This is the third in a series of essays from a California perspective on the challenges and opportunities presented by the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown in five key areas: (1) public health; (2) politics; (3) the economy; (4) climate change; and (5) U.S.-China relations. Part 1 addressed public health and politics. Part 2 addressed the economy and climate change.

Ever since the founding of our republic, the evolving relationship between the United States and China has been unique among all nations. In his book THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM published in 2016, American journalist John Pomfret describes the evolution of this strange and complex relationship as a "never-ending Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. Both sides experience rapturous enchantment begetting hope, followed by disappointment, repulsion, and disgust, only to return to fascination once again."[i]

In this essay, I explore why this relationship has become critical to the future of both countries and essential to the survival of our world. To understand this relationship better, I start with a brief history of U.S. China relations from the late eighteenth century through the start of the twenty-first century, followed by an examination of how this relationship changed from partner to competitor when China ascended to superpower status and how the power and prestige of both nations has been diminished by their bungled responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and domestic dissent. Finally, I look at the future of U.S.-China relations and how both nations may decide to assert leadership in a changing world.

As tensions between these superpowers accelerate, it is more important now than ever to apply the lessons of history to find a sustainable path forward. Although we have shared two centuries of alternating infatuation and disappointment, far more draws the people of “The Beautiful Country” (“Meiguo”) and “The Middle Kingdom” (“Zhongguo”) together than pulls them apart.

The History of U.S.-China Relations in a Nutshell

Starting with the American revolution, Chinese and Americans have shared a strong mutual interest in trade and cultural exchanges. Most of the early exchanges involved fur traders or Christian missionaries. Chinese government officials and businessmen often found America more trustworthy to deal with compared to imperial England, France, or Japan because the U.S. was less interested in territorial conquest. The U.S. Open Door policy allowed trade to flourish and ports to remain under nominal Chinese control without resort to the use of military force. Eventually China and Europe went along with the idea.

The story of Wu Bingjian, a Chinese entrepreneur and tea trader who did business under the name Howqua, exemplifies how both nations benefited economically from this interaction. By the time he died in 1843, Howqua was the world's richest private businessman. He mentored a number of young clerks from Boston, including John Murray Forbes who went on to manage Howqua’s American investments, putting his money in land, transport, manufacturing and railroads. One of Howqua’s factories made some of the first rail ties in the U.S., while Forbes went on to become a railroad magnate.

Americans in China had a significant effect on modernizing China in a number of different ways. Frederick Townsend Ward became the first foreign officer in the Qing army in the mid-19th Century, starting a long history of American involvement in Chinese military reforms. American missionaries were responsible for creating the first open schools and universities in China and for ending misogynistic practices such as foot binding. Adele Fielde arrived in China in the late 1800s to teach Chinese women how to read and write, along with geography, hygiene, and basic medical skills. “[H]er missionary work began to resemble less an evangelical enterprise than an early version of the Peace Corps."[ii] For pioneers like Fielde, "China offered freedom and opportunity at a time when educated American women faced limited career choices at home. American women were surgeons in China when they were denied entry into operating rooms in America. They chaired university departments when only a few of them were teaching at the college level in the United States."[iii]

Meanwhile, immigrants from China were also transforming nineteenth century America. A large influx of southern Chinese arrived from Guangzhou (Canton) region to California during the Gold Rush. These early Chinese immigrants were small in stature but their hard work, strength, endurance, and know-how made them indispensable in building the transcontinental railroad, particularly the Central Pacific portion from California to Utah. By 1868, ten percent of California’s population was Chinese.

As happens periodically throughout American history, racism and xenophobia led to a wave of anti-immigration, anti-miscegenation, and other discriminatory laws in the nineteenth century, particularly the enactment of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which stemmed the flow of Chinese immigrants into America until well into the twentieth century. American hostility towards Chinese immigration was mirrored in anti-foreign, anti-Christian, and anti-imperialist uprisings in China between 1899 and 1901, commonly called the “Boxer Rebellion.”

The long, gradual decline of Imperial China accelerated to its final conclusion after generations of Qing dynasty leaders failed either to modernize or confront foreign aggression by Europe, America, and Japan. In 1912, the Xinhai Revolution forced the abdication of the last emperor, six-year old Puyi, and established the Republic of China. In the early days of the Chinese republic, America took on a special place again.

