China’s Message to America: We’re an Equal Now
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China’s Message to America: We’re an Equal Now

President Xi is confronting the Biden administration with a new world view.

By LINGLING WEI
Thu, Apr 15, 2021 10:27amGrey Clock 7 min

It quickly became obvious in Anchorage, Alaska, last month that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s diplomatic envoys hadn’t come carrying olive branches. Instead they brought a new world view.

As Biden administration officials expected in their first meeting with Chinese counterparts, Yang Jiechi, Mr. Xi’s top foreign-policy aide, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi asked them to roll back Trump-era policies targeting China. Beijing wanted to restore the kind of recurring “dialogue” Washington sees as a waste of time, say U.S. and Chinese officials briefed on the Alaska meeting.

Mr. Yang also delivered a surprise: a 16-minute lecture about America’s racial problems and democratic failings. The objective, say Chinese officials, was to make clear that Beijing sees itself as an equal of the U.S. He also warned Washington against challenging China over a mission Beijing views as sacred—the eventual reunification with Taiwan.

That is a big shift for Chinese leaders, who for decades took care not to challenge the U.S. as the world’s leader and followed the dictum Deng Xiaoping set decades ago: “Keep a low profile and bide your time.” Some senior Chinese officials privately—often sarcastically—called the U.S. Lao Da, or Big Boss.

Now Mr. Xi is reshaping the relationship. As far as he is concerned, China’s time has arrived.

“China can already look at the world on an equal level,” he told the annual legislative sessions in Beijing in early March, a remark widely interpreted in Chinese media as a declaration that China no longer looks up to the U.S.

The U.S. routinely describes China as a strategic rival, but Beijing has rarely if ever used such terms, emphasizing terms like “win-win” and cooperation.

“One of the more obvious changes in China’s attitude is that China now recognizes the existence of competition, which was never expressed in the past,” says Wang Huiyao, an adviser to China’s State Council and president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank.

The increasingly contentious relationship has created competition for allies, with American diplomats jetting to Japan, South Korea and Western Europe, while Chinese equivalents sew up deals in Southeast Asia, Russia and Iran.

Competitive relationship

Mr. Yang’s warning in Alaska on Taiwan reunification is an ominous inkling of how a competitive relationship between the world powers could lead to conflict.

The U.S. is committed to helping Taiwan preserve its autonomy under pledges including the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, and the Biden team trumpets its plans to strengthen economic and political links to Taipei. Mr. Xi has made reunification with Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province, a big part of his “China Dream” of national revival.

China’s Foreign Ministry says of Mr. Yang’s Anchorage warning: “The Chinese side pointed out that the Taiwan issue is related to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and China’s core interests.” It adds that “There is no room for compromise.”

There is little sign of imminent Chinese actions to take back the island, though there have been plenty of symbolic gestures. Soon after the Alaska meetings, Mr. Xi inspected Fujian province, across the strait from Taiwan. Chinese aeroplanes in recent weeks have stepped up incursions into Taiwan’s air-defense zone.

Days after the Alaska encounter, the White House’s China coordinator, Kurt Campbell, told a private conference hosted by the University of California at San Diego that Beijing had become “impatient” at the pace of reunification, according to participants.

Adm. Phil Davidson, who heads the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier in March that China could try to take control of Taiwan by decade’s end, perhaps in as little as six years. China might act rashly, says a senior U.S. official, because of an exaggerated belief that the U.S. is a declining power.

Relations between the countries plummeted during the Trump administration. After both sides fought a two-year trade war to a wary truce, the U.S. president blamed Beijing for unleashing the coronavirus. China rejected the charges and labelled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a “doomsday clown.”

After Mr. Biden’s election, academics and officials in Beijing reached out to American contacts to try to figure out whether the new administration would change course. They were quickly discouraged.

