Opinion | Trump’s America and Xi’s China are dangerously stuck in a rut
- Both Beijing and Washington are retreating to old patterns – of US-bashing or China-bashing. The two countries must move away from rivalry and understand their differences as problems that have solutions
Many of us have just been through a lockdown, and some of us are still stuck in it. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the term usually meant the kind of harsh confinement that would befall inmates of a penal institution in the wake of a prison riot. Slight parallels with what we non-felons have endured lately are obvious.
Recall the warning from one of the greats, literary immortal E.M. Forster. In his short story The Machine Stops, the English author of A Passage to India conjures up a world in which humans hunker down in underground bunker rooms – sustained by food deliveries and a take-charge, in-room communication machine that is the primary link to others. One utterly predictable result was limited thinking.
Forster’s vision was that confinement and technology would render people one-dimensional, having the same recycled conversations and ideas. This knockout of a lockdown story was published in 1909.
If there is a better illustration of mental lockdown than ferociously fraught US-China relations, I am unaware of it. Both so-called superpowers are in trouble. Nightly, you witness scenes of urban implosion in the United States. China, though much harder to assess, may be in deep trouble as well. Who knows?