Advertisement
US-China relations
ChinaDiplomacy

Growing isolation puts China, US ‘on the brink’ of a new cold war

  • Obama-era envoy to Beijing Max Baucus says ‘dire’ relations are getting worse with each side isolating into big separate camps
  • Technology and culture are key battlegrounds in troublesome downward trend

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
99+
China-US relations have continued on a downward spiral, with President Joe Biden retaining most of his predecessor’s policies. Photo: AP
Owen Churchill
US-China relations are at a “tipping point”, with the two powers on the brink of a technological and cultural cold war, former Washington ambassador to China Max Baucus warned on Tuesday.
Advertisement
Among the factors fuelling the downward spiral were the continuing barrage of US sanctions targeting Beijing, rising nationalism in China, growing domestic pressure in the country as Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks a third term, and a class of Chinese officials who are “hypercritical” of the US, he said.
Former US ambassador to Beijing Max Baucus. Photo: Handout
Former US ambassador to Beijing Max Baucus. Photo: Handout

“We’re at a tipping point here,” Baucus told a virtual event hosted by the US-China Policy Foundation. “This current trend is very, very troublesome to me and it’s going to take a lot of work to turn that around.”

Baucus served as president Barack Obama’s envoy to Beijing from 2014-2017, overseeing efforts to forge avenues of cooperation, even as tensions simmered around human rights issues and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

Relations plummeted under Obama’s successor Donald Trump, whose trade war with Beijing and numerous other China-focused policies have largely remained intact under President Joe Biden.

Advertisement

“The relationship has gone downhill quite precipitously in the last several years and it’s getting worse,” said Baucus. “I thought maybe that we hit bottom after Trump [for] four years and Biden took over, but it’s still going south.”

While China extends the reach of its economic might through the Belt and Road Initiative, the US is forming alliances in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, Baucus said, expressing concern that Washington and Beijing were “just isolating each other into two separate, big camps”.

Advertisement