Le Yucheng, vice-minister of foreign affairs. (FENG YONGBIN / CHINA DAILY)
China, US called to normalize relations
By Zhang Yunbi
Vice-Foreign Minister Le Yucheng has called on China and the United States to build mutual respect, reverse the wrong course on bilateral ties, renew cooperation and fulfill key global responsibilities.
The senior diplomat used the four “Rs” — respect, reversal, renewal and responsibility — to explain Beijing’s position on developing China-US ties during his address to the Vision China event on Jan 28. This year marks the 50th anniversary of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s historic visit to China, a prelude to the normalization of diplomatic ties.
In his speech titled “Anything is possible when China and the United States choose to cooperate”, Le said “the challenges we face today call for the same vision and courage to break the ice again”.
Le said mutual respect is the foundation for successful people-to-people and state-to-state interactions.
While some people doubt the need to respect China as it is a strategic competitor of the US, Le said: “We don’t even think the relationship should be defined by ‘competition’, because we keep challenging ourselves, not the United States.
“The only thing that China asks of the United States is to respect the development path we have chosen, respect our legitimate interests, respect our pursuit of a better life and to quit its obsession with changing or splitting China,” he added.
China-US relations in the last four years have seen growing mistrust, division and hatred. Le said both sides must “act without further delay to reverse the wrong course”. “A lot of repair (work) has to be done. I agree with American friends’ suggestions that both sides take small steps first to create conditions for improving the relationship. But we have to act now to bring China-US relations back on track,” he said.
As some work between the two governments has ground to a halt, the diplomat said the countries’ shared interests and need for cooperation “far outweigh our differences”. He said controlling COVID-19, the economic recovery and climate change could be priorities for cooperation in the short term.
China will continue to support the COVID-19 response of the US, increase experience-sharing on diagnostics and treatment, and work more closely with the US on the research, production and distribution of vaccines, he said. Beijing will also enhance macroeconomic policy coordination with Washington to help the global economic recovery, and collaboration on climate change is expected to be renewed. “Our closer results-oriented cooperation on clean energy, low-carbon technologies, and environmental protection will go a long way toward protecting Mother Earth,” he said.
On shouldering responsibilities on the global stage, Le quoted a Chinese proverb that “A bigger boat is meant to carry more weight” as well as an American saying that “Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them”.
“As two major countries in the world, China and the United States should shoulder important responsibilities for world peace and development,” he said.
Le cited successful cooperation, such as tackling the 2008 global financial crisis, combating the Ebola virus in 2014 and collaborating on the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The two countries can work together to avoid the so-called Thucydides Trap, he said. “There is no predestined fate for the world. The future of China-US relations, and the future of the world, depend on what vision we embrace and what choice we make.”
Zhou Shuchun, publisher and editor-in-chief of China Daily. (FENG YONGBIN / CHINA DAILY)
Countries urged to be on right side of history
By Cao Desheng
Both China and the United States should “stand on the right side of history” in setting the direction of their relations amid unprecedented difficulties and setbacks they encountered in the past few years, said Zhou Shuchun, publisher and editor-in-chief of China Daily, on Jan 28.
Zhou made the remarks while addressing the virtual Vision China event. He said that “the right side of history” means removing barriers and building bridges rather than erecting walls or closing doors.
“To be on the right side of history, we should move forward from where we began,” Zhou suggested. He talked about the “ping-pong diplomacy” in 1971, which marked a thaw in Sino-US relations and paved the way for the establishment of diplomatic ties. He also underlined the importance of people-to-people exchanges in raising public support for a meaningful friendship and substantial cooperation.
Zhou noted that the Sino-US relationship is widely considered the most important in today’s world because the way they handle their relations matters a great deal to many other countries. He called on both nations to shoulder their responsibility as major players in the international arena and work together to build a better relationship.
“History tells us that the decisions made by major countries on the direction of their relations determine to a large extent the fate and future of mankind,” he said, adding the right side of history calls for a relationship featuring “nonconflict, nonconfrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation”, as was the consensus reached between President Xi Jinping and former US president Barack Obama at their summit back in 2013.
Zhou said that since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have become increasingly aware that humanity is a community with a shared future. As the global public health crisis shows no signs of abating and confirmed cases worldwide have passed 100 million, there is an urgent need for nations to join hands to build a global community of health for all, he added. “The right side of history asks China and the United States to share, and not shirk, the responsibility of strengthening international partnerships and global governance.”
Zhou also called on the two countries to work together to advance the building of an open world economy to boost global development.
China and the US account for more than one-third of global economic output and half of global growth. Due to the fallout of the pandemic, the global economy has encountered the most severe crisis and challenge since the Great Depression of the 1930s, he said.
“Different calculations in their economic, trade and technological policies might either impart momentum or put a brake on global development,” Zhou said. “And to be on the right side of history, the two biggest economies in the world must work together where they carry the most weight.”
He added that “the right side of history” will prove that openness and togetherness will prevail over confrontation and decoupling.