The Chinese regarded President Woodrow Wilson as a kind of messiah when he advocated equality among all nations and national self-determination. The era of Chinese optimism and goodwill towards the U.S. ended abruptly with the signing of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles after World War I. In order to keep his dream of a League of Nations alive, President Wilson agreed to cede Shandong province to Japan. The sacrifice of China’s largest and most economically advanced province to their bitter imperialist enemy a betrayal, sparking large protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Next to the Communist Revolution at the end of World War II, this marked the lowest point in the history of U.S.-China relations.

Pomfret reminds us, however, that even the most anti-American Chinese propagandists looked up to America. Mao Zedong studied Benjamin Franklin's contributions to science, was a fan of George Washington, admired Theodore Roosevelt, and “read a little English each morning, a habit he would retain until late in life."[iv]

Americans and Chinese have long dreamed of a "Great Harmony" between their countries. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from a family of China traders and thought of China as one of "four policemen" for permanent world peace, along with the U.S., Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. Henry Luce, the creator of the Time-Life magazine empire, was born in China to missionary parents. He considered the U.S. to be the top country in the world and believed that Sino-U.S. relations would modernize China. Former President George H.W. Bush also had a long history with China, starting with the Yale-in-China program and later serving as the first U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China from 1974 to 1976.[v]

During China’s Civil War (1927-1949), the U.S. generally sided with the Kuomintang Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-Shek against the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. The Communists initially opposed American capitalism even more than they opposed the Japanese fascists, despite Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

In 1935, with encouragement from Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, Mao put aside his differences with the Kuomintang and the U.S. to join the Allied effort to defeat the fascist Germany-Japan-Italy Axis and form a United Front against Japan.

During the period leading up to and during World War II, America harbored some hope of kindling democracy in China. American journalist Edgar Snow, author of RED STAR OVER CHINA,[vi] the most influential book on China after Pearl Buck’s THE GOOD EARTH, formed strong ties with Mao. He accompanied Mao through the Chinese countryside, particularly during The Long March, and wrote favorable accounts of Mao, comparing him to Robin Hood. Snow also developed a special relationship with Zhou Enlai.

On October 1, 1949, Mao defeated Chiang and founded the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”). For the next two decades as China turned inward and completely restructured its government, economy and culture, there was little interaction between the U.S. and China.

In 1972, after a brief period of ping pong diplomacy, President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger dramatically reopened the door to China with their historic visit to Beijing. The thrust of Nixon’s policy was to embrace and reengage China in international trade. American policymakers hoped that if China enjoyed economic progress through a more open, liberalized economy, then its culture and government would also become more open and democratic. They also hoped to distance China from the Soviet Union and reduce the risk of China’s becoming a military threat. Indeed, Zhou Enlai and Deng Tsaoping proved instrumental in opening China to western ideas, trade and technology. Unfortunately, China’s move to a more capitalist economy was never accompanied by a liberalization of its politics.

At the time of America’s rapprochement with China, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were still the two world superpowers. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, the U.S. stood alone as the world’s only superpower for the next decade. American policy through the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations, and the early part of the Bush II administration, still viewed a strong and stable China to be in America’s interest and U.S.-China relations continued to strengthen. For example, in 1991, future Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson who led the investment banking wing of Goldman Sachs at the time, promoted the idea of merging China's state-owned companies to create firms that could compete on the world stage. Although Goldman Sachs and other American bankers reaped large profits, Paulson’s idea also saved China's state-run economy and arguably the Communist Party. In a sense, “China Inc.” was “Made in the USA."[vii]

With China’s continued economic growth after 2000, China joined the U.S. as one of the world’s two superpowers. Meanwhile, as China continued on the path of strong economic growth, America found itself mired in interminable Middle East conflicts and the lingering hangover from the Great Recession. China and the U.S. increasingly saw themselves as competitors rather than partners.

After Xi Jinping took office in 2013, China’s diplomatic tone became more confrontational even as its human rights abuses and cyber espionage continued unabated. In an effort to improve strained relations, President Obama declined to criticize China for fear that it would make cooperation on bigger issues more difficult. However, President Xi responded by treating Obama very poorly when the U.S. president visited China. Xi seemed to view Obama’s overtures as signs of weakness.

