Opinion | The coronavirus crisis has finally sunk the US-China relationship. What’s next?

China’s economic rebalancing set the stage for an uneasy shift in the world’s most important bilateral relationship, and now tit-for-tat blame over the pandemic has pitched the tension into open conflict

Reading Time:4 minutes

Published: 1:00am, 29 Apr 2020Updated: 4:10am, 29 Apr 2020

It didn’t have to end this way, but the die is now cast. After 48 years of painstaking progress, a major rupture of the US-China relationship is at hand. This is a tragic outcome for both sides – and for the world. From an unnecessary trade war to an increasingly desperate coronavirus war, two angry countries are trapped in a blame game with no easy way out.

A nationalistic American public is fed up with China. According to a new poll by the Pew Research Centre, 66 per cent of US citizens now view China in an unfavourable light – six points worse than last summer and the highest negative reading since Pew introduced this question some 15 years ago.

While this shift was more evident for Republicans – those older than 50 and college graduates –, unfavourable sentiment among Democrats, younger cohorts and the less educated also hit record highs.

An equally nationalistic Chinese public is also irate at the United States. That is not just because President Donald Trump insisted on dubbing a global pandemic the “Chinese virus”. It is also because whispers turned into shouts linking the outbreak of Covid-19 to alleged suspicious activities at the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory.

Just as most children are taught that two wrongs don’t make a right, tit-for-tat blame does not justify severing the world’s most important bilateral relationship. But the time for dispassionate logic is over. We must, instead, contemplate the harsh consequences of this rupture.

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