Zhou quoted Richard Nixon, the first US president to set foot on the soil of New China in 1972, as saying: “It is not our common beliefs that have brought us together here, but our common interests and our common hope.”
He said: “Things have changed as time has passed, and the world is no longer what it used to be. However, we’re strongly convinced that the ‘common interests’ and ‘common hopes’ that President Nixon spoke of are still relevant, and what’s more, they should be built upon.”
Expert warns against ‘Cold War’ mentality
By Han Baoyi in London
The US must avoid misjudging China as the new administration in Washington is set to recalibrate the bilateral relations of the two major powers, said John Ross, a senior fellow of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China in Beijing.
“It’s very dangerous for a major great power like the United States to have a distorted view of the world,” said Ross, referring to the “Cold War mentality” of former president Donald Trump’s administration against China.
One of the consequences of this “lose-lose policy” is that it prevented Washington from learning the lessons of China’s fight against COVID-19, which has caused more than 430,000 deaths in the US, said Ross, who used to work as an economic adviser to former London mayor Ken Livingstone.
“The general method of demagoguery is the worst. Some of the tweets by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo lead to a distorted view of the world,” Ross said.
“China has no interest in, or intention of, engaging in the struggle for hegemony with the United States, and it does not favor hegemony by any state in the world,” he said. “China’s framework is to focus on its national development to seek win-win cooperation with other countries.”
The inauguration of US President Joe Biden should be seen as an opportunity to reset China-US relations, he said.
“Responsible statesmanship means constraint on having the most accurate view possible of the situation, not of misleading. In attempting to mislead other people, you also mislead yourself.”
From his perspective, some good steps have been taken by the Biden administration, such as the country’s rejoining of the Paris Agreement on climate change and halting the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization. However, there are some “negative signs” regarding China-US relations, Ross said, quoting a statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken of the Biden administration.
Blinken, when he was a nominee of the position, told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan 19: “Let me just say that I also believe that President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China. I disagree, very much with the way that he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one, and I think that’s actually helpful to our foreign policy.”
As the world is experiencing a much worse economic downturn than the one caused by the global financial crisis 13 years ago, Ross said that all countries, including the US, should be “seeking to benefit from the growth in China”.
Statistics show that China was the only major economy to register positive economic growth last year, while the US economy contracted by 3.6 percent and the Eurozone’s shrank by 7.4 percent, contributing to a global economic pullback of 4.3 percent, according to the World Bank. These facts mean that China has become the motor of world economic growth to a degree, Ross said.
“China would obviously benefit greatly from increasing trade and investment with other countries, and other countries would gain from the very rapid growth of China’s economy.”
Ross said one of the important benefits is the China-European Union investment deal, which was reached in December.
hanbaoyi@mail.chinadailyuk.com
Post-Trump era offers stability
By Mo Jingxi
The China-US relationship is at a new starting point with an opportunity for the two countries to stabilize bilateral ties after “a very difficult period” under the Donald Trump administration, according to an expert on international affairs.
Da Wei, senior fellow of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, speaking at the Vision China event on Jan 28, said that over the past few years, the Trump administration had taken the wrong direction, and erroneous actions had led to a “severe situation” in China-US relations.
He said he hoped the new US administration pursues a policy that treats the world’s second-largest economy in an objective manner over the next four years. “The two countries need to take action in the first month, then the first 100 days, then the first six months and then the first year, because the window of opportunity will not last forever,” Da said, noting that the free-fall of bilateral relations cannot continue.
In 2017, Trump announced his first national security strategy and called China a “strategic competitor”.
After that, however, the Trump administration took a more confrontational attitude toward China.
To avoid China and the US engaging in a new “Cold War” or even military conflicts, Da said the two countries should stop finger-pointing and calmly rethink bilateral relations.
He underlined the importance of setting up four mechanisms relating to high-level exchanges, the military and security, economics and trade, and cultural and social interactions to build a solid base to support the long-term relationship.
Da said high-level dialogues between the two sides are very important and should be sustained, even if the two countries encounter difficulties.
In military and security areas, more crisis management and confidence-building measures are required to prevent the two major powers from heading toward conflict, Da said.
While economic and trade issues have been the core issues over the past four years, Da said the task for China and the US is to reach an equilibrium between economic interaction and mutual benefit. “I think both countries support economic interaction, but at the same time, our economic relations need to make both sides feel satisfied and also feel that they are gaining something out of it,” he said.
While engaging in social, cultural and educational cooperation and exchanges, Da said it is important to make both sides feel secure.
If China and the US can make progress in the four areas, the two sides will probably have a mechanism to support long-term stability not only in the next four years but probably the next 10 years or more, he said.
While it is impossible to ignore the elements of competition in bilateral ties, it should be constructive, healthy and limited, Da said.
“It’s not the US-Soviet-style Cold War competition,” he said, noting that China has no aspirations for global hegemony, or to replace the institutions, values or systems of the US and the West.
Da also said that the two countries, which are deeply dependent on each other, need to cooperate on regional affairs such as the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue and global concerns like climate change and cyberspace governance.
