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Opinion | Three ways to rebuild US-China trust after ‘spy balloon’ row
- Officials must steer competition away from sensitive areas and focus on global stability, and moderates must return to face-to-face backchannel dialogues
- Crucially, both sides must end the escalation in vitriol and unpredictability
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Sino-American relations briefly thawed after President Xi Jinping’s meeting with US President Joe Biden in Bali, Indonesia, last November.
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Much of that goodwill turned out to be more transient than expected. The Republican-majority House of Representatives has established a select committee to brace the United States for its “strategic competition” with China’s ruling party, with bipartisan support for greater financial and technological decoupling. Elsewhere, legislators in Texas and other states are calling for a ban on Chinese citizens buying land and/or property in their states.
The recent ignominy over the alleged “spy balloon”, then, was as much a symptom as a cause of a further deterioration in Sino-American relations.
A balloon of Chinese origin, alleged to be a tool of surveillance and reconnaissance for Beijing, was shot down in American airspace on February 4 – much to Beijing’s chagrin. Washington has framed the episode as indicative of China’s expansionist surveillance regime. Since then, the US has shot down three other unidentified objects.
The road ahead is treacherous, but not all hope is lost. There are three concrete steps by which bilateral relations can be repaired.
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First, while great power competition is likely to continue, China and the US can compete in a more responsible, mutually advantageous manner by shifting away from unproductive squabbles and unsound economics. Former president Donald Trump’s trade war against, for instance, China was unwinnable for a simple reason.
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