In Chapter 8 of this book, Yafeng Xia discussed in detail Deng Xiaoping’s efforts in maintaining a tie with the United States while not weakening the Party’s rule in China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen incident. In this chapter, I focus more on Jiang Zemin’s handling of Sino-US relations during Deng Xiaoping’s last years and beyond when Jiang was the de jure ‘core’ of the CCP leadership. In fact, with the retaining of some of Jiang’s supporters in the powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo, Jiang’s power penetrated deep into the first term of Hu Jintao (2002–2007).

Just one year after the outbreak of the pandemic in 2019, Sino-US relations witnessed a freefall, plunging to a nadir not seen since the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 when the George Bush administration and its European allies swiftly imposed a wide range of penalties, from military and economic sanctions to the termination of high-level contacts. Major polls showed that most Americans had unfavourable opinions of China, which was a drastic change from prior polls (Gallup Poll, 2021). In China, while the aftermath of the Tiananmen incident sealed the political career of former general Party secretary Zhao Ziyang, it marked the beginning of the era of Jiang Zemin, then the Party secretary of Shanghai and a new protégé of Deng Xiaoping.