How to Manage the World’s Most Important Relationship
By Zhou Bo
May 13, 2024According to the National Security Strategy that the Biden administration issued in 2022, the United States faces a “decisive decade” in its rivalry with China. Chinese officials have come to believe the same thing. As Washington has grown ever more voluble in its desire to compete with Beijing, the Chinese government has turned from surprise to protest to an avowed determination to fight back. In Beijing’s view, the United States fears losing its primacy and forces this struggle on China. In turn, China has no choice but must “dare to fight,” as the report of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party insisted.
Such intensifying confrontation is lamentable but not inevitable. Beltway analysts have greatly exaggerated China’s supposed threat to Western democratic systems and international order. In recent years, U.S. leaders have cast China as a revisionist power and invoked the specter of a global clash between democracy and autocracy. But democracy’s troubles in the twenty-first century have little to do with China. According to a 2023 report from Freedom House, liberal democracy around the world has been in steady decline for 17 years. That is not China’s doing. China has not promoted its socialist values abroad. It has not been directly involved in any war since 1979. Despite its partnership with Russia, it has not supplied lethal aid to the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
Indeed, far from being a revisionist power seeking to upend the world, China upholds the status quo. It has joined almost all the international regimes and institutions established by the U.S.-led West after World War II. As the world’s top trader and the largest beneficiary of globalization, China is deeply embedded in the existing international order and wishes to safeguard that system. Despite disagreements, tensions, and even disputes, China maintains robust ties with the West; neither side could countenance the kind of severing of relations that has occurred between the West and Russia since the invasion of Ukraine.
China has advanced new institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the multilateral BRICS grouping, and the Belt and Road Initiative to build global infrastructure, all of which could change the international political and economic landscape. But these shifts would serve to reform, rather than replace, the international order, making it more equitable and elevating the interests of many less prosperous countries.
And yet if one listens to the policymaking establishments in the West, one can hear the sound of lines being drawn. A refrain one hears often today suggests that the world has entered a new cold war. It is still too early to judge whether the rivalry between China and the United States really resembles the one between the Soviet Union and the United States—and, indeed, if it will continue to remain cold. But the analogy fails to capture a critical distinction: unlike the Cold War, this rivalry is between two individual titans rather than two confrontational camps. Washington cannot rally an implacably anti-Chinese alliance, just as Beijing cannot lead a bloc that is uniformly hostile to the United States. Most U.S. allies have China as their largest trading partner. Like all other countries in an increasingly multipolar world, they will pick and choose positions on specific issues, not blindly take the United States’ side. Washington has enjoyed modest success in rallying allies and partners in arrangements meant to contain China, such as the Indo-Pacific security partnership known as the Quad and the military partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States known as AUKUS. But these groupings do not amount to much: they look like a few tiny islands in a vast ocean. In many parts of the world, especially in Africa, the United States has already lost to China, which helps local economies without delivering moralizing bromides about governance and values.
But those ties do not represent the formation of an anti-Western, pro-Chinese camp. Relations between China and the United States cannot simply be defined by “extreme competition,” as U.S. President Joe Biden once declared. Instead, they combine competition and cooperation in an ever-shifting balance. At a time when Washington is focused on competition with Beijing, it is useless for Beijing to insist on cooperation when such calls fall on deaf ears. What both sides can agree on is a fundamental redline—not letting their competition slide into outright confrontation. To that end, China and the United States must remain willing to talk to help avoid misunderstandings and miscalculations—and to reassure an anxious world.
TRUST BUT TALK
Unfortunately, Beijing and Washington have talked to each other much less in recent years than the two superpowers did during the latter half of the Cold War. Back then, both sides remained committed to dialogue even if they were wary of each other. When U.S. President Ronald Reagan used a famous Russian proverb—“trust but verify”—after signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, he was politely suggesting that he did not, in fact, trust the Soviets, but that that would not stop him from entering into negotiations and agreements with them. The same logic still applies: trust is not necessarily a precondition for dialogue or interaction. In the absence of trust, the Soviet Union and the United States still managed to cooperate in a number of areas, including arms control, the eradication of smallpox, and the joint exploration of space for peaceful purposes.
If “trust but verify” characterized the later years of the Cold War, a modified version of the proverb is the right paradigm for China and the United States today: “trust but talk.” The relative bonhomie of the Obama administration, when the countries held wide-ranging talks on bilateral, regional, and global issues, is unlikely to return any time soon. The hard-line policies of the Trump administration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022 put a definitive end to that era. Biden has retained many of Trump’s positions on China, and a bipartisan consensus has emerged in Washington that the United States must get tougher on its closest geopolitical peer.