Meanwhile twenty-first century American journalists took on the cultural role previously performed by nineteenth century American missionaries. They wrote article after article shaming China for its ongoing human rights violations against the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, its official acts of cyber espionage, its theft of intelligence on foreign government officials with security clearances, its notoriously poor air quality, and so on. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing went so far as to set up its own air pollution monitoring equipment to show how dangerously high ozone and particulate emission levels were on a regular basis.[viii]

After Xi’s rebuke, Obama negotiated a major trade agreement between the U.S. and most Asian nations, excluding China. Although the multilateral agreement called the TransPacific Partnership (“TPP”) proved politically unpopular in the U.S., particularly with labor unions, Obama signed the TPP in 2016. However, when President Trump took office the following year, he pulled America out of the deal. China went on to negotiate its own deal with the rest of the Pacific Rim nations, firmly taking the reins of power and authority over international trade in the Pacific. In the words of Yale History Professor Odd Arne Westad, it was “as if the Americans, having just invented NATO, suddenly decided to withdraw from it. The Trump administration’s decision may have made domestic political sense, but in terms of foreign policy, it was a disaster, since it allowed China to claim that the United States was an unreliable partner in Asia.”[ix]

By the end of 2019, Trump had all but abandoned engagement with China, but without a strategy to replace it. Instead, his America First policy produced a tit-for-tat with China on a number of standalone trade issues. Although both nations entered into a cease fire on tariffs in late 2019, they continue on a collision course in 2020, as they increasingly blame each other for the coronavirus and other problems. The failed presidency of Donald Trump has now weakened the U.S. on so many levels that many historians have already declared the twenty-first century to belong to China. Indeed, through its Belt and Road Initiative, China is in some ways already supplanting the U.S. as the world’s economic leader through its aggressive financing and construction of rail lines, highways, ports, and other infrastructure in countries all around the globe.

U.S.-China Relations Pre-Pandemic

In his book Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China, Alec Ash writes a compelling portrait of the more than 320 million Chinese millennials between the ages of 16 and 30. These are children of the one-child policy, born after Mao, with no memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. They are the first net native generation to come of age in a market-driven, more international China. Their experiences and aspirations were formed in a radically different country from the one that shaped their elders, and their lives will decide the future of their nation and its place in the world.

One of the millennials profiled in Wish Lanterns is the daughter of a Communist Party official born on the tropical southern island of Hainan. A political science student, she spent a year abroad at Cornell where she admired many aspects of American life that China lacked, such as lush green college campuses, friendly strangers who trust in society, and the assurance of legal rights. On the flip side, there was a dynamism to China that she didn’t sense in the U.S., a drive and upward movement. If anything, she believed that the two rival nations have more in common than they think. Both have a strong sense of exceptionalism. Both want to be Number One and are obsessed by personal and national quests for money and power. As she observed, “they are the same in opposite ways.”[x]

More than 300,000 Chinese students continue to study abroad in the U.S. and Europe. There used to be a brain drain because many of these students would stay abroad and not return to China. But increasingly, these students do come back. Although their world view may change from their foreign travels, they now see more opportunity in China than in the U.S. or Europe.

My own experiences traveling to China four times over the last two decades confirm Ash’s observations in Wish Lanterns.[xi] Although I have visited dozens of cities and several national parks, the highlight of every trip is the four days spent in Sacramento’s beautiful sister city Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Twenty years ago, only a handful of high rises existed, all near Spring Square in downtown Jinan. The trains were antiquated and there were no freeways. Today, Jinan has blossomed into an economic and environmental jewel. Jinan’s progress in science, technology, education, healthcare, arts and culture are extraordinary. The Jinan region has grown from three to 10 million people, with more high rises than Chicago and more building cranes about town than Sacramento has buildings. Like Sacramento, Jinan is a clean city with major rivers running through it and freeways circulating throughout its region. Unlike Sacramento, it now has high speed rail connections to all major cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Qingdao.

During our Jinan stay we always visit Qufu, the ancient home of Confucius who lived during the fourth century B.C. His extended family stayed in the Confucius estate until 1949. Imagine a civilization so durable and stable that a single family could stay in one place for over 2000 years. It’s incomprehensible even in Europe, let alone in America.

