China’s future rests on ‘mending fences with the United States’
- Stable ties with the United States are good for China’s reform and opening up, analysts says
- Beijing ‘needs to maintain international support’ for its economic programme
China must find ways to repair its strained relations with its geopolitical rival the United States if Beijing is serious about deepening reforms, according to Chinese and American analysts.
At a seminar in Hong Kong looking back at China’s 40 years of opening up to the world, the observers voiced concerns that China’s further rise on the global stage could be affected by the protracted tensions between the two powers over trade and a litany of security and political conflicts.
Yuan Peng, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said there was a strong link between China’s rapid rise and the largely conflict-free development of bilateral ties in the past four decades.
“A stable US-China relationship is good for China’s reform and opening up, and deeper reform and opening would help stabilise bilateral ties,” Yuan said at the seminar co-organised by the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong and the Better Hong Kong Foundation. The South China Morning Post is the media partner of the event.
The normalisation of China-US relations, marked by the publication on December 16, 1978, of a joint communique to establish diplomatic ties between the US and China, happened just two days before the historic Third Plenum of the 11th Communist Party’s Central Committee, which was widely seen as the start of China’s reform and opening up.