Anything is possible when the world's two largest economies choose to cooperate
Le Yucheng, vice-minister of foreign affairs. (FENG YONGBIN / CHINA DAILY)
Respect key to mending damaged relations
By Zhang Yunbi
Vice-Foreign Minister Le Yucheng has called on China and the United States to build mutual respect, reverse the wrong course on bilateral ties, renew cooperation and fulfill key global responsibilities.
The senior diplomat used the four "Rs"－respect, reversal, renewal and responsibility－to explain Beijing's position on developing China-US ties during his address to the Vision China event on Thursday.
There is no predestined fate for the world. The future of China-US relations, and the future of the world, depend on what vision we embrace and what choice we make
Le yucheng, vice-foreign minister
This year marks the 50th anniversary of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger's historic visit to China, a prelude to the normalization of diplomatic ties.
In his speech titled "Anything is possible when China and the United States choose to cooperate", Le said "the challenges we face today call for the same vision and courage to break the ice again".
Le said mutual respect is the foundation for successful people-to-people and state-to-state interactions and "it is not a difficult starting point".
While some people doubt the need to respect China as it is a strategic competitor of the US, Le said,"We don't even think the relationship should be defined by 'competition', because we keep challenging ourselves, not the United States."
"The only thing that China asks of the United States is to respect the development path we have chosen, respect our legitimate interests, respect our pursuit of a better life and to quit its obsession with changing or splitting China," he added.
China-US relations in the last four years have seen growing mistrust, division and hatred. Le said both sides must "act without further delay to reverse the wrong course". "A lot of repair (work) has to be done. I agree with American friends' suggestions that both sides take small steps first to create conditions for improving the relationship. But we have to act now to bring China-US relations back on track," he said.
As some work between the two governments has ground to a halt, the diplomat said the countries' shared interests and need for cooperation "far outweigh our differences". He said controlling COVID-19, the economic recovery and climate change could be priorities for cooperation in the short term.
China will continue to support the COVID-19 response of the US, increase experience-sharing on diagnostics and treatment, and work more closely with the United States on the research, production and distribution of vaccines, he said. Beijing will also enhance macroeconomic policy coordination with Washington to help the global economic recovery, and collaboration on climate change is expected to be renewed. "Our closer results-oriented cooperation on clean energy, low-carbon technologies, and environmental protection will go a long way toward protecting Mother Earth," he said.
On shouldering responsibilities on the global stage, Le quoted a Chinese proverb that "A bigger boat is meant to carry more weight" as well as an American saying that "Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them".
"As two major countries in the world, China and the United States should shoulder important responsibilities for world peace and development. Our choice and action today will have a far-reaching impact on the future of our world," he said.
Le cited successful cooperation, such as tackling the 2008 global financial crisis, combating the Ebola virus in 2014 and collaborating on the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The two countries can work together to avoid the so-called Thucydides Trap, he said. "There is no predestined fate for the world. The future of China-US relations, and the future of the world, depend on what vision we embrace and what choice we make."
zhangyunbi@chinadaily.com.cn
Zhou Shuchun, publisher and editor-in-chief of China Daily. (FENG YONGBIN / CHINA DAILY)
Both nations should be on 'right side of history'
By Cao Desheng
Both China and the United States should "stand on the right side of history" in setting the direction of their relations amid unprecedented difficulties and setbacks they encountered in the past a few years, said Zhou Shuchun, publisher and editor-in-chief of China Daily, on Thursday.
Zhou made the remarks while addressing the virtual Vision China event. He said that "the right side of history" means removing barriers and building bridges rather than erecting walls and digging ditches, or closing doors and blocking roads.
"To be on the right side of history, we should move forward from where we began," Zhou suggested. He talked about the "ping-pong diplomacy" in 1971, which marked a thaw in Sino-US relations and paved the way for the establishment of diplomatic ties. He also underlined the importance of people-to-people exchanges in raising public support for a meaningful friendship and substantial cooperation.