One cannot overstate the influence of Confucian values and teachings on the culture and politics of China up to the present day. For example, the Mandarin word for “human” is “ren”, which is also the Confucian virtue denoting the good quality of a virtuous human when being altruistic. Ren is exemplified by a normal adult's protective feelings for children. It is considered the outward expression of Confucian ideals how two people should treat one another. Ren also has a political dimension and is the basis of Confucian political theory. If the ruler lacks ren, it will be difficult for his subjects to behave humanely. Therefore, the ruler is exhorted to refrain from acting inhumanely towards his subjects. An inhumane ruler runs the risk of losing the “Mandate of Heaven” or the right to rule. A ruler lacking such a mandate need not be obeyed.

What hasn't changed over the last two decades since I first visited Jinan is the warm friendship between our two sister cities. During our last trip this past September, my wife got food poisoning in Jinan but quickly recovered. Our Jinan hosts were quite responsive in getting a doctor to attend to her and even ready to call an ambulance if necessary, all without charge.

On the negative side, the other thing that hasn’t changed is the tap water, which is still not potable, just as in the rest of China. What a boon it would be for the City of Springs, as Jinan is known, if they figured out a way to become the first major city in China with drinkable water.

Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the seismic shifts I witness. Cities and neighborhoods that used to look like the poorest parts of Mexico now have more modern infrastructure than the United States and are kept very clean. The high speed rail system (the largest in the world)[xii] connects virtually all of the mid- to large-sized cities from Central China to the eastern seaboard and from Shanghai to Beijing. Most major cities in China now boast clean, affordable and modern rail and transit systems and airports.

But what always impresses me the most are the Chinese people, especially the youth. They are forward-looking and unafraid of the future. Don’t get me wrong. They still have plenty of problems in China trying to feed 1.5 billion people, tackling the horrendous air pollution problems caused by coal burning plants and the extraordinary number of new cars clogging their roads, the lack of clean drinking water, and the social problems that tremendous growth can cause. Although China now has a capitalist, entrepreneurial economy, it is still a totalitarian state with only one political party. Censorship is rampant. The Government owns all the land (Chinese can buy houses and buildings and lease the land for 70 years from the Government) and the Government dictates most business and many personal decisions (although China has relaxed the one-child policy). Nevertheless, the Chinese work hard and maintain a can-do attitude. They are able and willing to apply scientific and engineering principles to solve their problems. In contrast to the official government line, most of the people I talked to seem to genuinely like America and Americans, though recent signs show that may be changing.

Yale Professor Westad puts these contrasts into perspective: “There are two central facts about China today. The first is that the country has just experienced a period of economic growth the likes of which the world had never before seen. The second is that it is ruled, increasingly dictatorially, by an unelected communist party that puts people in prison for their convictions and limits all forms of free expression and association.”[xiii]

In economic terms, decoupling China and the U.S. is not practical for either nation. They are too interdependent. For example, total revenue of US companies and affiliates in China in 2017 were $544 Billion dollars. Some companies such as Nintendo, GoPro, and Hasbro, have accelerated plans to build factories in India, Vietnam and Mexico, but at least up until the pandemic, most American companies wanted more access to China, not less. For example, Starbucks has plans to open 3,000 Chinese stores by 2023. Tesla opened a plant in Shanghai that will build 150,000 cars a year. Elon Musk called the plant a “template for future growth.”

Nevertheless, political tensions are growing. Just ask the National Basketball Association (NBA), the ultimate cautionary tale when it comes to the problem of accepting censorship for profits. Up until last year, the NBA had been steadily increasing its influence in China since Shanghai native Yao Ming was the top player in the NBA Draft in 2002. In less than a decade, China became the largest NBA market outside the U.S. But in the few seconds that it took Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey to tweet a few words of support for Hong Kong freedom fighters, the NBA market in China suddenly vanished.

