There were a lot of raised eyebrows and quiet chuckles this month when President-elect Donald Trump invited President Xi Jinping to Washington for his inauguration. Foreign leaders don’t attend our inaugurations, of course, but I think Trump’s idea was actually a good one. Having just returned from a trip to China, I can tell you that if I were drawing a picture of relations between our two countries today, it would be two elephants looking at each other through a straw.
That is not good. Because suddenly the U.S. and China have a lot more to talk about than just trade and Taiwan — and who’s the undisputed heavyweight champion of the 21st century.
The world today faces three epochal challenges right now: runaway artificial intelligence, climate change and spreading disorder from collapsing states. The U.S. and China are the world’s A.I. superpowers. They are the world’s two leading carbon emitters. And they have the world’s two biggest naval forces, capable of projecting power globally. America and China are the only two powers, in other words, that together can offer any hope of managing superintelligence, superstorms and superempowered small groups of angry men in failed states — not to mention superviruses — at a time when the world has become superfused.
Which is why we need an updated Shanghai Communiqué, the document that set out parameters for normalizing U.S.-China relations when Richard Nixon went to China and met Mao Zedong in 1972. Right now, unfortunately, we are denormalizing. Our two countries are drifting farther and farther apart at all levels. In the three decades I have been visiting Beijing and Shanghai, I had never felt what I felt on this trip — as if I were the only American in China.
Of course I wasn’t, but the American accents you would usually hear at a big Shanghai train station or Beijing hotel lobby were notably absent. Chinese parents say that many families no longer want their kids to go to the U.S. for schooling, because they fear it’s becoming dangerous — the F.B.I. might follow them while they are in America, and their own government might suspect them when they return home. The same is now true for U.S. students in China. A professor in China who works with foreign students told me that some Americans don’t want to study there anymore for semesters abroad, in part because they don’t relish competing against superintense Chinese undergraduates and in part because, these days, having studied or worked in China can raise security suspicions with future potential U.S. employers.
True, underneath all the talk of the new China-U.S. cold war, there are still over 270,000 Chinese students studying in America, according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, but there are now only about 1,100 American college students studying in China. That is down from around 15,000 a decade ago — but up from a few hundred in 2022, not long after Covid peaked. If these trends continue, where will the next generation of Chinese-speaking American scholars and diplomats come from and, similarly, Chinese who will understand America?
“We must compete with China — as it is our strongest rival for global military, technology and economic power — but the complicated reality is we also need to work with China on climate change, fentanyl and other issues to create a more stable world,” the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, told me in Beijing. Therefore, “we need a cohort of young Americans who speak Mandarin and have friendships with young Chinese. We have to create room for people from both countries to connect. They are the ballast in the relationship. We used to have five million tourists going back and forth, and today it’s a fraction of that.”
Burns’s point is critical. It was the business communities, tourists and students who softened the steadily sharpening elbows between China and America as China overtook Russia as America’s chief global rival and the U.S.-China relationship tilted more toward outright confrontation than a balance between competition and collaboration. As that ballast steadily shrinks, the relationship is now increasingly being defined by just raw confrontation, leaving little room for collaboration.
For his ambassador to China, Trump has picked David Perdue, who was a senator from Georgia from 2015 to 2021. Perdue is a competent guy who did business in East Asia before going to the Senate. But in a September 2024 essay in The Washington Examiner, he wrote of the Chinese Communist Party, “Through all my activity in China and the region, one thing became painfully clear: The C.C.P. firmly believes its rightful destiny is to reclaim its historical position as the hegemon of the world order — and convert the world to Marxism.”
Hmmm. I would not dispute the hegemon stuff, but “convert the world to Marxism?” Before he takes up his post, I hope Perdue will get briefed to understand that China today has a lot more Muskists — young people who want to be like Elon Musk — than Marxists. The Chinese are trying to beat us at our game, capitalism, not convert us to Marxism.
Yes, the Chinese Communist Party is as tightly in control in China today as at any other time since the late 1980s. But it is communist in name only. The ideology it promotes is a combination of state-directed capitalism and wild cowboy capitalism, where scores of private and state-owned companies slug it out in survival-of-the-fittest contests across a range of high-tech industries to grow China’s middle class.
Even though Trump is often depicted in China as a China basher and “Tariff man,” I was struck by how many Chinese economic experts I spoke to suggested that China preferred dealing with him over Democrats. As David Daokui Li, the director of the Center for China in the World Economy at Tsinghua University and the author of “China’s World View,” pointed out to me: “Many people in China feel they understand Trump. They see him as Deng Xiaoping. Chinese relate to Trump because he thinks that economics is everything.”
