Analysts hope to see reset in China, US ties
After a volatile 12 months, observers expect tensions to ease in new year
There is no simple way to sum up relations between China and the United States in 2020. It is safe to say they have been tumultuous, fraught with inflammatory rhetoric, and laden with backand-forth sanctions.
But the relationship also holds hope.
The “most consequential” bilateral relationship in the world seems to have reached the bottom of the valley, from where every step to be taken may lead back to the mountain top, so hoped senior China hands in Washington and beyond, as they look at 2020 in retrospect.
The year started with a promising note for Beijing and Washington with the signing of a historic Phase One trade deal on Jan 15 that capped 18 months of conflict between the world’s two largest economies.
As in other presidential election years, 2020 saw candidates, incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and his challenger, former Democratic vice-president Joe Biden, use China- bashing rhetoric and actions as tactics to court support.
But with an administration bent on the view that China is a primary strategic threat — which Beijing says is an “illusion” of some US politicians — Washington has increasingly set its relations with Beijing on a contentious course.
It has been further compounded by the still-sweeping COVID-19 pandemic in the US, which Trump baselessly linked with what he termed as the “China virus”, a move blasted by Beijing and criticized by many in the scientific community as racist and blame-shifting.
Events of the past year strained the China-US relationship and reduced it to a level never seen before, with trade and investment held back, scientific and technological cooperation blocked, and people-to-people exchanges dampened.
The souring mood culminated with what The Atlantic magazine headlined as a “surreal speech” by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Nixon Presidential Library in late July, in which he declared decadeslong US policy of engagement with China having utterly failed.
The claim was panned by many scholars. Pompeo’s speech was “highly
destructive”, said David M. Lampton, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
“In this regard, our two countries did not join hands more than 40 years ago to change each other’s internal systems. Instead, we normalized to improve our own internal circumstances and those of the world,” Lampton said at a virtual gala of the USChina Policy Foundation on Dec 16.
J. Stapleton Roy, US ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995, said the “pernicious claim” that the US policy of engagement with China was a “dismal failure” was allegedly based on the
premise that the US can successfully transform China.
Toward the end of last year, the outgoing US administration continued to impose visa and economic restrictions on Chinese officials and companies, adding dozens of Chinese enterprises to its trade blacklist out of national security and other concerns.
“That’s very unusual in the US during this transition period for an outgoing president to be making major policy decisions,” David Dollar, senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center of the Brookings Institution, told China Daily, alluding to the US Electoral College having confirmed
Biden’s victory in the Nov 3 election.
Throughout the year, there had been an incessant flow of measures seeking to decouple the two economies, in addition to rhetoric reeking of the Cold War.
For Cui Tiankai, the longest-serving Chinese ambassador to the US, a new year always comes with new hope for the two countries.
“The year 2020 has been a tough year, and … we are wishing more than ever that 2021, the year of the bull in the Chinese zodiac, would be a truly bullish year,” Cui said at the virtual US- China Business Council 2020 annual gala on Dec 9.