

“One of the meanings the Chinese see in the ‘wrong side of history’ debate is that the West is saying your system will fail, and they are responding that no, our system works and it is going to continue to work,” Nathan said.

— MCDONALDS’ RIOTOUS ‘SZECHUAN SAUCE’ RETURNS: Call it gross cultural appropriation, a diabolical rendering of sodium benzoate and xanthan gum or the most profitable sweet and sour substance in modern history, but McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce dip for Chicken McNuggets will return toward the end of March but only “while supplies last.” A marketing gimmick concocted to help promote Disney’s 1998 animated film “Mulan,” the sauce in the past has caused riots in California, evoked taste comparisons to old cigarette butts and spawned a lucrative cottage industry for Szechuan Sauce collectors on eBay. 请慢用!

One Book, Three Questions

The Book: “The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics” (a winner last week of the 2022 Bancroft Prize)

The Author: MAE M. NGAI, professor of history and co-director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University.

What is the most important takeaway from your book?

The book aimed to slay the “coolie myth” — the false idea that Chinese emigrants to the U.S. and the British settler colonies during the gold rush era were indentured workers, or like slaves, and therefore not assimilable to white societies and incapable of democratic self-government. The coolie myth was the rationale for the exclusion laws passed across the anglophone world.

I offer a fine-grained portrait of Chinese diasporic communities in the West, which not only refutes the notion that they were coolies but also illuminates the lives of workers and merchants as real people and their resistance to racist politics.

What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching and writing this book?

The coolie trope was so ubiquitous in California that I was surprised it was not present in the Australian gold rush. I realized that comparing Chinese to slaves had no purchase in Australia, where the history of unfreedom was not in African slavery but in convict transportation of the Irish and English poor. This insight underscored my conclusion that all racisms, in the first instance, are generated by local conditions. But politics also adapt and travel, so it was later in the 19th century that the British settler colonies adopted the theory of coolieism from the United States, as part of their own nation-building project.

What does your book tell us about the trajectory and future of U.S.-China relations?

The Chinese exclusion laws of the late-19th century (which lasted until the mid-20th century) aimed to keep Chinese people out of the West as part of a larger strategy to contain China. At that time, China was a weak and unequal player in global affairs, but Euro-Americans worried that China’s large population and presumed racial advantage (i.e. cheap labor) would inundate the West. U.S.-China relations today are different because China is now a global economic power.

Unfortunately, leaders in both the U.S. and China promote nationalism and view their competition as a zero-sum game. Euro-Americans have invoked similar complaints about unfair competition. The figure of the coolie has returned as low-waged factory workers in China’s export manufacturing zones and Chinese and Chinese American students in U.S. universities. Both are imagined to work too hard and without complaint, under the whip of the Chinese Communist Party or tiger moms.

Thanks to: Ben Pauker, Matt Kaminski, digital producer Setota Hailemariam, Stuart Lau and editor John Yearwood.

Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week’s items? Email us at [email protected].

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