China must stop ‘wishful thinking’ that rivalry with US will end with Biden
- Chinese foreign relations expert Yan Xuetong predicts decade of uneasy peace as competition continues between two powers
- Clearly defining competitive relationship would give Beijing and Washington common ground to avoid escalation, he says
Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Beijing’s Tsinghua University said there would be an “uneasy peace” in the decade ahead, featuring an increasingly fierce rivalry between the two great powers, and hedging policy moves from smaller parties.
“Unpredictability, uncertainty will still be the basic characteristic of the coming years,” Yan said on Wednesday at the Beijing Xiangshan Forum, China’s top international platform for dialogue on defence and security issues. “The world will definitely become more chaotic.”
Yan said he was not optimistic about president-elect Joe Biden’s China policy, which he predicted would shift from the trade war into frictions in the political realm, without lowering the scale and intensity of clashes between the two countries.
“Biden will take a multilateral approach and the pressure on China will increase rather than decrease,” he said, adding that human rights and other ideological values were part of the policy goals pursued by Biden and the Democrats, compared with Donald Trump and Republicans who saw them more as geopolitical tools.
“He will take a harder line and invest more resources in these issues, resulting in more serious conflicts,” Yan said.