Sino File | With Obama gone, Trump in, US-China rivalry is set to intensify
After a hopeful start, relations slid during Obama’s second term – will they fall further under America’s new president?
With the legacy of President Barack Obama on US foreign policy soon to be a subject for historians, it is time to consider how US-China relations fared under his eight-year term.
Obama’s two four-year terms overlapped with the Chinese presidencies of Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Xi Jinping ( 習近平 ), who succeeded Hu in March 2013, just two months after Obama began his second term.
Generally speaking, Obama might have succeeded in maintaining the relatively stable and friendly working relationship between the two countries during his first term in office. However, relations became increasingly fragile during his second term.
At the beginning of Obama’s first term, the US and China embarked on a new level of collaboration. In his first visit to China as US president, in November 2009, Obama launched with Hu the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), an expansion of the framework for economic cooperation between the countries that was initiated in 2006 by Hu and Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush.
And since then, Beijing and Washington have maintained frequent high-level interactions to keep their relationship on track.