Talks, however, have now haltingly resumed, notably including the military-to-military communications that were severed after Pelosi’s Taiwan visit. They have included phone calls between high-level officials, the U.S.-Chinese Defense Policy Coordination Talks between defense officials, discussions relating to the U.S.-Chinese Military Maritime Consultative Agreement about maritime and aviation disputes, and a new channel of communication between Chinese and American theater commanders. Such talks represent a good start, but they are only a start. Senior military officers should visit with one another more regularly, both sides should use the hotline that was established in 2008 for crisis management more often, and they should encourage direct communications between pilots and sailors to help avoid dangerous close encounters in the air and at sea.
ACCIDENTS AND GUARDRAILS
Few in Beijing and Washington disagree about the need to establish guardrails or confidence-building measures to make conflict less likely. One area that produces considerable friction and tension are the waters and airspace in the South China Sea, where China’s territorial claims are seldom respected. U.S. aircraft regularly conduct close surveillance and reconnaissance in China’s exclusive economic zones. U.S. naval vessels sail through waters off the islands and rocks in the South China Sea over which China claims sovereignty. In the Pentagon’s latest report on China’s military, the United States documented over 180 instances of Chinese aircraft conducting “coercive and risky” intercepts of U.S. aircraft in the region between the fall of 2021 and the fall of 2023, a measure of growing tensions.
This dynamic will likely persist, as neither side is willing to back down. The Americans want to have technical discussions in the hope of making accidents and potential skirmishes less likely. The Chinese, for their part, find such conversations a bit odd. They are focused more broadly on their security, interpreting the U.S. Navy’s operations in China’s exclusive economic zones and maneuvers in the South China Sea as reckless provocations. Put another way, the Americans may want to ask Chinese ships that are monitoring U.S. ships to maintain a particular distance; the Chinese would respond by saying that the Americans would be safest if they weren’t there at all.
China in principle agrees to guardrails proposed by the United States, but Beijing fears that such guardrails are meant to freeze in place a status quo that favors Washington. Obviously, the overall military strength of the PLA lags behind that of the U.S. military. But in China’s vicinity, the gap between the PLA and the U.S. military is closing, as Chinese military capacities have grown by leaps and bounds in recent decades. The United States fears that China wants to drive it out of the western Pacific. As a result, Washington is investing more militarily in the region and calling on its allies and partners to gang up on China. This in turn irks Beijing and makes the situation more volatile.
Neither Beijing nor Washington wants an accident, let alone a confrontation. In 2020, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense and the U.S. Department of Defense convened the first Crisis Communication Working Group, meeting by video teleconference to discuss how to prevent a crisis. Such a working group represents a step in the right direction. Were an accident in the South China Sea to occur, it might spur nationalist outrage in both countries, but it is hard to believe that it would trigger a full-blown war. The deadly collision between a Chinese fighter and an American spy plane in 2001 didn’t prove to be the end of the world; the crisis produced by the fatal incident was resolved in 11 days. Skillful diplomacy prevailed and both sides saved face.
DIRE STRAIT
The only issue that could drag China and the United States into a full-blown conflict is the dispute over Taiwan. Currently, a dangerous cycle is unfolding. The United States fears a potential attack from the mainland and is speeding up arms sales and expanding training and personnel exchanges to boost Taiwan’s defense and turn the island into a “porcupine.” An angry but increasingly confident China has responded by sending more warplanes to routinely fly over the median line in the Taiwan Strait, which previously acted as a buffer between the sides.
Many Western observers suggest that Taiwan will be the next Ukraine. And yet U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said at the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2023 that a conflict with China was neither imminent nor inevitable. A war over Taiwan will not come to pass as long as Beijing believes peaceful reunification with the island is still possible. If it suspects that the prospect of peaceful reunification is exhausted forever, then its calculus will change. But there is no indication that Beijing has drawn such a conclusion even after Taiwan elected William Lai of the Democratic Progressive Party as the Taiwanese leader in January. (Lai has in the past described himself as a “political worker for Taiwanese independence.”) In a meeting with former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou in April, Xi said it was imperative to promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations, adhering to the one-China principle, the notion that China and Taiwan remain formally one country.
Taiwan is the only issue that could drag China and America into a full-blown conflict.