Similar issues occurred with the Chinese version of the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody” which censored the parts of the movie showing Freddie Mercury as gay. Censored imports have acclimated Chinese citizens to a parallel reality in which nobody cares about Hong Kong and Freddie Mercury is not gay. “When Chinese consumers erupt at something like Daryl Morey’s tweet, it indicates not a growing awareness of what the rest of the world thinks but a growing seclusion from it.”[xiv]

Facebook last year abandoned efforts to enter the Chinese market. Netflix acknowledged they will likely be blocked there as well. Hollywood-China co-productions are more about finances than creative partnerships, especially after the train-wreck of a movie “The Great Wall” with Matt Damon playing a warrior who fends off monsters with his Chinese comrades. Chinese audiences will watch Chinese movies or American blockbusters but not a combination of the two. Even more Chinese consider themselves “Pro-China” now than Americans who identify with Trump’s “America First” movement.

In military and strategic terms, the competition between the U.S. and China is harder to gauge. According to Professor Westad: “The United States today has tremendous military advantages over China: more than 20 times as many nuclear warheads, a far superior air force, and defense budgets that run at least three times as high as China’s. It also has allies (Japan and South Korea) and prospective allies (India and Vietnam) in China’s neighborhood that boast substantial military capabilities of their own. China has no equivalent in the Western Hemisphere. . . . yet within the last decade, the balance of power in East Asia has shifted perceptibly in China’s favor. Today, the country has enough ground-based ballistic missiles, aircraft, and ships to plausibly contend that it has achieved military superiority in its immediate backyard. The Chinese missile force presents such a challenge to U.S. air bases and aircraft carriers in the Pacific that Washington can no longer claim supremacy in the region. The problem will only get worse, as China’s naval capabilities are set to grow massively within the next few years, and its military technologies—especially its lasers, drones, cyber-operations, and capabilities in outer space—are fast catching up to those of the United States . . . much more quickly and comprehensively than Moscow ever could.”[xv]

In October 2019, Newt Gingrich published a book Trump vs. China, in which he called China “the greatest threat to us since the British Empire in the seventeen-seventies, much greater than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” For Gingrich and Trump, China is an existential menace, demanding the same kind of aggressive military expansion and broad campaign against tyranny that thwarted the Soviet Union. This conclusion ignores that the Cold War’s main strategy was “containment”, a term coined by diplomat George Kennan to refer to a third option to contain Soviet expansionism, as opposed to appeasement or direct conflict.

However, “China is not the Soviet Union,” Professor Westad explains in his 2019 article in Foreign Affairs.“For one thing, Soviet ideology was inherently opposed to any long-term coexistence with the United States. From Lenin onward, Soviet leaders saw the world in zero-sum terms: bourgeois democracy and capitalism had to lose for communism to win. There could be alliances of convenience and even periods of détente, but in the end, their form of communism would have to be victorious everywhere for the Soviet Union to be safe. The CCP does not share such beliefs. It is nationalist rather than internationalist in outlook. The party sees Washington as an obstacle to its goals of preserving its own rule and gaining regional dominance, but it does not believe that the United States or its system of government has to be defeated in order to achieve these aims.”[xvi]

As the millennial daughter of a Chinese official in Wish Lanterns noted, Chinese society is in many ways similar to American society. Unlike their Soviet counterparts who generally accepted inefficient, socialist economic policies, the Chinese are more interested in getting ahead in a competitive, market-oriented society. “For the vast majority of them, communism is simply a name for the ruling party rather than an ideal to seek. True, some sympathize with Xi’s efforts to centralize power, believing that China needs strong leadership after the individualism of the 1990s and early years of this century went too far. But nobody, including Xi himself, wants to bring back the bad old days before the reform and opening began. For all his Maoist rhetoric, Xi, both in thought and practice, is much further removed from Mao Zedong than even the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev was from Lenin.”[xvii]

What’s more, the Chinese have enjoyed a remarkably peaceful few decades since 1990, during which they have prospered. Waging war would be costly.

U.S.-China Relations in the Age of Coronavirus

To former Secretary of State John Kerry and other foreign policy experts, the Covid-19 pandemic marks the first time since before World War II that the U.S. has not led an international response to a world crisis.[xviii] For example, when an Ebola epidemic erupted in West Africa in 2014, the Obama administration dispatched the 101st Airborne and other troops to build treatment hospitals and donated half of the $4 billion in relief funds collected from governments worldwide. As observed by New Yorker columnist Evan Osnos, “[w]ithin six months, the outbreak was under control, and the U.S.-led effort was hailed as a template for handling future epidemics.”[xix]

In contrast to America’s robust humanitarian response, China did next to nothing. Although Chinese mining and construction firms had big businesses in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, China struggled to mount a humanitarian response, contributing only four percent of the relief funds. Meanwhile, thousands of Chinese nationals fled in a panic.

