Between the trade war and coronavirus, US-China relations are becoming more toxic

During the Sars outbreak and after the Sichuan earthquake, US administrations reached out to China. During the Covid-19 crisis, however, the two countries have been playing the blame game as hawks push for economic decoupling

Cary Huang

Published: 8:00pm, 17 Mar 2020

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Viruses and epidemics are enemies of the entire human race, and nations should be making joint efforts and cooperating to fight them, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, ideology or political belief.

Covid-19 is obviously one such enemy, given the pain and suffering it has so far inflicted on people across the globe. World powers like the United States and China have a clear opportunity to unite and fight the coronavirus pandemic – while also overcoming the escalating rivalry between them.

There are many precedents from recent memory. For instance, following the deadly Sichuan earthquake in 2008, then US president George W. Bush immediately offered to help China, including sharing detailed images of the devastated region taken by spy satellites and dispatching the military to airlift critically needed relief supplies to the disaster zone.

When severe acute respiratory syndrome broke out in 2002 and 2003, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention already had a substantial presence in China. American public health experts had built relationships with their Chinese counterparts and had instituted procedures that could be called upon.

However, such empathy and cooperation have been elusive during the Covid-19 outbreak. Instead, the coronavirus has become a new point of friction between the US and China, despite indications of improved relations after the signing of a phase-one trade agreement in January.

Since the outbreak, the two countries have been playing the blame game. Early in the crisis, Washington criticised Beijing’s reluctance to accept its offer to send health experts to China, though some experts were eventually allowed to join the World Health Organisation delegation.

Later, China criticised the US for being one of the first countries to impose restrictions on travellers from China, before Beijing also restricted travel from overseas.

More recently, US officials and politicians, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have taken to calling the novel coronavirus the “Wuhan virus” and painting it as a Chinese export. On Friday, the US government summoned Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai to the State Department to protest against Beijing’s suggestion that the US military brought the coronavirus to China.

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The global health crisis is evidently hurting the fragile truce between Beijing and Washington, as officials fight a daily war of words on various issues.

For sure, the pandemic will seriously affect the implementation of the phase one trade deal which took effect in February, and which is critical to ensuring smooth bilateral relations as the US presidential election gears up.

The epidemic has forced a severe disruption to economic activity in China, and the government is undoubtedly under pressure to focus all its resources on the domestic economy, to halt what could be China’s first quarterly contraction in decades.

While Beijing’s top concern is whether Covid-19 might affect China’s central role in global supply chains, politicians in Washington has seized the opportunity to push the decoupling of the two economies, citing both economic and national security risks. The pandemic has, if anything, strengthened the validity of the exit strategies that grew among US companies during the trade war.

Such a decoupling would fundamentally alter the landscape of the global economy, reshape geopolitics and undermine the very foundation that has supported relations between the world’s two largest economies, despite their discord on a wide range of issues. The Covid-19 pandemic might well accelerate this process.

Relations between nature and humanity have deteriorated over the past century, with mankind’s unconstrained exploration and development of the world. Unfortunately, the relationship between the world’s two major powers is becoming just as strained.

The question then is: what is the greater enemy, the pandemic from mother nature, or adversarial politics from human beings?

Amid growing strategic distrust and antagonism, political hawks in both capitals seem to see each other as a political virus that is more toxic, contagious and lethal than a biological virus.

Cary Huang is a veteran China affairs columnist, having written on this topic since the early 1990s

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Pandemic may drive decoupling of economic ties

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