A Containment Policy By Any Other Name Would Be Just As Foolish

The U.S. and its allies can call their policy whatever they like, but they shouldn’t expect their exercise in rebranding to be taken seriously by the people being targeted by it.

Secretary Blinken played some word games during his visit to Beijing:

So, on the first part of the question, one of the important things for me to do on this trip was to disabuse our Chinese hosts of the notion that we are seeking to economically contain them.  We’re not.  And as I’ve said, we are not about decoupling; we’re about de-risking and diversifying.

De-risking has become the preferred term for Western governments to use to describe how they want to manage their economic ties with China. The distinction between de-risking and decoupling is evidently lost on the Chinese government, which sees the new term as nothing more than a euphemism for the same policy of containment. According to some observers, both terms are so poorly-defined that they can be used however government officials see fit. As SCMP columnist Alex Lo put it a few weeks ago, “So far as I can tell, if a Western politician wants to push for a hard line against China, she says “decoupling”. If she wants to sound more moderate, it’s “de-risking”.” Another way that it can be used is when politicians and officials want to dress up a hardline policy with moderate-sounding rhetoric.