The US and China are heading toward a more strained relationship with increased mutual distrust, a new study by David Shambaugh, the director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University has shown.
This will be the case no matter who wins the US presidential election and who fills the new Chinese Politburo next week, Shambaugh said.
“The competitive elements in the relationship are growing and becoming primary, while the cooperative ones are secondary and declining,” he added.
A senior US congressional staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that such a development could impact Taiwan by causing Beijing to further resent the Washington-Taipei relationship and putting new strains on arms sales, trade and diplomatic policies.
At the same time, Elizabeth Economy, the director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that US-China relations would no longer be focused exclusively on trade, Taiwan and human rights.
“The next [US] president will have to work with China on virtually every global challenge,” she said. “China’s leaders no longer simply want to export their goods and services, they want to export their culture, their values and ideals.”
According to Shambaugh’s gloomy forecast, meetings between Washington and Beijing representatives are becoming more pro forma and “increasingly acrimonious.”
He said that beneath the surface of these official exchanges, mutual distrust is pervasive, with few officials on either side on a strong mission to cooperate with the other. Rows are breaking out over trade and investment conditions, technology, espionage and cyberattacks, as well as about global challenges like climate change, Syria, nuclear challenges like Iran and North Korea, and military postures in the Asia-Pacific region.
“As China’s global footprint has emerged onto every continent, it is increasingly bumping up against longstanding American interests — thus adding a global dimension the relationship has never had,” Shambaugh said.
While it is not unnatural that frictions should arise between a rising power and an established one, there is also a deep interdependence.
“To some extent, this helps to buffer the strategic competition and keep the relationship from becoming fully adversarial,” Shambaugh said, adding: “Given the global importance of US-China relations, this is a marriage in which divorce is not an option. The stakes are high. Whether [US] President Barack Obama or Republican challenger Mitt Romney win the presidential election, their China policies are likely to bear many commonalities.”
Both will seek to cooperate with China, but simultaneously adopt tougher trade and diplomatic policies towards it. Managing competition will become the overriding task of the new US and Chinese governments, and Shambaugh says this will require mutual pragmatism and mutual accommodation.
He finishes his report by saying: “It is not at all clear that the respective political cultures and political systems, national identities, social values and world views are conducive to a newly cooperative US-China relationship. It will be all the new leaders in Beijing and Washington can do to maintain a modicum of stability between the two sides.”
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
HOSPITALITY HIT: Hotels in Hualien have an occupancy rate of 10 percent, down from 30 percent before the earthquake, a Tourism Administration official said The Executive Yuan yesterday unveiled a stimulus package of vouchers and subsidies to revive tourism in Hualien County following a quake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale. The tremor on April 3, which killed at least 17 people and left two others missing, caused the county an estimated NT$3 billion (US$92.7 million) in damages. The Ministry of Economic Affairs is to issue vouchers worth NT$200 at the price of NT$100 for purchases at the Dongdamen Night Market (東大門夜市) in Hualien City to boost spending, a ministry official told a news conference after a Cabinet meeting in Taipei. The ministry plans to issue 18,400