The vacuum was all his.
Here's Obama:
“With my successor coming in, I think he saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama said, the Daily Mail reported. "As a consequence, I think China’s attitude [is], 'Well, we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.'"
It was Obama who never cared about the rules, never challenged China's military expansion in the South China Sea under Xi, and telegraphed nothing but weakness to China.
Here's Xi Jinping as early as 2014:
Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou
Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted
individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if
they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao
that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to
relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like
Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the
“positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. ...
But
the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps
unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four
speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference,
two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and
paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical
landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary,
exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic
aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as
vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great
rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”
In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the
coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and
become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one
place, work hard in one place, help
each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good
at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized.
Xi
also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his
practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical
contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading
causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the
United States have implemented containment from all directions,
encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented
severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S.
President Joe Biden’s administration
has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the
deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a
new, more confrontational era.
On
March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese
self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous
discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is
contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said
that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and
manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international
market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier,
emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the
same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more
than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China
currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food
consumption.
In
his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the
People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts
on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national
reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a
“National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA,
invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.
In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his
great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.”
Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and
his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he
has rarely if ever done so with such clarity.
One
thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to
take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not
do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against
corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property
and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be
short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.
Xi
is now intensifying a decade long campaign to break key economic and
technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing
so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic
“struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his
equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in
his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly
willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether
he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the
United States.
