The Art of War

A poster for The Battle at Lake Changjin in Beijing on October 3, 2021 (VCG/Getty Images)

Have the United States and China begun a second Cold War? At first there seems to be no lack of evidence pointing to yes. The raising of barriers to trade and immigration, the imposition of sanctions and embargoes focused on sensitive technology, the constant rise in military budgets, an ever-more critical tone from the press regarding the other state, all of it contributing to an almost complete collapse of trust between the rival superpowers’ polities: surely such a lack of warmth must signal winter. Yet more careful observation should give us pause. For all the chatter of divorce, the marriage of convenience between the Chinese and American economies remains almost entirely in effect. Trade, and trade imbalance, on a colossal scale, goes on. A one-party People’s Republic reliant on Japanese and Western capital for investment, prosperity, and security can’t afford to have it any other way; likewise, a bipartisan capitalist republic whose economy depends on a nominally communist party has no option other than to maintain a ceasefire. The notion of a Cold War is more a memory or a wish now than a fact.

The truth remains, however, that U.S.-China ties have been utterly transformed over the past five years. Something precious has vanished: the potential for improvement. It was of little consequence that Donald Trump won the 2016 election by inveighing against China. But in doing so as a Republican and then matching his harsh campaigning words with harsh deeds in office, he established a precedent his successors cannot reverse. Neither a Democratic Party struggling to attract white working-class voters nor a GOP eager to buttress its white small-holder base can ease up on China without harming its own cause.

This change has not been lost on observers in Beijing. The ruling party and its legions of America-watchers have absorbed the Trump phenomenon and adjusted policy accordingly. In retrospect, the flagrant offensives against Chinese interests carried out under Trump were something like a godsend for the atheist Chinese Communist Party. Trump’s China-bashing galvanized a subject population accustomed to benign views of the United States and instructed them in the reality of great-power competition. With the possibility of better ties ruled out, the party is plowing the political capital accrued by its handling of the pandemic into an ever more ambitious program of internal discipline. The hog-tying of Hong Kong protesters, the mass incarceration of Uyghurs, the narrowing of permissible speech, the arbitrary humiliation of tech barons and real-estate moguls, intensified mass surveillance of physical and digital space—such authoritarian measures, which no self-respecting Western leftist can condone, aim to shut down every site within the home society from which the party-state’s supremacy could be challenged.

More ominous and less obvious than the above, however, is another, smaller set of initiatives. In the face of intensified threats from the United States, the CCP believes that it requires more soldiers, and it is celebrating soldiers and promoting their formation more and more with every passing year. Youth is central to this course of action. In school, English may be phased out of the curriculum; in its place, physical education is already being stressed. A regime of relentless academic test-taking is being dismantled. Children are now limited by law to a maximum of three hours of video gaming per week. And, just as the virtues and necessities of scientific learning have been popularized by innovations in Chinese science fiction—Liu Cixin’s interstellar trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past being the ultimate exemplar—the virtues of military service are being popularized by increasingly expensive and elaborate war movies. Whether on land, by sea, or in the skies, the various branches of the People’s Liberation Army now flaunt their skills and toughness for the silver screen. Though the films, financed by PLA holding companies, are themselves big business, they signify the recession of the business owner...