Senior academics from the United States and China held a forum in Singapore on Friday, with ways to stabilise the Sino-US relationship among the top issues on the agenda amid worsening ties in recent years.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the event, one of the participants, international relations scholar Jia Qingguo from Peking University said that while both countries are not in a Cold War, they are moving in that direction.
Two dangerous trends are emerging, he added. One is thinking of everything in terms of security.
“For example, the US is now coming up with a list of so-called entities, and policy after policy of delinking the technological relationship in the name of national security,” he said.
The US includes more than 600 Chinese establishments on the Entity List, which blocks them from buying technology from American suppliers unless they have government authorisation.
The other, said Professor Jia, is seeing both sides as ideological foes when this is not the case. In his view, they share common values such as equality, democracy and freedom.
But once the ideological differences are emphasised, the relationship becomes a contention between identity politics – and this would mean there is very little room for compromise, pragmatic solutions or management of the relationship, he said.
An example of emphasis on ideological differences was when US President Joe Biden, in his State of the Union address in 2022, referred to the Ukraine war as “a battle between democracy and autocracies”, although he made no mention of China in that part of the speech, The Straits Times reported.
Fellow participant Jude Blanchette, who holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), believes the reality is more complicated than what can be captured by the concept of a Cold War.
“I think the great challenge for us is to find a better framework to describe the relationship,” he said in a separate interview at the Parkroyal Collection Marina Bay hotel, where the one-day exchange was held.
This would be a framework with the “undeniable elements of rivalry” between two global powers with significant military capabilities that are rubbing up against each other in a number of domains, but are also inextricably linked economically and technologically.
The trilateral exchange involved 120 participants, including scholars from the CSIS think-tank and Peking University’s Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding. It was organised by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS).
The discussion, titled US-China Relations: The Future Of International Order, also involved topics such as the implications of US-China competition, how to promote cooperation and the role of other countries, such as those in South-east Asia.
Blanchette described the US-China relationship as being in a state of transition.
The US remains a powerful actor in the international system, but is no longer as influential as it was in the 1990s.
But a much more confident, assertive and powerful Beijing – which the US has to adjust to – is still learning to navigate the geopolitical environment, which he described as “building the plane as it is flying”.
Christopher Johnstone, senior adviser and Japan chair at CSIS, noted at the forum that every major alliance that the US has in the Indo-Pacific region has been growing recently, citing the examples of Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
This is not because the US has engaged in “brilliant diplomacy”, he said. “It is happening because all those partners are deeply concerned about their security environment, and by China’s behaviour.”
On what can be done, Prof Jia said guard rails are needed, not just to prevent an accidental military conflict between the US and China, but in their political relationship too.
“The US Congress is not supposed to poke into the eyes of the Chinese all the time. How to restrain their behaviour – that is a big challenge for both countries,” said Prof Jia, who is former dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University.
Participants at the forum also included Singapore government officials and representatives from RSIS.
The Ministry of Defence’s deputy secretary for policy, Brigadier-General Kelvin Fan, believes that while competition between the US and China is likely to increase, there are many ways to prevent it from escalating into military conflict. Crucially, he said, communication between both sides is lacking.
“What we need to do is not just more communication, but also better-quality communication underpinned by trust and strategic empathy.”
RSIS executive deputy chairman Ong Keng Yong said the face-to-face interactions at the exchange between scholars from both sides is valuable.
“Even if you might be well aware of what the other side’s views are, to hear it from each other and then to allow the other side to rebut you, or to give you an answer as to why you have this wrongful perception, is important.”
