Veteran China specialist Orville Schell said the death of Washington’s long-standing policy of engagement was casting a shadow on every aspect of the bilateral relationship and creating a “new and more dangerous” climate of interaction.

“Our stand-off grows out of a fundamental change in attitude on both sides, where each government increasingly sees the other not only as an economic threat but also as a threat to their notion of global order and their respective values and political systems,” he said.

“We are definitely at a crossroads where the very fabric of the US-China relationship is tearing apart in an alarming way. Without bold and creative leadership, we may again end up in two hostile, cold war-style camps.

“What is so alarming about this crisis is that neither the US nor Chinese leaders seem up to the kind of leadership that is needed to arrest this slide.”

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In another speech earlier in December, Wang described the Trump administration as “a troublemaker in today’s world” and accused Washington of undercutting the foundation of bilateral ties and trying to hold China down.

George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre, said Wang’s comments were not unexpected, given how antagonistic and hostile the relationship had become.

“They are aggressive, but perhaps no more so than what can be heard in the US. Where I think Wang Yi and colleagues are being disingenuous is in making the charge one-sided,” he said.

While US President Donald Trump’s confrontational approach was partly to blame, a series of major policy changes in Beijing, especially the erosion of the lines between party and state – and those between private and public sectors – had made China appear more assertive and truculent, as well as adversarial, Magnus said.

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Human rights

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Trust

Chinese students and researchers in the US felt the heat of rapidly deteriorating US-China ties, with frequent visa restrictions and greater scrutiny of their possible links to the Communist Party and the Chinese military.

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Public opinion in the US also turned against China. The latest survey by the Pew Research Centre in December showed favourable perceptions of China among Americans at a record low, while those holding unfavourable views of China were up from 47 per cent the previous year, reaching a new high of 60 per cent.

Diplomatic sources on both sides said official and unofficial exchanges had been significantly reduced in terms of volume, scope and intensity.

“The relations have passed the point of no return. There is no trust; the people-to-people relations are dying; and the US is already in full containment mode,” said Gal Luft, co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.

Finger pointing

Luft also said the US Congress had become an “alarmingly destabilising force” in US-China relations, with Republicans and Democrats trying to outdo each other on who was more hawkish on China.

“Trump himself is not interested in escalation. But the hawks in Washington are egging him on to escalate and he seems to be unable to control them. The US Congress is suffering from what could be described as China derangement syndrome,” he said.

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Yun Sun, a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre in Washington, noted that most Americans saw China as the revisionist power that had started the downward spiral by challenging the US and the current system.

“Both China and the US feel strongly about the other side being the troublemaker and such finger-pointing is unlikely to render any resolution or positive feedback,” she said.

While Chinese diplomats put the blame squarely on the US for the worst downward spiral in 40 years of bilateral ties, David Stilwell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, recently made a vigorous defence of Washington’s China policy since the establishment of official ties in 1979.

“The fact is that, for decades, American policymakers have extended the hand of friendship to the PRC – yet Beijing has not reciprocated. The historical record shows this clearly,” he said in a speech at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on December 12.

Joint future

Both Chinese and American pundits saw a link between China’s rapid rise and the largely conflict-free development of bilateral ties over the past four decades. Despite the talk of economic disengagement, they believed the future of China’s reform and opening up was still largely dependent on its ties with the US.

According to Yuan Peng, president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy would have been almost impossible without the formal normalisation of relations with the US.

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While most experts were pessimistic about the prospect of US-China relations in 2020, ahead of two presidential elections in the US and Taiwan, few believed the two powers would enter a new cold war any time soon.

Zhiqun Zhu, chair of the department of international relations at Bucknell University, said the state of the US-China relationship was disappointing but had managed to avoid the worst-case scenario. “One needs to be worried, but not despairing,” he said.

“The new normal is that the relationship has become more competitive and conflictual, but neither side has ditched cooperation as a preferred mode of interaction.”