Zhou noted that the Sino-US relationship is widely considered the most important in today's world because the way they handle their relations matters a great deal to many other countries. He called on both nations to shoulder their responsibility as major players in the international arena and work together to build a better relationship.
"History tells us that the decisions made by major countries on the direction of their relations determine to a large extent the fate and future of mankind," he said, adding the right side of history calls for a relationship featuring "nonconflict, nonconfrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation", as was the consensus reached between President Xi Jinping and former president Barack Obama at their summit back in 2013.
Zhou said that since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have become increasingly aware that humanity is a community with a shared future. As the global public health crisis shows no signs of abating and confirmed cases worldwide have just passed 100 million, there is an urgent need for nations to join hands to build a global community of health for all, he added."The right side of history asks China and the United States to share, and not shirk, the responsibility of strengthening international partnerships and global governance."
Zhou also called on the two countries to work together to advance the building of an open world economy to boost global development.
China and the US account for more than one-third of global economic output and half of global growth. Due to the fallout of the pandemic, the global economy has encountered the most severe crisis and challenge since the Great Depression of the 1930s, he said.
"Different calculations in their economic, trade and technological policies might either impart momentum or put a brake on global development," Zhou said. "And to be on the right side of history, the two biggest economies in the world must work together where they carry the most weight."
"The right side of history" will prove that openness and togetherness will prevail over confrontation and decoupling, and responsible members of the international community should work to advance the building of an open world economy, he added.
Zhou quoted Richard Nixon, the first US president to set foot on the soil of New China in 1972, as saying "It is not our common beliefs that have brought us together here, but our common interests and our common hope".
He said: "Things have changed as time has passed, and the world is no longer what it used to be. However, we're strongly convinced that the 'common interests' and 'common hopes' that President Nixon spoke of are still relevant, and what's more, they should be built upon."
caodesheng@chinadaily.com.cn
A fresh chance to create long-term stability
By Mo Jingxi
The China-US relationship is at a new starting point with an opportunity for the two countries to stabilize bilateral ties after "a very difficult period" under the Donald Trump administration, according to an expert on international affairs.
Da Wei, senior fellow of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, told the Vision China event on Thursday that over the past few years, the Trump administration had taken the wrong direction, and erroneous actions had led to a "severe situation" in China-US relations.
He said he hoped the new US administration pursues a policy that treats the world's second-largest economy in an objective manner over the next four years. "The two countries need to take action in the first month, then the first 100 days, then the first six months and then the first year, because the window of opportunity will not last forever," Da said, noting that the free-fall of bilateral relations can't continue.
In 2017, Trump announced his first national security strategy and called China a "strategic competitor".
However, after that the Trump administration took a more confrontational attitude toward China.
To avoid China and the US engaging in a new "Cold War" or even military conflicts, Da said the two countries should stop finger-pointing and calmly rethink bilateral relations.
He underlined the importance of setting up four mechanisms relating to high-level exchanges, the military and security, economics and trade, and cultural and social interactions to build a solid base to support the long-term relationship.
Da said high-level dialogues between the two sides are very important and should be sustained, even if the two countries encounter fresh difficulties in the future.
In military and security areas, more crisis management and confidence-building measures are required to prevent the two major powers heading toward conflict, Da said.
While economic and trade issues have been the core issues over the past four years, Da said the task for China and the US is to reach an equilibrium between economic interaction and mutual benefit."I think both countries support economic interaction, but at the same time, our economic relations need to make both sides feel satisfied and also feel that they are gaining something out of it," he said.
While engaging in social, cultural and educational cooperation and exchanges, Da said it is important to make both sides feel secure.
If China and the US can make progress in the four areas, the two sides will probably have a mechanism to support long-term stability not only in the next four years, but probably the next 10 years or more, he said.
While it's impossible to ignore the elements of competition in bilateral ties, it should be constructive, healthy and limited, Da said.
"It's not the US-Soviet-style Cold War competition," he said, noting that China has no aspirations for global hegemony, or to replace the institutions, values or systems of the US and the West.