Six years later, neither country has managed well during the Covid-19 pandemic. To the contrary, as explained by Osnos:

“The efforts of both have been marred by denial, coverup, and self-deception. President Donald Trump’s trade war and President Xi Jinping’s hostility to western influence had already frayed the countries’ relationship to its most fragile point in decades. Now, in a bid to deflect criticism, they are turning against each other in perilous ways.

“For President Xi, containing the disease, which first emerged in Hubei Province in January, has been a race against both a public-health and a political calamity. After initially silencing doctors who reported the virus, Beijing gained control of the outbreak by locking down Hubei, testing millions of people, and quarantining suspected cases, even if it required forcibly removing residents from their homes. By mid-March, China was reporting nearly no new cases, a claim that outside experts considered doubtful but in the neighborhood of truth.

“Shaping the narrative of China’s role in the pandemic will be more difficult. In April, the Associated Press obtained government documents showing that leaders in Beijing knew the potential scale of the threat by January 14th, but Xi waited six days before warning the public – a catastrophic interlude of dinners, train rides, and handshakes that helped unleash the pandemic. The government staged a public-relations offensive, touting China’s exports of medical gear to other nations – a tactic dubbed ‘mask diplomacy.’ It also suggested, with no evidence, that the source of the virus was a delegation from the United States that had participated in the Military World Games in Wuhan in October. The offensive backfired: buyers complained of faulty or undelivered shipments, and U.S. officials accused China of using social media to promote divisive and false information.” [xx]

China has not stopped with bungling its response to the pandemic. In February 2020, the Chinese government expelled reporters working in China for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.[xxi] Their official statement said that the expulsion was in response to President Trump’s order from several weeks before limiting the number of Chinese citizens who can work in U.S. for five state-owned media organizations. However, state media outlets also point to critical reporting of China’s mass detention of Uyghurs and other ethnic muslims in Xinjiang, government surveillance, and the government’s inept response to the Coronavirus outbreak. There is mounting xenophobia and harsh treatment of foreigners in China, not just Americans.

Trump could have criticized China’s early mishandling of the virus and its efforts to control scrutiny of the virus’s origins. Indeed, the White House could have highlighted and contrasted Beijing’s crisis mismanagement by showcasing American leadership in the world’s fight against Covid-19. Instead, Trump has abdicated leadership and refused to mount a multilateral strategy just as it has done with climate change. He cut off funds to the World Health Organization and seized upon a blame-Beijing strategy to undermine China and bolster his reelection campaign.[xxii]He refused to partner with Europe in funding vaccine research. Worse yet, his stunning lack of judgment and his delusional belief in phony miracle cures has led to the bizarre circumstance where the manufacturer of Lysol has to explain to its customers that they should not ingest disinfectant. As Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia, wrote in Foreign Affairs, the Trump Administration has “left an indelible impression around the world of a country incapable of handling its own crises, let alone anybody else’s. . . . [The] uncomfortable truth is that China and the United States are both likely to emerge from this crisis significantly diminished.”[xxiii]

According to Osnos, unnamed Administration officials have even “floated revenge fantasies to reporters, such as abandoning U.S. debt obligations to China, an act that, investors noted, would gut America’s financial credibility.” “In economic terms,” Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the Washington Post, “this is worse than telling people to drink bleach.”

