There were a lot of raised eyebrows and quiet chuckles this month when President-elect Donald Trump invited President Xi Jinping to Washington for his inauguration. Foreign leaders don’t attend our inaugurations, of course, but I think Trump’s idea was actually a good one. Having just returned from a trip to China, I can tell you that if I were drawing a picture of relations between our two countries today, it would be two elephants looking at each other through a straw.
That is not good. Because suddenly the US and China have a lot more to talk about than just trade and Taiwan — and who’s the undisputed heavyweight champion of the 21st century.
The world today faces three epochal challenges right now: runaway artificial intelligence, climate change and spreading disorder from collapsing states. The US and China are the world’s AI superpowers. They are the world’s two leading carbon emitters. And they have the world’s two biggest naval forces, capable of projecting power globally. America and China are the only two powers, in other words, that together can offer any hope of managing superintelligence, superstorms and superempowered small groups of angry men in failed states — not to mention superviruses — at a time when the world has become superfused.
Which is why we need an updated Shanghai Communique, the document that set out parameters for normalising US-China relations when Richard Nixon went to China and met Mao Zedong in 1972. Right now, unfortunately, we are denormalising. Our two countries are drifting farther and farther apart at all levels. In the three decades I have been visiting Beijing and Shanghai, I had never felt what I felt on this trip — as if I were the only American in China.
Of course I wasn’t, but the American accents you would usually hear at a big Shanghai train station or Beijing hotel lobby were notably absent. Chinese parents say that many families no longer want their kids to go to the US for schooling, because they fear it’s becoming dangerous — the FBI might follow them while they are in America, and their own government might suspect them when they return home. The same is now true for US students in China.
A professor in China who works with foreign students told me that some Americans don’t want to study there anymore for semesters abroad, in part because they don’t relish competing against superintense Chinese undergraduates and in part because, these days, having studied or worked in China can raise security suspicions with future potential US employers.
True, underneath all the talk of the new China-US cold war, there are still over 270,000 Chinese students studying in America, according to the US Embassy in Beijing, but there are now only about 1,100 American college students studying in China. That is down from around 15,000 a decade ago — but up from a few hundred in 2022, not long after Covid peaked. If these trends continue, where will the next generation of Chinese-speaking American scholars and diplomats come from and, similarly, Chinese who will understand America?
A new Shanghai Communique could help govern the new realities that both countries and the world face. The first is that US and Chinese tech firms are racing towards artificial general intelligence; theirs is more focused on enhancing industrial production and surveillance and ours on a broad array of uses, from writing movie scripts to designing new drugs. Even if artificial general intelligence — a sentient machine — is five or seven years away, Beijing and Washington need to be collaborating on a set of rules that we will both use to govern AI and that the rest of the world must follow.
That would be to embed into all AI systems algorithms that ensure that the system cannot be used for destructive purposes by bad actors and cannot go off on its own to destroy the humans who built it.
On managing climate change, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon and the US, the second largest, need to agree on a set of strategies to get the world to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 — to reduce the ruinous health, economic and extreme weather challenges wrought by climate change, which are going to create increasing disorder in failing states.
As I tried to explain to my Chinese interlocutors on this trip: You think we are each other’s enemy. We might be, but we also now have a big common enemy, just as we did in 1972. Only this time it is not Russia. It’s disorder. More and more nation-states are falling apart — into disorder — and haemorrhaging their people as migrants scrambling to get to zones of order.
It’s not only Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Somalia in the Middle East racked by disorder; it’s also some of China’s best friends in the global south, like Venezuela and Zimbabwe and Myanmar. And more than a few participants in China’s Belt and Road Initiative to which China has lent billions are struggling — including Sri Lanka, Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Montenegro and Tanzania. Beijing is now starting to demand its money back from them and has throttled down new lending. But that is just making the crises worse in some of these countries.
Only the US and China working together with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank will have the resources, power and influence to stem some of this disorder, which is why I repeatedly challenged my Chinese interlocutors: Why are you hanging around with losers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Iran? How could you be neutral between Hamas and Israel?
China went from an impoverished isolated country to an industrial giant with a rising middle class in a world in which the rules of the game — on trade and geopolitics — were largely set by the US after World War II for the benefit and stability of all.
The idea that China can thrive in a world shaped by the values of a murderous thief like Putin, who is an agent of disorder, or by the global south — or by China alone — is crazy.
If I were Trump, I’d explore a “Nixon goes to China” move — a rapprochement between the US and China that totally isolates Russia and Iran. That’s how you end the Ukraine war, shrink Iran’s influence in the Middle East and defuse tensions with Beijing in one move. Trump is unpredictable enough to try it. - The New York Times
Thomas L Friedman
The writer is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a weekly columnist for TNYT
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