Post by account_disabled on Mar 6, 2024 3:08:08 GMT -5
These were great and glorious exercises in event planning, but they failed to prevent trade war, technological war, and the first skirmishes of a new cold war. Now it appears that both Yellen and Blinken would like nothing more than to return to this failed approach. The same goes for China. Li Qiang, the new Chinese premier, borrowed an elliptical page from one of his predecessors, Wen Jiabao, and spoke wistfully after meeting Yellen about seeing “rainbows” after a round of “wind and rain.” This deeply problematic relationship needs much more than a “floor” to avoid a new round of conflict escalation. That's the least Biden and Xi expect from each other as responsible stewards of a fragile world. But without reinforcement, it could prove surprisingly unstable. The big February balloon fiasco is an example of how quickly things can get out of control with the slightest technical problem. This precarious state of affairs is an inevitable consequence of a major shift in the priorities of managing US-China relations: a long-standing emphasis on the economy and trade has now been replaced by concerns about defense and security.
Economics and commerce, where relationship conflicts are evaluated through the lens of hard data, security concerns are judged more on the basis of unsubstantiated presumptions of antagonistic behavior. China's dual use Job Function Email Database of advanced technologies, blurring the distinction between commercial and military purposes, is a good example. The US assumes that China will weaponize artificial intelligence just as it assumes that Huawei poses a backdoor threat to 5G infrastructure or that TikTok will use proprietary data collected from young US users for nefarious purposes. China operates under the same paranoid mindset, assuming that Washington's trade and technology sanctions are aimed at “total containment, encirclement and suppression,” to quote Xi at this year's Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. With both nations operating on evidence-free presumptions, the dangers of further escalation, especially in the face of imminent risks to technology investment and strategic materials exports, cannot be ignored.
Old-style engagement is ill-equipped to deal with these risks. In the end, that's based on leader-to-leader chemistry, which is always vulnerable to the tenuous interplay between internal politics and fragile human egos' need to save face. The current conflict between the United States and China has survived that approach. For this reason, I favor the establishment of a US-China secretariat as the centerpiece of a new architecture of Sino-US engagement: a permanent organization, composed of equal parts US and Chinese professionals, located in a jurisdiction neutral with a broad mandate for policy development, problem solving and conflict resolution. Your focus would be on a full-time, forward-thinking approach to relationship management and dispute detection. A secretariat would shift the relationship framework from the personalization of endless diplomacy toward a more resilient institutionalization of collaborative problem-solving.
Economics and commerce, where relationship conflicts are evaluated through the lens of hard data, security concerns are judged more on the basis of unsubstantiated presumptions of antagonistic behavior. China's dual use Job Function Email Database of advanced technologies, blurring the distinction between commercial and military purposes, is a good example. The US assumes that China will weaponize artificial intelligence just as it assumes that Huawei poses a backdoor threat to 5G infrastructure or that TikTok will use proprietary data collected from young US users for nefarious purposes. China operates under the same paranoid mindset, assuming that Washington's trade and technology sanctions are aimed at “total containment, encirclement and suppression,” to quote Xi at this year's Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. With both nations operating on evidence-free presumptions, the dangers of further escalation, especially in the face of imminent risks to technology investment and strategic materials exports, cannot be ignored.
Old-style engagement is ill-equipped to deal with these risks. In the end, that's based on leader-to-leader chemistry, which is always vulnerable to the tenuous interplay between internal politics and fragile human egos' need to save face. The current conflict between the United States and China has survived that approach. For this reason, I favor the establishment of a US-China secretariat as the centerpiece of a new architecture of Sino-US engagement: a permanent organization, composed of equal parts US and Chinese professionals, located in a jurisdiction neutral with a broad mandate for policy development, problem solving and conflict resolution. Your focus would be on a full-time, forward-thinking approach to relationship management and dispute detection. A secretariat would shift the relationship framework from the personalization of endless diplomacy toward a more resilient institutionalization of collaborative problem-solving.