Administration supporters, including Senator Tom Cotton and Fox News, have also promoted the unproven theory that the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan virology lab. On April 30th, Trump said that he had seen convincing evidence of this. A few days later, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed there was “enormous evidence” to support the theory. “More credible voices - including those of Anthony Fauci, the Administration’s top expert on infectious diseases, and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – have declined to endorse that view.”[xxiv]

The chill in U.S.-China relations is becoming frozen in place and could last a long time, particularly if Trump’s cronies continue to push the Wuhan lab theory on the origin of the virus. It is all too reminiscent of the way that the Bush administration pressured intelligence agencies to support the theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile back in Beijing, the Ministry of State Security presented to Xi an assessment that reportedly describes the current hostilities between the U.S. and China as the most inhospitable diplomatic environment since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, perhaps foreshadowing a new Cold War. “To John Gaddis, the dean of Cold War historians, America’s advantage over the Soviet Union hinged less on aggression than on competent governance. “If the Trump Administration uses the coronavirus to heighten its conflict with China, it will not only have ignored a basic lesson of U.S. history; it will expose America to yet another crisis for which it is plainly unprepared.”[xxv]

The Future of U.S.-China Relations

Before Covid-19 roiled the world, it appeared inevitable that China would lead the twenty-first century. Now that the pandemic has exposed the failures of leadership in both the U.S. and China, new challenges and opportunities arise. As heavy-handed and incompetent as Trump has been, the U.S. still has a chance to keep Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia in its corner because Beijing’s ventures have been too heavy-handed and self-serving. China’s message that its style of modernization has greater potential than American-style capitalism, has been tarnished by China’s tone-deaf importing of Chinese workers instead of generating local jobs for infrastructure projects and China’s bullying attempts to control large swaths of national territory. Nor did the Chinese government’s bungled attempt to hide the truth about the coronavirus outbreak and mismanaged response inspire confidence abroad.[xxvi]

Meanwhile, the main effect of the Trump Administration’s failure to lead the fight against Covid-19 has been a piecemeal response nation by nation, state by state. But it has also given China an opening to mitigate its own disastrous response to the pandemic and its repressive response to Hong Kong and take another crack at leading the world response. Now, the rest of the world questions the United States’ potential for leadership on issues great and small, issues on which American guidance would have been considered indispensable in the past. The more the United States and China beat each other up, the more room for maneuver other powers will have. The result may be a world of regional hegemons, and sooner rather than later.

The global order is not over, but it is changing. In the post-pandemic era, America needs to reengage with the world. America’s partnership with European and Asian countries to win World War II and to build a strong economy and military alliance after the war show the importance of a multilateral strategy and moral leadership to confront hostile nations and to address other transnational issues.

Former diplomat Susan Thornton has said that the U.S. will not succeed in achieving global supremacy by trying to trip up China or prevent it from doing what it’s doing. Rather we will succeed by reasserting our leadership and emphasizing what we do best - diversity, freedom, technology, and innovation. We must seek a smarter, nimbler, and more just approach to solving the pandemic and other transnational problems.[xxvii]

Nor will we succeed by replaying our Cold War strategy with the Soviet Union. The U.S. economy is intertwined with the Chinese economy in ways that would have been unimaginable with the Soviet economy. China’s leaders also have some international cards to play that the Soviets never held. Compared with the class-based politics Moscow was peddling during the Cold War, China’s appeals for global unity on such issues as climate change, trade, and inequality could find far greater traction abroad. That would be ironic, given China’s pollution, protectionism, economic disparities, and repressive response to Hong Kong and ethnic minorities. However, America’s recent failure to take the lead on these issues opens the door for China’s communist government to try to convince foreigners that authoritarian governments handle such problems better than democracies do.

Yale Professor Westad preaches patience. “If the United States wants to compete, it must prepare for a long campaign for influence.”[xxviii] The rivalry with China will have to be managed within the context of continued economic interdependence. In addition to strengthening ties with our allies in Europe and Asia (India, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia), we should try to move Russia towards closer ties with the west to avoid a China-Russia axis.

The New Yorker columnist Evan Osnos sums up our best option: “The most viable path ahead is an uneasy coexistence, founded on a mutual desire to ‘struggle but not smash’ the relationship. . . . To avoid catastrophe, both sides will have to accept truths that so far they have not: China must acknowledge the outrage caused by its overreaching bids for control, and American must adjust to China’s presence, without selling honor for profit. The ascendant view in Washington holds that the competition is us-or-them; in fact, the reality of this century will be us-and-them. It is naïve to imagine wrestling China back to the past. The project, now, is to contest its moral vision of the future.”[xxix]

American power has always depended on our ability, as Professor Westad puts it, to “create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a world power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time.” [xxx]

Given the moral bankruptcy of the Trump administration, it will be difficult to convince the rest of the world to listen to America on moral issues. Recent national protests against the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police have highlighted systemic racism and police misconduct that further weaken America’s leadership position and moral authority.

