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
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.
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.
This rupture does not come as a great surprise. As is the case in interpersonal relationships, geopolitical codependency can lead to conflict, especially if one partner starts to go its own way.
And China’s decade of rebalancing – shifting away from exports and investment to consumer-led growth, from manufacturing to services, from surplus saving to saving absorption, and from imported to indigenous innovation – did indeed put it on a very different path.
This turned out to be an increasingly uncomfortable development for a China-dependent US. Left behind, America felt scorned, and that scorn led first to blame, and now to open conflict.
The consequences of the US-China rupture go far beyond economics. A decisive shift in the balance of global power, ushering in a new cold war, could well be at hand.
Many Americans are angry over allegedly unfair trade deals and practices, indignant at seemingly disproportionate US funding for institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and suspicious that the US security umbrella in Europe, Asia and elsewhere encourages free riders and others not paying their fair share.
Can the broken US-China relationship be salvaged? Ironically, Covid-19 offers an outside chance. Both countries’ leaders would need to end the blame game and begin restoring trust. To do so, they would need to come clean on what really happened in the early days of the pandemic – December for China, and January and February for the US.
This is not a time for false pride or nationalistic bluster. True leaders often emerge – or are revealed – at history’s darkest moments. Is it really too late for Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to comprehend what’s at stake and seize this opportunity?
Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China. Copyright: Project Syndicate