Even before Mr. Biden took office, Chinese diplomats sought to schedule a high-level meeting between the two sides, people close to the matter say. Biden officials never approved the request and instead repeatedly talked about working with allies to confront China.

China’s concerns were reinforced in January, when Mr. Biden’s choice for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, used his confirmation hearing to declare that China had committed genocide against Uyghur Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. China has called the charge “the lie of the century.”

The Biden team shares its predecessor’s view of China as America’s greatest military, technological and economic challenger. From the new administration’s perspective, Chinese provocations never ceased. Beijing cut off imports from Australia over its call for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, skirmished with India over the countries’ Himalayan border and sought to intimidate Philippines and Vietnam ships in the South China Sea.

Beijing, as Chinese officials put it, sought to “duo hui hua yu quan,” or take back the narrative. China’s diplomats and state-media outlets aggressively denounced Western meddling in its domestic affairs and heralded China’s rise.

Before the Alaska meeting on March 18 and 19, the U.S. signaled a muscular approach. President Biden met online with the leaders of India, Australia and Japan. Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser, flew to Tokyo and Seoul to confer with security counterparts and insisted that Messrs. Yang and Wang fly to Alaska for the U.S.-China session rather than meeting in Asia. A day before the Anchorage meeting, the U.S. expanded sanctions against two dozen Chinese officials over the repression of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters.

Some U.S. foreign-policy experts thought the Americans went overboard, including Jeffrey Bader, a senior China official in the Clinton and Obama administrations, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The more you assert you’re not a declining power,” he says, “the less convincing you are.”

With cameras rolling in Anchorage, Mr. Blinken briefly criticized China’s actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang and threats against Taiwan. Mr. Yang, a member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, gave his blistering 16-minute rejoinder, which the Chinese officials say was meant to show China’s new world view.

After rattling off his country’s achievements under Mr. Xi, he said China wouldn’t follow “what is advocated by a small number of countries as the so-called rule-based international order.” He criticized the U.S. as having “deep-seated” human-rights problems and declared that “the U.S. itself doesn’t represent international public opinion.”

After the doors closed, say the officials briefed on the meeting, the Chinese laid out the differences between the nations in three categories. The first category was what could be dealt with fairly easily.

The second would require more negotiations. Issues involving both sides relaxing restrictions on diplomats and journalists belong to the first two groups.

The third category, largely concerning China’s sovereignty, was off limits.

On the second day, the diplomats addressed Taiwan. Control of the island has been a Communist Party goal since Mao Zedong’s forces drove Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government there in 1949.

As he turned to the West after Mao’s death, Deng made clear that reunification could wait while China focused on developing its economy. For Mr. Xi, the wait is wearing thin. As Mr. Xi heads for an unprecedented third term as China’s leader late next year, his talk of national revival has broad support. There is little that would cement his legacy more forcefully than bringing the island back into Beijing’s fold, China watchers say.

In Anchorage, the U.S. reaffirmed its adherence to the “One China” policy, under which Washington agrees not to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, but also reiterated pledges to help Taiwan economically and militarily.

“The Chinese are concerned about a slippery slope of Biden doing more and more on Taiwan,” says Bonnie Glaser, a China analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They are using their ever-expanding tool kit to put pressure on Taiwan and signal the U.S. it better be careful.”

Sharp departure

Beamed back to China, Mr. Yang’s lecturing made him a national hero. It also represented a sharp departure from the policy of cooperation with the U.S. that Deng had adopted shortly after the two countries established diplomatic ties. “As we look back, we find that all of those countries that are with the U.S. have become rich,” Deng told aides in 1979, according to official accounts, “while all of those against the U.S. have remained poor. We should be with the U.S.”

That principle guided his successors. Jiang Zemin pushed through Beijing’s negotiations with Washington to get China into the global trading system in 2001. He wooed American and other CEOs to showcase the country’s greater opening to the world. The next leader, Hu Jintao, went further in following the U.S. lead. During the 2008 financial crisis, Mr. Hu signed up to a plan laid out by President George W. Bush to stimulate the Chinese economy to help lift the world from recession.

