US officials urged not to neglect personal relationships with Chinese counterparts

Report by US think tank says individual connections can help manage tensions and help reach agreement during face-to-face discussions

Managing expectations is key to success, it adds and warns against ‘romanticism about the past’ and ‘fatalism about the future’

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The personal connection between former trade representative Robert Lighthizer and vice-premier Liu He helped secure a trade deal even when relations were at rock bottom. Photo: AP

Published: 11:00pm, 6 Nov 2021Updated: 11:56am, 7 Nov 2021

Senior American policymakers should try to build personal relationships with their Chinese counterparts to manage frictions between the two countries, a US think tank has urged.

“The single common trait of every issue that has been managed effectively in the relationship over the past 50 years has been that it has been done between officials that have built relationships with each other,” said the report published by the Brookings Institution on Friday.

It went on to say that these officials have often been able to solve problems behind closed doors and that even when relations hit their lowest point during Donald Trump’s presidency, an interim trade deal was reached because of the relationship between treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, trade representative Robert Lighthizer and vice-premier Liu He.

The report was released following a series of exchanges with the Beijing-based China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, which released its own parallel report offering a Chinese perspective.

The first 10 months of Joe Biden’s presidency have seen US-China tensions persist in many areas, but officials have recently engaged in talks to manage tensions and officials are preparing the ground for a virtual meeting between Biden and Xi Jinping before the end of the year.

Last Sunday Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the two sides should maintain regular contact and prepare for the “next phase of exchanges” when they met on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Rome.

The Brookings report argues the two sides should acknowledge the competition between them and avoid unrealistic expectations, but should not assume that conflicts are inevitable.

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