China scholars, foreign policy experts and critics of the Trump administration's approach to international relations have united in criticism of Kiron Skinner, the State Department’s director of policy planning, after controversial remarks she made about China at a recent think tank event. Skinner, a Harvard-educated foreign affairs specialist, argued that China poses a unique and unprecedented threat to the United States because of history, ideology, culture and race. My experience of studying in both China and the US has taught me that Dr Skinner is right. Throughout my childhood in China, I learned about Chinese history, civilisation and culture. After moving to the US after the second world war, I studied American history and learned about American culture and society. I am still trying to promote US-China understanding, yet the relationship continues to deteriorate. Skinner is correct in identifying a source of this: the US has struggled to understand China for decades, and continues to do so . Skinner's remarks also warrant further consideration because of the important job she holds for the Trump administration. The director of policy planning is a prestigious position within the foreign policy decision-making apparatus. It was from this office that George Kennan implemented the containment strategy and the Marshall Plan at the height of the cold war. As the only foreign policy think tank within the federal government, the policy planning department is uniquely positioned to deliberate, create, and implement policy as part of the US’ grand strategy. Pointing out the reality that the US faces a potential non-Caucasian adversary should serve as a wake-up call So, the remarks made by Skinner cannot be so easily dismissed as those of other Trump administration personnel involved in China policy. Skinner is participating in creating a new China policy, and is working with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to help translate Trump's foreign policy axioms into a diplomatic agenda. A closer look at Skinner's remarks shows she is largely correct. Her comments reflect some of the same strategic thinking of her predecessors. Why China won’t give Donald Trump his dream deal At the forum organised by the New America think thank, Skinner argued not only that China is different from the US, but that it has also been consistently misunderstanding China along these lines. Chinese civilisation spans over 3,000 years, and the Americans responsible for shaping and implementing China policy have all too often failed to properly take account of how this rich tapestry of history, culture and ideology affects modern Chinese strategy and decision-making. Skinner went further, noting that China is not Western, and therefore lacks the common ground that helped the US and the Soviet Union at times put aside their ideological differences. This echoes the thinking of many officials in the 1950s and 1960s – that China posed more difficult problems to the US than did the Soviet Union because it was not Western. Critics of Skinner's remarks say that, at best, she is too closely leaning on Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilisations” theory, which held that conflicts in the post-cold-war era would be based around cultural and religious divides. While mainly focused on the Western relationship with the Islamic world, Huntington’s thesis has also been applied to future Sino-US relations . Taken in a darker light, Skinner's remarks have been criticised as inherently racist, in particular her statement that China is the first non-Caucasian great power to become a potential US adversary, and that this is a significant distinction. Skinner's argument is shaky, as the US confronted a non-Caucasian adversary – Japan – in the past, and won. Putting this aside, many experts have expressed disgust with Skinner's rhetoric for implying that the administration views the US-China relationship through racist lenses. The truth about the US-China clash of civilisations? There isn’t one But is Skinner's recognition that China is non-Caucasian, and that it could affect the trajectory of relations, fundamentally racist? She is, after all, right – China is not Caucasian. China is different from the majority of the US in a manner that nearly 250 years of American diplomacy has struggled to articulate. George Washington thought the Chinese must be white because of how advanced their civilisation was. Many in Dwight Eisenhower's administration mistrusted China because of their bias against Asians. The reluctance of the Kennedy administration to consider changing US policy towards the People’s Republic of China was due in part to the belief that the Chinese would be more inclined to use violence than the Soviets. Ignoring race as a component of policy ignores the reality that the individuals responsible for making policy are influenced by their own backgrounds, prejudices, and perceptions of the world. Had the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations included more diverse voices – perhaps even Chinese- and Asian-Americans – the policies they proposed would not have been influenced as strongly by cultural misunderstanding and racial biases. When pressed to elaborate on her remarks, Skinner, one of the few African-Americans in high-level positions in the administration, pointed out that the foreign policy elite in the US is very homogeneous and does not reflect the changing demographic realities in the country. I know this first-hand; I was consulted by both the Nixon and Carter administrations for my views on China – the only such Chinese voice the government had as a resource. Today, the old generation of China watchers and scholars who had first-hand experience in China are gone. If the administration wants effective policy, informed by accurate historical, cultural and ideological understanding of China, they should seek out Chinese-Americans. 100 years in the making: China's distrust of US-led global order Pointing out the reality that the US faces a potential non-Caucasian adversary should serve as a wake-up call, and a catalyst to prioritising the diversification of US foreign policy decision-making. Skinner said it was time for the US to take off its “rose-coloured glasses” and take a hard look at China. In the desire to highlight the areas in which the US and China are similar and have the capacity to cooperate, it is naive to entirely gloss over the areas in which these two countries are structurally different. It is only through openly acknowledging these differences that the decision makers on both sides can hope to seriously take steps to overcome them, and to chart the US-China relationship on a course where they can compete but also cooperate without became adversaries. Chi Wang, a former head of the Chinese section of the US Library of Congress, is president of the US-China Policy Foundation