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US-China relations: nations failing as global leaders, academics say
- The collapse of cooperation between Washington and Beijing is ‘very sad and a disappointment’, vice-president of Centre for China and Globalisation says during webinar
- ‘The last thing we need is to open another battlefield on the ideological front,’ says senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations
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China and the United States are failing in their roles as world leaders, and the poor state of their relationship is impeding international collaboration in the fight against Covid-19, academics said on Wednesday.
“I see some key global challenges – right now that would be this health pandemic, global climate change, debt problems, bond payment crisis – I really see a failure of the US and China to provide leadership,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said at a webinar organised by Centre for China and Globalisation (CCG), a Beijing-based think tank.
“This era of power competition is bad for global governance and a lot of this comes down to poor relations between US and China,” he said.
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While Beijing claims it was quick to respond to the health crisis sparked by the emergence of the coronavirus in Wuhan at the end of last year, there have been widespread allegations it initially tried to cover up the incident. A US congressional report said the world lost weeks because of China’s lack of transparency.
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“The two sides see things very differently,” Dollar said. “It’s just very hard to praise any collaboration in terms of global governance. We have not done a good job and that does not bode well for the next pandemic.”
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