Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***ChinaThis week highlighted the importance of both domestic politics and economic policy in the United States and China, as China held its long-awaited Third Plenum and the Republican National Convention met to formally nominate Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as candidates for president and vice president.China’s Third Plenum produced few clear signals of policy change. While the communique acknowledged, at least to some extent, China’s ongoing economic challenges, it did not outline major changes in economic policy. Instead, it continued to emphasize the need for state-driven development and economic security, which have been key to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s vision of economic governance. Under Xi, the Third Plenums have previously been used to announce broad governance reforms and are not confined to economic policy, and more detail is often forthcoming in the weeks after the plenum concludes. This suggests that the full impact of the Third Plenum is likely not yet fully visible to outside observers.On defense and foreign policy, the communique affirmed the previously announced expulsion of three People’s Liberation Army officers and accepted the resignation from the Central Committee of former Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who has not been seen in public since last summer, when he was abruptly replaced.In the United States, Vance’s convention speech framed China as detrimental to the health of the American economy in a speech that otherwise largely avoided foreign policy to focus on a domestic populist economic agenda. Vance did promise to stop the Chinese Communist Party from “building their middle class on the backs of American citizens,” and both Vance and Trump have previously suggested sharp increases to tariffs on Chinese imports (as well as, in Vance’s case, limiting China’s access
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Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***ChinaThis week highlighted the importance of both domestic politics and economic policy in the United States and China, as China held its long-awaited Third Plenum and the Republican National Convention met to formally nominate Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as candidates for president and vice president.China’s Third Plenum produced few clear signals of policy change. While the communique acknowledged, at least to some extent, China’s ongoing economic challenges, it did not outline major changes in economic policy. Instead,