China has never announced a timetable for reunification. As a proportion of GDP, China’s defense budget remains low—below two percent, where it has been for decades. That figure speaks volumes about China’s confidence and about Beijing’s assessment of its relationship with Washington. China is exercising restraint. Pelosi’s visit to the island triggered Chinese military exercises around Taiwan that involved firing live ammunition and missiles. But Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen met with Pelosi’s successor, Kevin McCarthy, in California in April 2023, and China’s subsequent exercises were much more subdued.
Beijing is also trying its best to win the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese people. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, around 1.5 million Taiwanese worked and lived on the mainland—a figure that equals around six percent of the Taiwanese population. It seems that they did not mind living in a totally different political system as long as it provided them with better economic opportunities than they had in Taiwan. In September 2023, China unveiled a plan in which Beijing would make it easier for Taiwanese people to live and work in Fujian Province (across the strait from the island), including by allowing them to buy property, promising equal treatment for Taiwanese students enrolled in public schools, and linking the Chinese port city of Xiamen with the Taiwanese island of Kinmen, which are just a few miles apart, via a bridge and gas and electricity connections.
Taiwan’s status remains a very sensitive issue for Beijing, something that Washington should never take lightly. For peace to prevail in the Taiwan Strait, the United States should reassure China that it has no intention of straying from its professed commitment to the “one China” policy. U.S. leaders have refused to enter into direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine despite the gravity of the Russian transgression. Equally, they should consider war with China a redline that cannot be crossed.
NOT FRIENDS, BUT NOT ENEMIES
Beyond these areas of friction, there remains plenty of room for collaboration. Three areas are particularly noteworthy: cyberspace, outer space, and artificial intelligence. As the strongest countries on earth, China and the United States should take the lead in crafting rules and regulations in these domains. In cyberwarfare, countries should refrain from striking critical information networks, such as military command-and-control systems. Beijing and Washington should exchange a list of sensitive targets that should be considered out of bounds and should not be attacked in any circumstance. To avoid an arms race in outer space, they should agree to negotiate a binding treaty that would commit countries to not placing weapons in outer space and encourage deliberations on rules and responsible behavior. At their meeting in California in November 2023, Biden and Xi agreed to establish an intergovernmental dialogue on AI. Even if it is not possible to prevent AI from being used for military purposes, China and the United States should at least lead in reducing risks related to AI-enabled military systems. In this regard, nothing is more important than ensuring absolute human control over nuclear command-and-control systems.
Another important area for cooperation, much as it was during the Cold War, is in limiting the risks posed by nuclear weapons. But discussions about nuclear disarmament between China and the United States won’t happen in the foreseeable future. China’s nuclear inferiority to the United States makes Beijing reluctant to join bilateral or multilateral talks on nuclear disarmament. Currently, there are no high-level talks in the nuclear field planned between the two sides.
But China and the United States have cooperated in this field in the past. After India and Pakistan successfully tested nuclear bombs in 1998, China and the United States jointly condemned the tests and reached an agreement on “nontargeting” of nuclear weapons; that is, they pledged not to target nuclear weapons at each other. In 2000, the five major nuclear powers (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) all agreed to do so. The logical next step would be to issue mutual “no first use” pledges, promising never to initiate a nuclear attack. China already maintains such a policy, but the United States does not, although the current policy, as described by the Biden administration, comes awfully close: the United States will only “consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” Committing to no first use does not exclude nuclear retaliation, so it would not neutralize the deterrent power of nuclear weapons.
Both sides can agree on a fundamental redline—not letting their competition slide into outright confrontation.
The narrowing power gap between China and the United States may intensify their competition, but it also means they have more reason to confront shared challenges. For example, in the Middle East, Beijing and Washington now have a similar stance on two major issues: finding a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. As the Israeli war in Gaza continues, the two-state solution may look like a fanciful dream. But the war has led more people to realize that the status quo is unsustainable. No war will last forever. Beijing and Washington should work together in making the two-state solution the paramount principle guiding any future road maps that sketch the way to peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
Beijing and Washington must also work together to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. On this issue, China has a major role to play: it enjoys Iran’s trust. China has given Iran an economic lifeline in the face of U.S. sanctions by buying the country’s oil. Beijing should make it clear to Tehran that although it is entitled to develop nuclear power for peaceful uses, it must not develop nuclear weapons. Doing so would very likely spur a preemptive strike by Israel or even a joint strike by Israel and the United States. Going nuclear will also surely invite severe UN sanctions on Iran—and China, despite being Iran’s largest trading partner, would have to abide by them.
As great powers, China and the United States may never become great friends. But they can resist becoming enemies. Level heads and cautious optimism will help maintain the stability of the world’s most important relationship. Fatalism and recklessness will only drive the countries toward a conflict that neither wants.