Da also said that the two countries, which are deeply dependent on each other, need to cooperate on regional affairs such as the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue and global concerns like climate change and cyberspace governance.
mojingxi@chinadaily.com.cn
Washington urged to not 'misjudge' Beijing
By Han Baoyi in London
The United States must avoid misjudging China as the new administration in Washington is set to recalibrate the bilateral relations of the two major powers, said John Ross, a senior fellow of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China in Beijing.
"It's very dangerous for a major great power like the United States to have a distorted view of the world," said Ross, referring to the "Cold War mentality" of former president Donald Trump's administration against China.
One of the consequences of this "lose-lose policy" is that it prevented Washington from learning the lessons of China's fight against COVID-19, which has caused more than 430,000 deaths in the United States, said Ross, who used to work as an economic adviser to former London mayor Ken Livingstone.
"The general method of demagoguery is the worst. Some of the tweets by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo lead to a distorted view of the world," Ross said.
"China has no interest in, or intention of, engaging in the struggle for hegemony with the United States, and it does not favor hegemony by any state in the world," he said."China's framework is to focus on its national development to seek win-win cooperation with other countries."
The inauguration of US President Joe Biden should be seen as an opportunity to reset China-US relations because win-win cooperation can not only benefit the two sides, but also the world, he said.
"Responsible statesmanship means constraint on having the most accurate view possible of the situation, not of misleading. In attempting to mislead other people, you also mislead yourself."
From his perspective, some good steps have been taken by the Biden administration, such as the country's rejoining of the Paris Agreement on climate change and halting the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization. However, there are some "negative signs" regarding China-US relations, Ross said, quoting a statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken of the Biden administration.
Blinken, when he was nominee of the position, told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan 19:"Let me just say that I also believe that President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China. I disagree, very much with the way that he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one, and I think that's actually helpful to our foreign policy."
Ross said, "That style of statement is not helpful."
As the world is experiencing an economic downturn which is much worse than the one caused by the global financial crisis 13 years ago, Ross said, what all countries, including the United States, should be doing is "seeking to benefit from the growth in China".
Statistics show that China was the only major economy to register positive economic growth last year, while the US economy contracted by 3.6 percent and the Eurozone's shrank by 7.4 percent, contributing to a global economic pullback of 4.3 percent, according to the World Bank. These facts mean that China has become the motor of world economic growth to a degree, which is actually, in the short term, quite extraordinary, Ross said.
"China would obviously benefit greatly from increasing trade and investment with other countries, and other countries would gain from the very rapid growth of China's economy."
Ross said one of the important benefits is the China-European Union investment deal, which was reached last month."The Cold War policy is so damaging; even some of the United States' closest allies will not go along with this policy because it's against their own country's interests," he said.
"So therefore, it's much to be hoped that the United States will see this and adopt a 'win-win' approach, to use the Chinese phrase, in that situation," he added.
hanbaoyi@mail.chinadailyuk.com
Redefining talks crucial, expert insists
By Liu Yinmeng in Los Angeles
A leading China expert and renowned US economist has urged President Joe Biden's administration "to actively consider a more constructive approach" in relations with China.
"Many people believe around the world that given the broad bipartisan support for marshaling negative pressures on China by the Trump administration, that this is unlikely to change as we now move to a new administration and presidency under our 46th president, Joe Biden. I reject that," said Stephen Roach, a Yale senior fellow and former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman, in a video speech aired during Thursday's Vision China virtual event.
A priority for the Biden administration is to redefine the nature of the United States' dialogue with China, Roach said. He envisions a permanent office to "house the relationship between the second and first most important economies in the world".
"I call this the secretariat, located in presumably a neutral country or jurisdiction, staffed by high-level officials and researchers with responsibility for data sharing, framing joint policy proposals, shepherding negotiations on those proposals," he said.
Roach said this full-time office would also engage in all aspects of the US-China relationship: from trade and technology to cybersecurity, visas, consulate staffing and people-to-people exchanges.
