China-US relations take positive turn amid heightened tensions in 2023

The year 2023 was not lacking in controversies and distrust between China and the US, but however eventful, it ended up with a highlight of the bilateral relationship — the Nov 15 summit between the two heads of state in California.

That the meeting even happened was an achievement, given that the year began with tensions running high following the widely reported "balloon incident" in the United States in February, in which the US military shot down a Chinese civilian airship that had drifted into US airspace.

Months later, on June 29, the Pentagon said the balloon did not collect intelligence while flying over the country.

A month before the California summit, the administration of US President Joe Biden escalated its chip war by imposing new restrictions on exports of advanced computing semiconductors.

In the same month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer led a bipartisan Senate delegation to China, the first visit to the country by US lawmakers since 2019.

Before Schumer's visit, four top officials from Biden's administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, had traveled to China since June.

In September, Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng visited the US to attend the United Nations General Assembly and had bilateral discussions with the US side, followed by Foreign Minister Wang Yi's trip to the US, the first time a top Chinese diplomat visited Washington in seven years.

As a result, the two sides launched a series of dialogue mechanisms, including the rolling out of the Economic and Financial Working Groups, and held consultations on Asia-Pacific affairs, maritime affairs, arms control and nonproliferation, and foreign policies.

Now, following the presidential summit, the two countries seem to be edging toward a point at which they must decide whether and how to work and prevent flashpoints that could sidetrack the momentum toward stabilizing China-US relations, and move forward to realizing the San Francisco vision from a new starting point.

Expectations are running high among China watchers in both countries for the stability in relations to be sustained.

Wang Jisi, head of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University, said the summit could set the tone for stable relations in the near future while arrangements are being made for next year's official bilateral interactions.

Jan Berris, vice-president of the National Committee on United States-China Relations in New York, said she hoped the meeting between the two presidents would once again provide an opportunity for the US and China to work together, to forge a "strong, a stable and a mutually respectful" relationship.

Berris, who received the Chinese table tennis team in a reciprocal visit to the US in 1972, said for the past few years, there is a perception that the engagement benefited only China.

"I think it's absolutely, 100 percent wrong, and I think both Americans and Chinese have benefited equally from our relationship," she said at an event in Washington earlier this month to mark the 52nd anniversary of Ping-Pong Diplomacy between China and the US.

In recent weeks, top envoys in each other's capital have hailed the summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Biden as either the "best" of the seven meetings the two leaders have had since Biden became president, or a "milestone" in the history of the bilateral relationship.

They also vowed to follow through its important consensus.

Pressing priority

Xie Feng, Beijing's top envoy in Washington, said the "pressing" priority is to follow up on the summit, where the presidents discussed the right way for China and the US to get along in the new era and where they fostered a future-oriented vision.

"China always honors its words with actions," the envoy said in Washington on Dec 13. "It is important to prevent any flip-flopping and avoid making one step forward but then taking half or even two steps backward, lest it should cause new obstacles to bilateral relations."

Asked whether there was any concern about how the common agreements of the summit are implemented and to what degree, Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, said he is "hopeful" they would be carried out.

"We fully intend to implement the agreements made by President Biden and President Xi," Burns told China Daily on Dec 15, a month after the summit.

"We're doing that on fentanyl, on military-to-military communications. We will do it on AI. We'll do it on people-to-people, so we fully intend to do that," he said.

Burns said he had "a good conversation" with Xie, whom he had met more than 20 times before the former vice-minister of foreign affairs headed to Washington to assume the ambassadorial post in late May.

"So we're hopeful that both sides will implement the agreements that our presidents came to; we have to trust but verify, but we're hopeful," Burns said in Washington after giving an update on US-China relations at the Brookings Institution.

At the Brookings discussion, Burns called China a "systemic rival" and said that the relationship is complicated and complex and does not lend itself to simplistic analysis because "we're competing with China".

"But we're also engaging China. And we have to engage China," he said.

Stephen S. Roach, former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman, told China Daily, "'Systemic rivals' is a conflict-prone label — not nearly as constructive as 'cooperative rivals'."

In a recent article titled "America should aim for competitive coexistence with China", Joseph Nye, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, argues that for better or worse, the US is locked in a "cooperative rivalry" with China.

Klaus Larres, professor of international affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he believed Washington and Beijing arrived at the agreements at the Filoli estate outside San Francisco in a "serious, well-meaning and honest" way and have intentions to implement them fully.

"There should be no long delays before the agreements get implemented in practice. Any delays would give rise to mutual suspicions, which should be avoided," Larres, also a fellow at the Washington-based think tank Wilson Center, told China Daily.

Larres said there was, and still is, a lot of tension, but both sides have recognized that it is ill-advised and potentially dangerous and have thus embarked on a thawing.

The trend in continuing to stabilize relations could be maintained by much better communication at all levels, senior and junior, and through much greater political transparency, more travel diplomacy and constructive dialogues, Larres said.

Taiwan question in focus

Looking to next year, analysts said the relations face mounting uncertainties usually in a general election year, which typically features China-bashing rhetoric among the presidential candidates, and it is also a year for the Taiwan regional leadership election.

At the California meeting, Biden reaffirmed the five commitments he made in Bali, Indonesia, a year earlier, which include that the US does not seek a new Cold War, does not support "Taiwan independence", and has no intention to have a conflict with China.

"The US is not seeking the independence of Taiwan, nor are the Europeans," Larres said in an email.

"As far as I know, they all wish to uphold the status quo," he said. "The US and the EU do not favor Taiwan independence and would not support this."

Chas W. Freeman, former US assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said the Biden administration's affirmation that the US is not supporting "Taiwan independence" is not rhetoric.

It is intended to caution the candidates in the island elections next month "against assuming that they would have US support for a move toward 'independence'," said Freeman, now a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

"It is a reaffirmation of longstanding US policy that entails domestic political costs in the context of our 2024 elections, in which ill-considered support for Taiwan and fearmongering about China are almost certain to play a role," Freeman added.

Freeman also said 2023 saw a "moderation" in the tone of the relationship that constitutes a measure of detente, in which both sides clearly hope to stabilize things and to reduce the danger of accidental conflict.

"I remain confident that common interests will, in time, draw the United States and China together, but this will take time," he said.

For Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, prospects in the new year for further agreements on individual trade and investment issues have improved, as both heads of state want better relations.

"The problem is that US congressional hawks are pushing a long list of measures that would badly damage relations if enacted. It remains to be seen how big an election issue this agenda will become," Hufbauer said.

Right now, inflation, immigration, the Palestine-Israel conflict and the Russia-Ukraine conflict are more contentious issues for the US presidential election in November 2024, he said.

Overall, the China-US relationship is not as good as he had hoped a year ago, but it is better than expected, he said.

"It's regrettable that Biden did not eliminate most of the Trump tariffs on imports from China, but the year could have been worse. While US semiconductor exports were broadly restricted, and while more Chinese firms were added to the 'do-not-trade' entity list, Biden did not completely cave in to the demands of congressional China hawks," he said.