The challenge for America going forward is whether we can overcome domestic discord and achieve a political consensus long enough to limit the Trump presidency to one term and conquer our inner demons of systemic racism and inequality. If we can, then a renaissance in American trust and leadership is possible. If not, then “the decline in the United States’ ability to act purposefully will, sooner than most people imagine, mean not just a multipolar world but an unruly world—one in which fear, hatred, and ambition hold everyone hostage to the basest instincts of the human imagination.”[xxxi]

No pressure America. Just do the right thing!

Endnotes

[i] “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present” by John Pomfret (HighBridge, November 2016). “The Beautiful Country” is the English translation of the Mandarin word “Meiguo”, which is what the Chinese call America. “The Middle Kingdom” is the English translation of the Mandarin word “Zhongguo”, which refers to the creation story of China’s homeland as the center of the earth and human civilization.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] In 2015, Yale opened its first satellite campus abroad in Singapore. Yale-NUS is the only fully-residential campus of higher education in Singapore and one of the few in all of Asia.

[vi] Snow, a native of Kansas City, was joined by other American journalists from the University of Missouri school of journalism. Snow appreciated how the Communists adopted Christian missionary tactics to win over the people, e.g., open air performances. However, unlike Christians who focused on urban areas, Communists worked more in rural areas with farmers.

[vii] “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present” by John Pomfret (HighBridge, November 2016).

[viii] China has shown on occasion that it is concerned about the world’s perception, at least of its air pollution problem. For example, Beijing banned personal automobile use on certain days to improve air quality in time for the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008.

[ix] “The Sources of Chinese Conduct: Are Washington and Beijing Fighting a New Cold War?” by Odd Arne Westad, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2019.

[x] “Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China,” by Alec Ash (2017). The book follows the story of six young Chinese: Dahai a military child, netizen and self-styled loser; Xiaoxiao, a hipster from the freezing north; “Fred”, born on the tropical southern island of Hainan, the daughter of a Party official, and political science student who spent a year abroad at Cornell; Lucifer, a would-be international rock star; Snail, a country boy and Internet gaming addict; and Mia, a fashionista rebel from far west Xinjiang.

[xi] Wish lanterns are the floating variety of traditional Chinese paper lanterns which are released to symbolize hope at festivals and other special occasions.

[xii] China went from no high speed trains to the largest system in the world in a decade from 2000 to 2010.

[xiii] “The Sources of Chinese Conduct: Are Washington and Beijing Fighting a New Cold War?” by Odd Arne Westad, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2019.

[xiv] “The Future of America’s Contest with China,” Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, January 6, 2020.

[xv] “The Sources of Chinese Conduct: Are Washington and Beijing Fighting a New Cold War?” by Odd Arne Westad, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2019.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] “Covid-19 and Global Affairs: Crisis Diplomacy” Webinar Conference, April 24, 2020, Yale University, Jackson Institute of Global Affairs, moderated by John Kerry.

[xix] “The Folly of Trump’s Blame-Beijing Coronavirus Strategy,” Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, May 10, 2020.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] NYT The Daily Podcast, 4/16/20

[xxii] A pro-Trump super PAC ad says, “To stop China, you have to stop Joe Biden.”

[xxiii] “The Coming Post-COVID Anarchy: The Pandemic Bodes Ill for Both American and Chinese Power – and for the Global Order,” Kevin Rudd, Foreign Affairs, May 6, 2020.

[xxiv] Ibid.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] “The Future of America’s Contest with China,” Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, January 6, 2020.

[xxvii] “Covid-19 and Global Affairs: Crisis Diplomacy” Webinar Conference, April 24, 2020, Yale University, Jackson Institute of Global Affairs, moderated by John Kerry.

[xxviii] “The Sources of Chinese Conduct: Are Washington and Beijing Fighting a New Cold War?” by Odd Arne Westad, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2019.

[xxix] “The Future of America’s Contest with China,” Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, January 6, 2020.

[xxx] “The Sources of Chinese Conduct: Are Washington and Beijing Fighting a New Cold War?” by Odd Arne Westad, Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2019.

[xxxi] Ibid.