Nixon’s multipolarity still best way to manage China

Reactions to the recent onslaught of cheap Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) have ranged from panic to dismissal. While panic is never useful in foreign policy, there is reason for concern.

After all, China produced 30 million cars in 2023 and the European Union (EU) is essentially watching as their auto markets become flooded with cheap Chinese cars. While America’s markets have been protected by Trump-era tariffs on Chinese-produced EVs, the threat of their market penetration is still present.

But reactions should be neither panic nor denial. Instead, they should be realistic. Long mocked as the place where cheap plastic toys come from, China is simply no longer making garbage and should be taken seriously.

While their models may not be entirely up to the standards of some Western companies, they are generally speaking solid cars which happen to be incredibly cheap (due in large part to China’s non-existent labor protections and low pay; Beijing has China’s highest hourly minimum wage, at $3.70 per hour).

America’s protectionism is, for now, doing its job and keeping our market free of Chinese EVs. With a low-paid but high-producing adult labor force twice the size of the entire American population, the tariff is akin to putting a band-aid on a flood. This is accentuated by the EU essentially surrendering to the Chinese auto market.

The fact that we have reached this precipice is only because, for decades, the crafters of America’s foreign policy operated along severely misguided lines of thought. Two in particular have led us to this point.

The first was that, with exposure to democracies, China would itself democratize (this line of thought was extended to Russia in the 1990s as well). This idea was essentially taken