Sino-American Contention in the Era of Western Decline
Remarks to Chinese Attendees at the Cambridge Executive Leadership Program
Ambassador Chas
W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
By Video, 11 July 2025
Every so often, the world order is refashioned. We are in the midst of yet another turning point in world affairs. It is said that we are witnessing changes not seen in a century. But history now moves faster than that – fast enough to give us vertigo.
Eighty years ago, World War II ended with a nuclear bang. A quasi-feudal order succeeded it. During the Cold War the security, ideological complexion, and freedom of maneuver of the world’s nations depended on the degree of their alignment with or against one or both of two overlords – Moscow or Washington. This bipolar regime lasted forty years. When it ended, only one superpower was left standing: the United States. Now America’s efforts to preserve global primacy are near the final stages of failure. The thirty-year-long unilateral U.S. command of the post-Cold War world order is disintegrating as new constellations of power emerge.
I want to speak with you today about what this may mean for my country, for yours, and for the world. It pains me to do so. I do not enjoy chronicling the demise of so many things I value and believe in.
It is easier to describe what America and others are demolishing than what we are creating. World orders, like isotopes, have a half-life. The rules and institutions created after World War II are in an advanced state of decay, their power and hence their utility much diminished. Domestic constitutional orders seem to have half-lives too.
Chinese history suggests that dynasties – that is to say: constitutional orders – last until bureaucratic sclerosis, corruption, and decadence enfeeble them. After at most 250 years, they fall to domestic revolt, are extinguished by wars with foreigners, or, less frequently, reinvent and reincarnate themselves. I am skeptical of predictive theories of history, but I can’t help recalling this one as I contemplate the present condition of my country and our world.
The Sources of American and Western Decline
Benjamin Franklin famously told his fellow Americans that what he and the other founding fathers of the United States had created at Philadelphia in 1787 was “a republic, if you can keep it.” The American republic aspired to exemplify the freethinking values of the European Enlightenment. These values are now everywhere under attack.
Western societies seem to be entering a prerevolutionary condition in which charismatic leaders backed by personality cults repudiate the moral constraints, civic virtues, and respect for due process that once legitimized governance. No one expects those in power to speak honestly or to be able to do anything well. Media manipulation and political disenchantment – bolstered by widespread public dissatisfaction and anomie – fuel assertive populism, demagoguery, and political polarization. Backlash is inevitable. Everyone holds government in low esteem. Neither the Left nor the Right accepts the legitimacy of the existing system as it perceives it. Both concur that governments and the elites that manage them are hostile to the values each espouses, unresponsive to popular opinion, corrupt, and incompetent.
The increasingly unequal distribution of income and wealth in Western societies and the unchecked power of an ever more privileged plutocracy outrage the Left. The presence of foreign immigrants, the abandonment of traditional religious values by elites, and the fussily intolerant politically correctness of the “woke” enrage the Right. In this contentious atmosphere, elections produce leaders whose policies are volatile and short-sighted, directed at supporting ideological and special rather than national interests, and often seriously self-destructive. Current US China policies reflect all these dysfunctions.
Who Is to Blame and for What?
Americans, like Chinese, like to blame foreigners rather than ourselves for our problems and anxieties. One way to do that is to ‘mirror-image’ – to attribute our own faults and misbehavior to a foreign scapegoat. So, Americans call out China, accusing it of:
· aiming at global domination,
· seeking to impose its ideology and political system on the world,
· pursuing an exclusionary regional sphere of influence,
· competing unfairly and engaging in economic bullying and financial predation,
· conspiring to monopolize employment for itself and to deindustrialize others,
· acting as though ‘might makes right’ and without due deference to international law,
· cheating on treaties and agreements or simply ignoring them,
· carrying out extensive espionage, and
· preparing to conquer Taiwan and thereby threatening the Pacific Asian status quo.
Meanwhile, China, of course, accuses the United States of malign behavior on almost all of these issues plus others – like invading the sovereignty of other countries with regime-change operations. If it is any consolation to Chinese accused of such villainy, the United States has not spared Europe from analogous charges, officially denouncing it for “[developing] into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.”[1] For their part, Europeans retort that this is a good description of what is happening in America.
Meanwhile, the United States and China are engaged in an economic war of attrition whose effects are only beginning to be felt by both sides. As they become more apparent, pressure on both to reach a mutual accommodation will increase.
I see no reason to take a stand on which side is more self-centered than the other or more at fault in these disputes. Doing so would just reinforce the American shouting match that has replaced constructive dialogue with China and other countries. As the Shanghai Communiqué noted, “there are essential differences between China and the United States in their social systems and foreign policies.” That is a fact that did not obstruct cooperation in the past and should not do so now.
The State of Sino-American Relations
The successful management of international relations is, however, not aided by diatribe. It requires respectful empathy for the other side’s perspective even if one fundamentally disagrees with it. At the official level, empathy is now almost completely lacking.
