Congress’s new China-focused committee hasn’t traveled to China yet. But they came to New York this week to meet with Wall Street executives, foreign policy leaders, and journalists in what may at times have felt like a foreign country.
That’s because New York and Washington see China rather differently.
Chairman Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, acknowledged the dissonance on Monday when speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The median view on Wall Street on China is much different than the median, bipartisan view on China on Capitol Hill. And that’s really why we’re here,” he said. “Even those in the financial community who are less hawkish on China than I am, what they want, above all other things, is certainty, predictability, clarity.”
A bipartisan consensus on China has emerged in Washington as one of the few policy arenas where there’s continuity between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Under that view, China poses an imminent risk to the US and international stability, and both domestic and foreign policy need to be focused on countering Beijing’s global reach.
Contrast that to New York: As America and the world’s financial hub, Wall Street executives think first of the depth of economic connection between the US and China, the challenge of fully decoupling the American economy from the Chinese (or the milder version of that which is called derisking), and the fears that the decline of US power could lead to de-dollarization (that is, the US dollar no longer serving as the anchor of the global financial system).
No one doubts that a scenario in which China were to invade neighboring Taiwan would be catastrophic for the region and the world. But the conversation in Washington has come to assume that Xi Jinping is on a seemingly inevitable path to war. Many analysts disagree, however, and fear that the zero-sum logic obscures the actual threat at hand. Gallagher and committee ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi, a…
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