Roach argued that concentrating on a bilateral trade imbalance in an interconnected world is a flawed strategy because it fails to address the discrepancy that caused the trade deficit contention, a shortfall of domestic savings on the US side and surplus savings on the Chinese side, he said."When you focus on a bilateral solution to a multilateral problem, it makes a major economic mistake because the profusion of bilateral imbalances or the multilateral imbalances really reflect savings problems in individual nations,"Roach said.
Instead, the trade war with China, initiated by former president Donald Trump's administration, led to a trade diversion from China to more expensive foreign suppliers, which resulted in new taxes for US consumers, Roach said."When you're a country like the United States with a major shortfall of domestic savings and you want to grow, you import surplus savings from abroad and you run these massive current account and multilateral trade deficits to attract the foreign capital," he said. "So, if you close down trade with one of your bilateral partners, even if it's the largest one, as China is, that has the unfortunate impact of diverting trade from China to other trading partners," Roach added.
He encouraged the Biden administration to "abandon the phase-one trade deal and the tariffs that underpin it" and develop a sustainable saving solution to boost domestic saving.
As for trade with China, Roach encouraged both sides to restart negotiations on a bilateral investment treaty to tackle structural issues between the two economies. Such a treaty would also eliminate many of the "contentious structural issues" disputed between the two countries, he added.
"US multinationals and the US economy need new sources of economic growth, and China also needs stable and secure access to large and deep sources of economic growth, such as that provided by the US," Roach said, adding,"Shame on us if we both don't take advantage of developing a framework that enables more effective access to markets by both countries".
He acknowledged that "there's no quick fix" to the existing conflicts, but he encouraged both nations to "take small steps" to rekindle "a more trusting relationship between us".
teresaliu@chinadailyusa.com
Opportunity for US president to 'build back better' rapport
By May Zhou in Houston
The Biden administration has to take the opportunity to work with China and "build back better" the world's most important bilateral relationship, according to an expert on relations between the two countries.
David Firestein, president and CEO of the George H. W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations, acknowledged that the relationship has suffered over the last four years.
The relationship has always been complex and challenging, and never perfect, but it has always been "immensely important", he told the Vision China forum.
He said that after four years of the Trump administration he is optimistic about a more constructive future under the leadership of new US President Joe Biden.
"There will be continuity and change as we get into the Biden administration, which will likely depart from the Trump administration's policy and practice in a number of significant ways," he predicted.
Firestein said while some in the Trump administration viewed and framed China as the enemy of the United States, Biden's team primarily sees China as a serious competitor. This is a major philosophical departure from the Trump administration's China policy, he said.
"I think that distinction is very meaningful. Enemies are countries we fight wars with, but competitors are countries we compete with," he said.
Firestein said China is an indispensable partner of the United States and will remain its most formidable competitor for this generation. "Only by recognizing the essential truth of both statements can we get this vitally important relationship, indeed the world's single most important and consequential bilateral relationship, right for ourselves and posterity, and that's very much what I hope to see in the year 2021," he said.
Over the past four years, reciprocity was often cited by the Trump administration in defense of its hawkish China policy.
While reciprocity will remain an important element in US policy toward China for the long haul, the way the Biden administration construes it is going to change, Firestein said."We will see in the Biden administration what I call 'smart reciprocity'."
While the Trump administration looked at China fundamentally through an ideological prism and rolled out policies that actually hurt the US－for example, tariffs produced the largest trade deficit ever seen in US history－the Biden administration will look at how to advance US interests with China, Firestein said.
The trade war initiated by the Trump administration did not close its trade deficits with major business partners, including China, which the US had hoped for.
According to figures released by the US Commerce Department this month, the US trade deficit surged to US$68.1 billion in November, the highest monthly deficit in 14 years.
The manner in which the United States engages and negotiates with China will also be different, Firestein said.
"We will be back to a presidential style of communication that will help move the relationship in a more constructive direction," he said.
"I don't believe we will see sea change in 2021 simply because Biden replaced Trump," he said, adding that incremental changes are "possible and desirable".
mayzhou@chinadailyusa.com