Thirty years ago, I was in Moscow and swam laps each morning at the Hotel Mezhdunarodnaya. In keeping with Soviet culture, suspicion and paranoia blocked any locker room chatter, until one young guy asked about American music and I gave him my cassette of James Brown Live at the Apollo. His suspicions about Americans gave way to a shared appreciation of the Godfather of Soul.
It’s a scene that played out over and over again as the Soviet Union withered — whether through American books and films smuggled behind the Iron Curtain or David Bowie playing Heroes at the Berlin Wall. And it is a living example of American culture’s power to convince and persuade our rivals instead of trying to coerce them — what political scientist Joseph Nye called soft power — one that’s more important than ever as the global competition between the United States and China takes center stage in US politics.
But, like the generals who fight the next war with the tools of the last one, many in Congress seem mired in an Iron Curtain-era mentality that emphasizes confrontation and containment over engagement and soft power. One that ignores the economic and geopolitical interdependence that is an integral part of the United States–China relationship. Policymakers who want to play to the crowd by getting “tough on China” must recognize American jobs depend on wining access to China’s vast pool of consumers and that shared problems such as climate change can only be solved together.
The difference between Cold War “toughness” and a more nuanced, modern pragmatism can be seen recently as multiple industries work to find ways to compete with China while simultaneously promoting US interests, values, and culture — deploying our “soft power” — around the world. Sports leagues, tech companies, and the film and television industry have all been criticized for failing to do enough to push back on China’s dictators and censors as they try to gain access to the world’s largest consumer market.
These companies are stuck in the middle with no good choices. If they “stand up” to the Chinese, they cede market share to Chinese firms who could never beat them in open competition, with a loss of American jobs. Or they can engage with China and make themselves a gratuitous target for American politicians who already decry Hollywood “elites,” sports leagues with “woke” athletes of color, and heavy-handed social media giants.
But whether you dislike them or not, piling on those companies threatens both American economic competitiveness and, as I saw at that Moscow pool thirty years ago, our ability to wield American culture and values as assets in our relationship with China.
It’s also a massive subsidy to China’s own tech, finance, and entertainment industries — businesses that could never beat open competition from America. Thus, China’s “Great Firewall” restrictions on tech companies may be a tool of political control, but they also conveniently shelter its own nascent tech giants like Alibaba and Huawei. Similarly, Chinese censors, desperate to cripple freedom and the flow of US values and ideas to their people, hide behind film quotas and other protectionist barriers, which has the added benefit of shackling American filmmakers and protecting China’s own film industry from meaningful foreign competition.
That’s why efforts in Congress to force American companies to leave the market or somehow force China to change its ways on their own are so costly. Even well-intentioned proposals like calls for American companies to follow rigid “best practices” when responding to Chinese government demands simply handcuff our companies giving China’s government a pass. It may be easy red meat for voters who want action on China. But it won’t do anything to open China’s markets while costing us jobs and income.
Our government should reject sheltering Chinese companies from competition and new restrictions on American companies. It should be pressuring the censors to change their ways, not piling on the censored.
The primary goal should be to open up Chinese markets more completely, forcing the Chinese to honor their obligations through the ongoing “Phase One” trade talks and using our diplomatic bully pulpit to force China’s government to drop censorship demands, provide fair working conditions, and end the human rights and political abuses that appall the world. Instead of making things harder for American companies Congress and the administration should take the fight directly to the Chinese regime itself.
China is a formidable rival and a brutal, repressive regime. Countering it will take an all-of-government effort involving all the levers of U.S. power — economic, national security, and cultural — including the soft power American technologists, creators, and athletes wield. Let’s not handicap our most successful export industries nor abandon one of America’s greatest long-term assets to win the hearts and minds of people around the world.
Ev Ehrlich was Undersecretary of Commerce for President Bill Clinton.