Diplomacy is how states pursue (and reduce the risks of pursuing) adjustments in relations with other states by measures short of war or other forms of coercion. But in recent years, both the United States and China have equated “diplomacy” with a willingness to meet to exchange formulaic talking points that pander to chauvinistic domestic opinion. In these encounters, the meeting is the message. Neither side seeks to address the concerns of the other or to explain its own concrete objectives in terms that the other can understand or accept. This is “diplomacy as spin,” not problem solving.
Washington has vetoed efforts to adjust the Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, and regional development banks – to meet the demands of a global economy no longer dominated by the West. This has encouraged China to join with others in creating new lending agencies – like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank. These complement and supplement the financial institutions earlier sponsored by the United States. Now, out of necessity, China and others have reacted to American sabotage of the World Trade Organization (WTO) by building regional alternatives to it.
The American people may not know the details, but they sense that U.S. statecraft has lost vision, competence, and traction. In the United States and many other Western countries there is a widening gap between the views of politicians captive to idées fixes and special interests and those of ordinary folk. The polls routinely show that voters often want policies that are quite different from those that have taken hold in Washington and other Western capitals.
In the case of the United States, on many issues, there is also distressingly little difference between the two mainline political parties. The late Julius Nyerere, who established a one-party state in Tanzania, once remarked that: “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them."
Both American factions have come to see China as an adversary whose growth and power must be curtailed. They have convinced many but not all Americans of this. They echo each other in claiming that opposing China is how to preserve American politico-military primacy, reverse American deindustrialization, and restore lost technological leadership. American antagonism to China is likely to persist until the U.S. government and electorate realize that the costs and infeasibility of accomplishing these objectives make it ruinous to pursue them.
Let me briefly review these elements of American fantasy foreign policy, beginning with politico-military supremacy.
Politico-Military Primacy
The United States retains military primacy at the global level, but it has lost it in the Taiwan Strait. The American establishment is beginning to realize that if the U.S. armed forces come to Taiwan’s aid in a war over the island’s political status, they could suffer losses that would finish off the United States as a global power. For its part, China knows that a war with America would almost certainly cost it much of the progress toward national rejuvenation that it has made in recent decades. Whatever such a war’s outcome, it would have no winners. It would not just destroy Taiwan’s prosperity and democracy but create dangerous new predicaments for all concerned.
If the war ended in Taiwan’s independence, Chinese nationalism would force Beijing to rearm and try again to conquer it. If it ended in Taiwan’s occupation by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the People’s Armed Police (PAP), they should expect intermittent violent resistance from some of the island’s inhabitants. It took Japan more than three decades to pacify Taiwan. The Kuomintang needed twenty-five years to suppress local opposition to its control of the island. Reintegrating the severed parts of divided countries is not easy. Even Hong Kong – peacefully reunited with the mainland – eventually suffered anarchic resistance to its new status.
In short, even if the PLA is now capable of taking Taiwan by force, the Chinese government has every reason to continue to pursue reconciliation with Taipei gradually and by peaceful means. To accomplish this, it must inspire the people of Taiwan to desire a common Chinese as well as Taiwanese identity. Setting an ever more attractive example – coaxing change, not imposing it – is the only practical path to this. Taking Taiwan by force would not achieve the ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.’ It could instead poison it. For reasons that have almost nothing to do with the United States, the smooth reintegration of Taiwan with the rest of China demands that Beijing cultivate not just wealth and power, but a reputation for other attractions and qualities worth emulating. In this regard, there is much to be learned from the Confucian tradition, which favors dialogue from demonstrated moral excellence over coercion from a position of strength as a means of influencing other states and peoples.
Meanwhile, the United States is not what it was and does not know what it is becoming.
Economic Warfare and its Consequences
This brings me to the issue of reindustrializing America. The current U.S. trade and technology wars, tariff tantrums, and efforts to bully others into “buying American” rather than Chinese goods and services rest on claims that they will somehow –magically – result in explosive growth in manufacturing jobs in the United States. They will not. They will instead accelerate the very trends that have reduced the competitiveness of the American economy, expanded its trade deficits, and produced the popular angst that is now destroying the American republic.
Current trends include the progressive concentration of capital in an economy dominated by oligopolies, regulatory capture, administered prices, financial engineering, and share buybacks rather than productive investment or labor-management partnership. In ever more sectors of the economy, growth in productivity has slowed. Rent-seeking financial engineering is no substitute for entrepreneurship.
The shifting patterns of employment about which Americans complain have been driven less by foreign trade than by the substitution of capital and technology for labor. In 1925, 26 percent of Americans worked on the farm. Mechanization has since raised farm output tenfold while reducing the people engaged in it to a mere 1.5 percent of the total American workforce. Thirty percent of Americans worked in factories in 1925. Automation has since reduced such employment to 8 percent while enabling a more than six-fold increase in industrial production. (The United States currently manufactures more goods than Japan, Germany, and south Korea combined.) The same forces at work in America are at work in the Chinese economy. China is now by far the world’s largest manufacturer, but from 2013 to 2020 increases in productivity from automation caused China to shed twenty million factory jobs – more than the entire American industrial workforce.
