How the Snowden affair might end up helping US-China relations

The reason Americans and Chinese have become so nostalgic for the great Nixon/Kissinger-Mao Zedong/Zhou Enlai meeting in 1972 is because that was the last time Sino-US relations experienced a dramatic breakthrough. Now, most policy wonks on both sides sense we need another jolt to kick the way we interact into a higher gear, but nobody quite knows how to accomplish that.

When he met US President Barack Obama recently at Sunnylands, Chinese President Xi Jinping lofted the idea of a “new great power relationship”. But then, the cybersecurity issue that the Obama administration had already put on the front burner - especially the cybertheft of private corporate intellectual property - got written even larger by l’affaire Snowden.

This gave Chinese nationalists a nice opportunity to mount a high horse and even the score a bit, as the Ministry of Defence spokesman, Yang Yujun, did when he defiantly proclaimed: “The Prism-gate affair is itself like a prism that reveals the true face and hypocritical conduct regarding internet security of the country concerned”, which by “making baseless accusations against other countries shows double standards and will be no help for peace and security in cyberspace”.

To many, the incident came as a real setback to any hopes for a major new diplomatic breakthrough.

And yet, there could be a bright side to this story. With the world’s only superpower - to which China has long looked with a complex mix of admiration and envy along with resentment and animosity - now unexpectedly forced to eat a super-sized portion of humble pie, and the Chinese enjoying a rare moment of schadenfreude, the playing field may have suddenly levelled a bit.