Bilateral relations between China and the United States have reached a historical turning point. Economic cooperation and trade, the “ballast stone” that stabilized bilateral relations, have loosened, and bilateral relations risk plunging into a vicious cycle of attacks and retaliation. Furthermore, both countries are mulling grand development plans with far-reaching significance.
The Sino-US strategic competition is likely to reshape the global political and economic landscape, international system and geopolitics.
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Sino-US relationship can be divided into two periods — the three decades before the official establishment of bilateral diplomatic relations in 1979 and the four decades after. Now Sino-US relations are at the starting point for the next 30 years — from now to 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China when the country is expected to accomplish the goal of building a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious.
While China is embarking on a journey toward realizing that centenary goal, the US is faced with the challenge of restoring US leadership, which has taken a battering in recent years.
Considering the two countries’ development and transformation trajectories, the strategic competition between the two sides is likely to become even more intense over the coming years. Some in Washington have embraced the “hundred-year marathon” notion, which hypes up China’s economic and social development plans, thus creating a stronger sense of urgency to contain China’s rise than ever before. It is likely that the China policy of the US will only become more sensitive and tougher and its containment and suppression efforts will intensify in the years to come.
However, the evolution and consequences of the competition are to a great extent dependent on the interactions between the two countries and the choices they make. The strategic interactions between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War offer a point of reference. Studies show that during the Cold War, the two superpowers reached a consensus on some tacit rules that regulated and restricted their behaviors.
These unwritten, ambiguous and unfixed rules of things that ought to be done and things that ought to be avoided — the US scholar Graham Allison called them “primitive rules of prudence” — included not using nuclear weapons under any circumstances, except as a last resort, respecting each other’s core interests and spheres of influence, avoiding direct use of violence against each other’s troops, and imposing restrictions on strategic strikes between each other’s allies and proxies.
In addition to the aforementioned unwritten rules, the US and the Soviet Union signed an array of agreements aimed at regulating each other’s behavior. In military control, the two countries signed the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems and the Interim Agreement on Certain Measures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (May 1972), and the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (June 1973), among other pacts.
In crisis management, following two rounds of negotiations, the two sides signed the Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents On and Over the High Seas, or INCSEA, in 1972.
These treaties and agreements, although not fully complied with, played a critical role in prescribing the two countries’ behavior during the Cold War.
After 1972, the number of incidents on and over the high seas between the two countries dropped by 60 percent from the previous level. During the 1973 Third Middle East Crisis, officers and soldiers on the US and Soviet Union warships strictly followed the INCSEA when the two sides’ warships were in extreme proximity to each other, thereby reducing the risk of a conflict arising from an unintended incident.
As strategic competition further intensifies, China and the US, too, should establish a set of written and tacit competition rules that clarify their respective bottom lines and red lines and regulate and restrict each other’s behaviors. In the meantime, the two countries should strengthen their mechanisms for communication, such as giving full play to the role of heads of state and government dialogue mechanisms and accelerating the establishment of a crisis management mechanism.
These measures could to a great extent prevent a head-on confrontation between the two countries, since their competition if not well managed could lead to the escalation of tension, conflicts or even war.
How to manage the strategic competition between China and the US not only concerns the two countries but also the whole world. Looking ahead, China and the US should strengthen dialogue, establish a new framework and work out new rules on how to manage their strategic competition.
The year 2021 is a milestone for Sino-US relations — the US has a new administration and China will usher in the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, and start the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25). About five decades ago, the pingpong diplomacy and Henry Kissinger’s ice-breaking secret trip to Beijing started the process for the normalization of bilateral relations. How Sino-US relations evolve in the new era is a question that is worth joint exploration of the two countries’ strategists.
The author is deputy director and a research professor of the Institute of US Studies at the Beijing-based China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.