Deng was the famously pragmatic, transactional, deal-making Chinese leader who forced open the Chinese economy to the world with the very un-Marxist motto about how China should leave behind Communist central planning and just opt for whatever works to create growth — or as he famously put it: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
None of this precludes great-power strategic competition between the U.S. and China — from cyberhacking to shadowing each other’s aircraft and naval ships. Whatever China is doing to us in those realms, I hope we are doing to them. But two great powers like the U.S. and China — which still rack up almost $600 billion in two-way trade annually (the U.S. imports about $430 million from China and exports close to $150 billion) — also have a mutual self-interest to do other things. That brings me back to why it was right for Trump to try to break the mold and invite Xi to Washington.
When I was in Shanghai this month, my colleague Keith Bradsher, the Times Beijing bureau chief, suggested we visit the Jin Jiang Hotel, where, on the evening of Feb. 27, 1972, Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai signed the Shanghai Communiqué, guiding the renewal of U.S.-China relations. In it, the U.S. acknowledged the view that there was one China — which was a concession to Beijing on the Taiwan issue — but asserted that any resolution of Taiwan’s future had to be peaceful, and the two sides also set out their goals for economic and people-to-people relations. The hall where that signing took place was adorned with faded photographs of Nixon and Zhou warmly toasting their new relationship. Looking at them today, I could only wonder: “Did that really happen?”
A new Shanghai Communiqué today could help govern the new realities that both countries and the world face. The first is that U.S. and Chinese tech firms are racing toward artificial general intelligence; theirs is more focused on enhancing industrial production and surveillance and ours on a broad array of uses, from writing movie scripts to designing new drugs. Even if artificial general intelligence — a sentient machine — is five or seven years away, Beijing and Washington need to be collaborating today on a set of rules that we will both use to govern A.I. and that the rest of the world must follow.
That would be to embed into all A.I. systems algorithms that ensure that the system cannot be used for destructive purposes by bad actors and cannot go off on its own to destroy the humans who built it.
In a little-noticed event, President Biden and Xi took the first steps toward building such a regime when they agreed at their recent Peru summit on a declaration stating that “the two leaders affirmed the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.” That means no decision to fire a nuclear weapon can be made by an A.I. bot alone. There always has to be a human in the loop.
U.S. officials told me that those 17 words took months to negotiate. They must not be the last when it comes to erecting guardrails around the use of A.I.
On managing climate change, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon and the U.S., the second largest, need to agree on a set of strategies to get the world to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 — to reduce the ruinous health, economic and extreme weather challenges wrought by climate change, which are going to create increasing disorder in failing states.
As I tried to explain to my Chinese interlocutors on this trip: You think we are each other’s enemy. We might be, but we also now have a big common enemy, just as we did in 1972. Only this time it is not Russia. It’s disorder. More and more nation-states are falling apart — into disorder — and hemorrhaging their people as migrants scrambling to get to zones of order.
It’s not only Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Somalia in the Middle East racked by disorder; it’s also some of China’s best friends in the global south, like Venezuela and Zimbabwe and Myanmar. And more than a few participants in China’s Belt and Road Initiative to which China has lent billions are struggling — including Sri Lanka, Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Montenegro and Tanzania. Beijing is now starting to demand its money back from them and has throttled down new lending. But that is just making the crises worse in some of these countries.
Only the U.S. and China working together with the I.M.F. and World Bank will have the resources, power and influence to stem some of this disorder, which is why I repeatedly challenged my Chinese interlocutors: Why are you hanging around with losers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Iran? How could you be neutral between Hamas and Israel?
China went from an impoverished isolated country to an industrial giant with a rising middle class in a world in which the rules of the game — on trade and geopolitics — were largely set by the United States after World War II for the benefit and stability of all.
The idea that China can thrive in a world shaped by the values of a murderous thief like Putin, who is an agent of disorder, or by fundamentalist Iran, another promoter of disorder and the next country likely to fracture, or by the global south — or by China alone — is crazy.
If I were Trump, I’d explore a “Nixon goes to China” move — a rapprochement between the U.S. and China that totally isolates Russia and Iran. That’s how you end the Ukraine war, shrink Iran’s influence in the Middle East and defuse tensions with Beijing in one move. Trump is unpredictable enough to try it.
Either way, China and America are compelled to work together if there is going to be a stable 21st century. If competition and collaboration give way entirely to confrontation, a disorderly 21st century awaits us both.
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