In the United States, as in China, the most enterprising and innovative sectors of the economy have been and remain small and medium-sized businesses. Such businesses are thinly financed and poorly equipped to cope with the uncertainties produced by wild changes in taxes on imports, supply chain disruptions, tightening embargoes on high-tech manufactures, unpredictable deportations of parts of the U.S. labor force, and the inflation these factors inevitably stoke. The same is true of American farmers losing foreign buyers for their products due to the newly perceived unreliability of the United States as a supplier of foodstuffs.
Many small service and farm businesses will not survive Washington’s drive to decouple from globalization. By contrast, oligopolies are better at weathering economic chaos. As they take over and absorb smaller firms, domestic competition will atrophy, innovation will lessen, and the financial and corporate plutocracy will capture even more of the nation’s wealth. All this will come at the expense of the American middle class and the poor.
Chinese will also suffer, even if the pain they experience does not match that imposed on Americans. The difficulties of ordinary Chinese will be magnified by China’s still-inadequate social safety net. But China now has a domestic economy that is far more market- and competition-driven than America’s has become. With the right government policies, this will make the Chinese economy more adaptable and resilient than America’s. Some Chinese businesses will fail but others will find new customers in China or in emerging markets overseas. Programs like the Belt and Road Initiative will help them leverage rising prosperity in foreign countries to their benefit.
U.S. bans on technology exports to China stimulate compensatory Chinese innovation and domestic production. Meanwhile, they deprive American companies of the sales revenues necessary to support research and development or to invest in expanded production. Export controls thus reduce both innovation and economic growth in the United States at the same time as Chinese investment in education – especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – powers China ahead.
As the saying goes, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” But an ebb tide lowers them. As Shakespeare aptly wrote:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Wars of attrition, whether economic or military, are unproductive. Their outcomes are uncertain. Over time their costs accumulate. Such wars are best avoided, but the United States and China are now caught up in one. We cannot know the extent of the damage our current economic confrontations will entail.
Competition in Science and Technology
This is as true of the technology war we have embarked upon as it is for the erratic tit-for-tat exchange of tariffs and export controls now underway. Imprudent cuts in support for scientific research and technological development in the United States will accelerate the demise of U.S. technological leadership and long-term competitiveness. The damage is already being exacerbated by a “brain drain,” as scientists seek greener pastures outside the intensifying scientific drought in the United States.
China is the beneficiary of more than a few refugees from the U.S. government’s self-destructive attacks on science and higher education, but it is by no means the only country to gain. Talent is now fleeing the United States to many other countries, much as scientists and engineers fled German fascism and persecution ninety years ago. This exodus will enrich the countries where these intellectuals resettle. It may even be good for science at the global level. But it promises to do long-term harm to American socioeconomic wellbeing. If the U.S. government continues to oppose the collaboration of its universities and scholars with those in China or other countries whose economic competition it fears, the harm will be all the greater.
Alternatives to Self-Sabotage
The fact that America is engaged in self-sabotage does not mean that China is doing everything right. China has plenty of problems with which it must grapple, and it is having a tough time doing so. You, as rising stars in the Chinese meritocracy, know these problems and their workable solutions far better than I. It is up to you rather than foreigners to propose policies to deal with them.
I am aware of far too many problems in my own country to have any inclination to preach to you about yours. I would like to see the United States re-embrace the principles on which it was founded. The preamble to the U.S. Constitution remains the best statement of the purposes of government ever penned. Let me quote it. It says:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
These words have lost none of their perspicacity or pertinence. But justice and domestic tranquility in the United States are now in jeopardy, as is the general welfare. Restoring the eroding liberties of Americans will not be easy. Nor will devising policies to serve both American and Chinese interests amidst a shifting balance of capabilities and a newly emerging world order. But we must try.
Toward Coexistence and Renewed Cooperation
In the end, neither the United States nor China can afford a break with the other. This is not just because cooperation between the two countries is essential to deal with planetwide problems like human-induced climate change and environmental degradation as well as pandemics and pestilences. The enormous interdependence we developed over the past forty-five years shows how much we need each other going forward. The progress China has made over the past five decades would not have been possible without a prosperous and scientifically advanced America having opened to China. The future of the United States will, in turn, be determined in large measure by its relationship with an increasingly prosperous and scientifically advanced China.
Rivalry – a competition in which the participants strive to excel each other – is both compatible with peaceful coexistence and an aid to progress. In contrast, adversarial antagonism risks harm not just to those engaged in it but to others.
A return to Sino-American cooperation would benefit both countries. It would also allay the anxieties of our respective partners and friends about collateral damage to their wellbeing from mutually destructive Sino-American confrontation.
A hostile relationship serves the interests of neither the United States nor China. It risks unnecessary damage to both. Together, Chinese and Americans have the capacity to enable a transition to a more just, peaceful, and prosperous world. Doing this is a common responsibility. It is also the only way either country can be secure in its wealth and power and domestically at ease. In the end, notwithstanding the turmoil of the moment, the same factors that brought the United States and China together five decades ago can do so again.
[1] Samuel Samson, Senior Advisor for the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) under President Donald J. Trump and Secretary Marco Rubio
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