Mr. Xi started his reign on a similar path. His “China Dream” slogan nodded to the appeal of the American Dream. In late 2017, he entertained President Donald Trump at a private dinner in the Forbidden City, despite Mr. Trump’s threats to punish China.

“We have a thousand reasons to get the China-U.S. relationship right,” he regularly told Chinese underlings and foreign visitors, “and not one reason to spoil it.”

But as the Trump administration piled tariffs on Chinese imports and blacklisted major Chinese companies, which it argued were stealing U.S. intellectual property and helping to build up the Chinese military, Mr. Xi soured. From his perspective, the U.S. had become an unreliable partner, and he worked to make China less reliant on America, especially on technology.

In Beijing’s corridors of power, Mr. Trump was derisively known as “a great unifier”—America’s aggressive actions were unifying support in China for the party and Mr. Xi.

America’s chaotic pandemic response, followed by a summer of racial upheaval and the Jan. 6 Capitol storming, solidified his faith in the Chinese system’s superiority, Chinese officials say. In internal meetings, they say, he compares American democracy to “a sheet of loose sand” and declares that the one-party system allows him to get things done.

With Mr. Biden in the White House, China has continued a hard-line approach, signalling that companies not following Beijing’s rules will lose access to the Chinese market. Swedish clothing brand Hennes & Mauritz AB recently met with a strong social-media rage and consumer boycott in China over its stance against sourcing cotton from Xinjiang. Chinese authorities have restricted military personnel and employees of certain state-owned companies from using electric vehicles made by America’s Tesla Inc., citing national-security risks including concerns about the cars’ cameras. H&M declined to comment. Tesla, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, said last week that its cameras aren’t activated outside North America.

“Nobody has forced them to stay in China,” Mr. Yang said in Anchorage, regarding U.S. companies doing business in China.

Search for allies

Since the Alaska meeting, the competition has played out in a search for allies. Within a week, Mr. Blinken organized joint condemnation of China’s Xinjiang policy with Canada, the European Union and the U.K., which included the first EU human-rights sanctions on China since the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters.

Even Japan, typically wary of angering China, its largest trading partner, appears to be tying itself more tightly to the U.S. Last week ahead of a trip by Prime Minister Yoshide Suga to Washington for an April 16 summit with Mr. Biden, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi called on Beijing to improve human rights conditions for Uyghurs and stop the Hong Kong crackdown.

Mr. Wang, the foreign minister, met his Russian peer in late March, prompting the nationalist Chinese newspaper Global Times to headline, “China, Russia to break US hold on ‘world order.’ ” Then he travelled to the Middle East and signed a wide-ranging economic and security agreement with Iran.

Countries like India are trying to avoid getting caught between the two sides. Mr. Biden’s plan to hold a Summit for Democracy will sharpen the divide.

China retaliated against the EU sanctions by blacklisting European lawmakers and think tanks, although that might make the EU parliament’s ratification of a pending investment treaty with China more difficult.

“It’s a high-stakes gamble for the Chinese,” says Daniel Russel, a former Obama China official, now a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank. “But it’s not a gamble they are certain to lose.”

 

 

 

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How 20 Seconds Can Make You a Better Investor

Investors are taming impulsive money moves by adding a little friction to financial transactions

By IMANI MOISE
Tue, Mar 14, 2023 4 min

To break the day-trading habit that cost him friendships and sleep, crypto fund manager Thomas Meenink first tried meditation and cycling. They proved no substitute for the high he got scrolling through investing forums, he said.

Instead, he took a digital breath. He installed software that imposed a 20-second delay whenever he tried to open CoinStats or Coinbase.

Twenty seconds might not seem like much, but feels excruciating in smartphone time, he said. As a result, he checks his accounts 60% less.

