Why the relationship between the US and China Matters

On 18– 19 March 2021, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met senior Chinese officials, including Blinken's counterpart Wang Yi, at a summit in Anchorage. Observers from all over the world hoped that bilateral relations would improve after their deterioration under the previous administration of Donald J. Trump. Instead, the Anchorage summit was an ill- tempered one characterized by US protests over repression in Hong Kong and the persecution of Xinjiang's Uighur population, and Chinese rebukes over the US’ domineering and hegemonic behaviour. This meeting indicated that worsening diplomatic relations between Washington DC and Beijing were not purely the product of Trump's ‘America First’ agenda (let alone his erratic conduct of foreign affairs and his often racist and Sinophobic outbursts on camera and on Twitter); there were also structural factors behind Sino- American tensions and the relationship between the US and China was now comparable to that between the US and the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 20th century (McCurry 2021; BBC Two 2021). This was confirmed by the recent Interim National Security Strategy, in which Biden argued that China ‘is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system’ (The White House 2021, 8). Indeed, the Anchorage fallout was not the only one in the post- Trump era. In December of the same year, at the Beijing Winter Olympics, the Biden administration announced a diplomatic boycott as a reaction to China's ongoing ‘genocide’ and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses, to which the Chinese authorities responded that US diplomats were not even invited in the first place. In the summer of 2022, the US and China were involved in what became known as the fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, when the People's Liberation Army responded to a visit to Taiwan by the Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi with a show of force around and in proximity of the island.