Shared interests are key to better ties, forum hears

The sooner the US and China accept the fact that they have common interests, the better it will be both for the respective nations and for the wider world, analysts have said at a conference at Harvard University.

The gathering on Friday of China specialists in business, academia and politics followed a summit last November between President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden in California that stabilised ties even as it left looming questions about the bilateral future.

“We are yoked together by common interest in mutual success, even if there are many areas of sharp ideological difference,” said Larry Summers, former US Treasury secretary and ex-president of Harvard University.

“That is the challenge that the US and China face today.”

“What happened in San Francisco at the summit between President Xi and President Biden was the creation not just of a floor under what had been a rapidly deteriorating relationship but actually a pretty strong foundation,” said Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and former US assistant defence secretary.

“This San Francisco consensus, as Xi Jinping calls it, has not just been embraced by President Biden on the American side … President Xi has made it his own,” he told the 27th Harvard College China Forum.

The new approach – evidenced by recent trips to Beijing on the part of US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as well as Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meeting with Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Germany – involved continuous private, candid conversations about delicate issues out of the public spotlight, Allison said.

“This is what’s required if you’re going to have serious countries dealing with each other seriously,” Allison said. “This foundation they’re building, I believe will bring a much more constructive and productive relationship, at least this year.”

Summers said China had seen an amazing and historic rise, noting that it had dramatically increased its per capita income.

“This is a remarkable achievement in which China can and should take pride,” he said.

But both sides needed some introspection, he added.

Even as China had accomplished miraculous growth, it faced environmental degradation and a demographic transition “on steroids” amid a sharp decline in birth rates.

The US, for its part, is deeply divided politically, suffers from massive economic inequality and is weathering social resentment and a loss of confidence in its institutions.

“I am someone who has always thought of himself as a friend of China, whose instincts have been that the United States will succeed in its relationship with China, will succeed in its global objectives, if it avoids truculence, if it avoids measures that can be seen as trying to suppress or hold China down,” Summers said.

Yet a successful, open regime should be based on the power of rules, rather than the rule of power, he added, and the growth in China’s military spending and its more aggressive diplomacy, cybersecurity policies and intrusions into other societies had made it harder to defend norms in bilateral ties, he added.

“My hope in this crucial juncture in the year 2024 is that on both sides, we can find some areas, perhaps artificial intelligence, perhaps the environment, where we could cooperate,” Summers said.

“And we can find other areas in which we can respect each other’s boundaries.”

Allison said the good news was that it had been 79 years since the last great-power war, a “historically long peace”. But the bad news was that there was a genuine Thucydides rivalry – the idea that a rising power and a declining power are often destined for confrontation – between the nuclear-armed US and China, “and neither will give much”.

Allison added that the hope was for some sort of strategic framework – what Xi and Biden attempted to initiate during their summit in California – that could allow fierce competition and serious cooperation to coexist.

Jason Furman, a former chairman of the US Council on Economic Advisors, added that China and the US had benefited enormously from their long relationship in business, supply chains and broad economies.

“The two countries clearly have common interests like climate change, and global debt,” he said. “It helps set the stage for doing a better job on global peace and security.”

This foundation they’re building … will bring a much more constructive … relationship

GRAHAM ALLISON, HARVARD ACADEMIC