“I have to consciously make an effort to go look at stuff that I actually want to know instead of scrolling through feeds and endless conversations about stuff that is actually not very useful,” he said.

More people are adding friction to curb all types of impulsive behaviour. App-limiting services such as One Sec and Opal were originally designed to help users cut back on social-media scrolling.

Now, they are being put to personal-finance use by individuals and some banking and investing platforms. On One Sec, the number of customers using the app to add a delay to trading or banking apps more than quintupled between 2021 and 2022. Opal says roughly 5% of its 100,000 active users rely on the app to help spend less time on finance apps, and 22% use it to block shopping apps such as Amazon.com Inc.

Economic researchers and psychologists say introducing friction into more apps can help people act in their own best interests. Whether we are trading or scrolling social media, the impulsive, automatic decision-making parts of our brains tend to win out over our more measured critical thinking when we use our smartphones, said Ankit Kalda, a finance professor at Indiana University who has studied the impact of mobile trading apps on investor behaviour.

His 2021 study tracked the behaviour of investors on different platforms over seven years and found that experienced day traders made more frequent, riskier bets and generated worse returns when using a smartphone than when using a desktop trading tool.

Most financial-technology innovation over the past decade focused on reducing the friction of moving money around to enable faster and more seamless transactions. Apps such as Venmo made it easier to pay the babysitter or split a bill with friends, and digital brokerages such as Robinhood streamlined mobile trading of stocks and crypto.

These innovations often lead customers to trade or buy more to the benefit of investing and finance platforms. But now, some customers are finding ways to slow the process. Meanwhile, some companies are experimenting with ways to create speed bumps to protect users from their own worst instincts.

When investing app Stash launched retirement accounts for customers in 2017, its customer-service representatives were flooded with calls from panicked customers who moved quickly to open up IRAs without understanding there would be penalties for early withdrawals. Stash funded the accounts in milliseconds once a customer opted in, said co-founder Ed Robinson.

So to reduce the number of IRAs funded on impulse, the company added a fake loading page with additional education screens to extend the product’s onboarding process to about 20 seconds. The change led to lower call-centre volume and a higher rate of customers deciding to keep the accounts funded.

“It’s still relatively quick,” Mr. Robinson said, but those extra steps “allow your brain to catch up.”

Some big financial decisions such as applying for a mortgage or saving for retirement can benefit from these speed bumps, according to ReD Associates, a consulting firm that specialises in using anthropological research to inform design of financial products and other services. More companies are starting to realise they can actually improve customer experiences by slowing things down, said Mikkel Krenchel, a partner at the firm.

“This idea of looking for sustainable behaviour, as opposed to just maximal behaviour is probably the mind-set that firms will try to adopt,” he said.

Slowing down processing times can help build trust, said Chianoo Adrian, a managing director at Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America. When the money manager launched its online retirement checkup tool last year, customers were initially unsettled by how fast the website estimated their projected lifetime incomes.

“We got some feedback during our testing that individuals would say ‘Well, how did you know that already? Are you sure you took in all my responses?’ ” she said. The company found that the delay increased credibility with customers, she added.

For others, a delay might not be enough to break undesirable habits.

More people have been seeking treatment for day-trading addictions in recent years, said Lin Sternlicht, co-founder of Family Addiction Specialist, who has seen an increase in cases since the start of the pandemic.

“By the time individuals seek out professional help they are usually experiencing a crisis, and there is often pressure to seek help from a loved one,” she said.

She recommends people who believe they might have a day-trading problem unsubscribe from notifications and emails from related companies and change the color scheme on the trading apps to grayscale, which has been found to make devices less addictive. In extreme cases, people might want to consider deleting apps entirely.

For Perjan Duro, an app developer in Berlin, a 20-second delay wasn’t enough. A few months after he installed One Sec, he went a step further and deleted the app for his retirement account.

“If you don’t have it on your phone, [that] helps you avoid that bad decision,” he said.

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