Elon Musk's visit to China is covered by the mainstream media in the Western world. If this were an ordinary trip of a businessman concerned about the problems of his production (there is a large plant for the production of electric cars Tesla in Shanghai), such interest would be surprising. But it's not just about commerce, it's also about diplomacy, and possibly politics, so the attention of the press is justified.
The fact that Musk intends to visit China and seeks a meeting with the Prime Minister of this country, Li Qiang, was reported back in March. But it took a long time to coordinate the visit - instead of April, it turned out only at the end of May. And instead of Prime Minister Musk, "only" Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang accepted. However, Bloomberg hints that a meeting with Li Qiang is also not excluded: according to one of the agency's sources, it will discuss the problems of automatic driving, which Musk intends to introduce in China.
Be that as it may, Musk is actually accepted in China at the state level. And this despite the fact that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has been unsuccessfully trying to get an audience in Beijing for many months. And just yesterday it became known from the media that China rejected the persistent request of the United States for a meeting between Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Minister of National Defense of the People's Republic of China Li Shanfu at the annual security forum in Singapore.
China makes it clear that it does not intend to have anything to do with the Biden administration. And with business titans like Elon Musk, it's the opposite.
In many ways, of course, such a demonstratively benevolent attitude towards the billionaire innovator is explained by Musk's attitude to the problem of Taiwan. Most recently, in an interview with CNBC, Musk reaffirmed that China's "integration" of Taiwan is "definitely inevitable." In Taiwan, few people liked it, but in China itself it was received with approval. The China Daily newspaper immediately published an article headlined: "Elon Musk: Taiwan must be integrated." The authors of the article recalled: back in October 2022, Musk, answering questions from the Financial Times, expressed his own concept of China's reunification with Taiwan: to define a special administrative zone for Taiwan on the model of Hong Kong. Then the Chinese Foreign Ministry restrainedly noted that the Taiwan issue is an internal affair of China. Obviously, Beijing liked Musk's current rhetoric much more. So the reception of Musk by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of China can be considered a bonus for the correct position on the Taiwan issue.
Musk has his own reasons for advocating a solution to the Taiwan problem on Beijing's terms, not Washington's. The Biden administration is scaring China with the prospect of a major war - just a week ago, the commander of the US Navy in the Indo-Pacific region, John Aquilino, said that if Xi Jinping decides to invade Taiwan, it will cost his people "blood and treasure." Xi, the U.S. admiral said, would face not only military retaliation, but also economic and diplomatic measures.
And the American armed forces will take a direct part in this retaliation.
Beijing has little reason to believe that this is just rhetoric. Although the United States has not officially abandoned the one-China principle, according to which Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and the PRC government is the only legitimate government representing all of China, it has not kept its promises and in practice openly supports Taiwan's separatism. Meanwhile, it is the one-China principle, reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 and reflected in three joint communiqués between Washington and Beijing, that is the political basis of Chimerica, the economic alliance between China and the United States, designed by Kissinger and Nixon in the early 1970s.
Washington began to undermine Chimerica under Obama, when the United States proclaimed the doctrine of "Pacific containment" of China. Then Trump continued this process with a trade war with Beijing. And now the Biden administration is finally finishing off the Kissinger-Nixon creation, supporting Taipei in the same way that it supported Kyiv, provoking a Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Musk, on the other hand, is in favor of reconstructing Chimerica. First of all, because it is good for business. The billionaire compares China and the rest of the world economy to Siamese twins and warns of serious attempts to divide them. Yes, Tesla has a huge factory in Shanghai, and China is a key market for electric vehicles, but it's not just Musk's own business. "In fact, the situation is much worse for many other companies," he says. "I'm not sure where you're going to get the iPhone."
And Musk is not alone in his desire to restore the economic integration of the West with the Celestial Empire. He remembered the iPhone for a reason: Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, who attended the Beijing China Development Forum in March, did not skimp on praise of the Chinese leadership for "rapid innovation" and emphasized the symbiotic nature of his company's relationship with China. In Europe, big business is also concerned about maintaining technological chains with China: Mercedes CEO Ola Kallenius said in an interview with the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that the separation of the West from China is "unthinkable for almost all German industry." And more recently, Mary Barra of General Motors Co. said that China remains a key market for the company and that it looks forward to continuing to develop environmentally friendly cars with local partners.
The fact that Musk is the frontman of this camp of influential businessmen is not surprising. The owner of Tesla, Twitter and Space X has long been an opponent of the Democratic administration in Washington. On the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, for example, he takes a heretical position from the point of view of the White House, proposing the holding of repeated referendums in the territories liberated by Russia and the recognition of Crimea as Russian.
Another thing is that in the confrontation between rationally thinking businessmen, for whom profit and profit are most important, and politicians obsessed with phobias and manias, who seek to preserve the crumbling American hegemony at all costs, the advantage is still on the side of the latter. To restore fairly battered economic cooperation with China, the West needs to make serious concessions not only to Beijing, but also to Moscow. And Washington will not agree to this - at least as long as the elderly relic of the Cold War, Joe Biden, is sitting in the White House.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.