How US and China are fuelling tensions by failing to foster better mutual understanding
There seems little hope the US-China relationship will improve significantly as the two drift further apart despite their long history of cooperation
If this continues, the next generation of US and China policymakers will have even less nuanced understanding and experience in dealing with their counterparts
Within the past 12 months, the leaders of the United States and China have not met in person and only spoken to each other three times. Yet, the US-China relationship has been far from uneventful.
Advisers to the American and Chinese leaders engaged in a bitter back-and-forth in Alaska in March. And a minor controversy erupted following US President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping’s virtual meeting in November concerning whether the two considered each other friends.
This year is ending with the US and China seemingly further apart than ever, at least since relations were normalised in 1979, with the US announcing a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming 2022 Beijing Olympics.
The year began with the Capitol riot on January 6. This underscored how difficult a task the incoming Biden administration faced in not only mending the fractured political divide at home but convincing other countries that American democracy remained steady and US power resolute.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, the ongoing pandemic and stalled domestic legislation have left Biden with poor approval ratings at home and have hardly helped to restore the image of American prestige abroad.
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Xi Jinping and Joe Biden call for mutual respect and peaceful China-US coexistence
Xi Jinping and Joe Biden call for mutual respect and peaceful China-US coexistence
Xi had to feel pleased with his standing as the year began. The unpredictable and increasingly anti-China Donald Trump was on his way out of Washington, and the Capitol riot reinforced Xi’s position that the Western liberal order was failing and China’s system was superior.
In July, he presided over a 100th anniversary celebration for the Communist Party. In November, the party adopted a new resolution on history that makes his securing of a third term appear all the more inevitable.
Yet Xi ends 2021 with myriad problems on the horizon. China’s demographic crisis looms ever closer, resistance to his “common prosperity” initiatives grows and the international community seems increasingly willing to speak out against his actions.
The few high-level engagements between Washington and Beijing this year left little room for optimism about the future of the relationship. The March meeting in Alaska devolved into a 17-minute lecture from Yang Jiechi about how the US needed to change its behaviour.
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Gloves off at top-level US-China summit in Alaska with on-camera sparring
Gloves off at top-level US-China summit in Alaska with on-camera sparring
A subsequent visit to China by Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman fared little better. Xi continued his pandemic-imposed isolation, declining to leave China or meet any foreign leader in person. He thus shunned the Group of 20 meeting in Rome – where the US had hoped for a sideline bilateral meeting – and the climate conference in Glasgow.
Biden and Xi settled for two brief phone calls seven months apart and a virtual summit in November. Breakthroughs or tangible results were never on the agenda and did not come. Looking ahead to 2022, I am sceptical that the relationship will improve significantly.
The Winter Olympics in Beijing is set to begin in February, and Canada, Australia and Britain have joined the US diplomatic boycott. One member of the Chinese state media responded by suggesting Biden might not be alive in 2028 to witness Beijing return the favour by boycotting the Summer Games scheduled that year for Los Angeles.
Russian PresidentVladimir Putin is, however, attending the Games at Xi’s invitation and will reportedly be the first foreign leader to meet Xi in person since the start of the pandemic.
This prospect is only adding to Western anxieties about blossoming China-Russia ties as both take increasingly aggressive stances towards Taiwan and Ukraine respectively.
Xi’s increasing closeness with Putin is misguided, and I do not think the West should be overly fearful about the prospects for this relationship. As I wrote when concerns about Sino-Russian relations peaked in 2019, their historical relationship has more commonly been one of confrontation than cooperation.
Xi and Putin’s shared interests are smaller and shallower than their rosy rhetoric from last week’s virtual summit would have you believe. They probably both enjoyed watching Western media squirm in reaction to their meeting and have played up their solidarity in the face of not being invited to Biden’s recent democracy summit.
But Xi did not make any pledge to support Putin in the event of an invasion of Ukraine, and neither did Putin make any assurances about Taiwan. The relationship between China and Russia is not a formal alliance and is unlikely to ever become one.
US President Joe Biden, left, waves as he meets President Xi Jinping virtually from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on November 15. Photo: AP
The US and China, by contrast, have a far deeper history of cooperation. The US was alone among the Western powers in not seeking its own sphere of influence in China and continuously advocating for maintaining Qing sovereignty in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The two countries were allies in World War II. The estrangement from the late 1940s to early 1970s is an outlier when considering the full scope of the US-China relationship, yet Washington and Beijing are both too quick to treat this era of antagonism and isolation as its defining framework.
This is what troubles me most about the US-China relationship moving forward. Both sides appear to have forgotten or chosen to ignore the legacy of cooperation and are moving the relationship further away from seeking mutual understanding.
We are moving closer to the estrangement that defined the Cold War and the most ineffective era of US-China relations.
Interest in studying China is declining in the US as public opinion grows more negative by the day. This is hardly an encouraging development. Meanwhile, fewer Chinese students are studying in the US and Xi has reportedly taken a dislike to many of the country’s most prominent US experts.
If these trends continue, the next generation of policymakers in both countries will have even less nuanced understanding and fewer first-hand experience of dealing with their counterparts than the US and Chinese governments do today.
The tensions in the US-China relationship are unlikely to be resolved in the short term. Both sides are setting themselves up to fail by neglecting to foster better understanding of each other.
Chi Wang, a former head of the Chinese section of the US Library of Congress, is president of the US-China Policy Foundation
