Current Sino-U.S. Relations

Chinese President Hu Jintao spoke with the U.S. President-elect Barack Obama earlier on the phone. Hu Jintao told Obama that the diplomatic relations between China and the United States have had ups and downs since they were established thirty years ago, yet on the whole they continue to progress.

As the largest developing country and the largest developed country, China and the U.S. share extensive common interests on major issues, such as world peace and development, and they also shoulder important responsibility.

In fact, from the U.S.’s point of view, the role that China plays internationally has become increasingly important. For example; in mid-November, the leaders of twenty countries discussed strategic measures in response to the financial turmoil in Washington, and since China owns nearly two trillion U.S. dollars of foreign exchange reserves, Hu Jintao played an important role during the summit.

Fred Bergsten, the director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, one of Washington’s important economic think tanks, stated that “the traditional relationship where ‘the world catches cold when the U.S. sneezes’ no longer holds.” Things have changed: Global economic growth is now driven by China.

In general, China’s national strategy has two core objectives: safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity and establishing international prestige and influence. China uses its influence over economic resources in its neighboring third-world countries and international organizations to in order to share, along with the U.S., the responsibility of being a dominant world power.

With the growth and development of China’s overall strength, the core of U.S. foreign policy has become its relationship with China. Mainstream philosophy in the U.S. has gradually changed from negative feeling toward China in Nixon’s era to being supportive of positive relations now. Already the U.S. has begun planning and developing means of collaboration in order to further enhance the partnership between the two countries as they share responsibility in international matters.

As a whole, the guiding principles for working with America under Hu Jintao’s leadership still tend to match up with American policies, including: working together to solve the financial crisis, supporting the U.S. in implementing wars against terrorism, maintaining the Korean peninsula’s stability, promoting peace in the Middle East, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cooperating to tackle the global climate change problem, as well as keeping the peace in the Taiwan Strait.

Unless the constructive and cooperative relationship between China and the U.S. is assaulted by significant factors, or the relationship falls out due to differing interests on both sides in the next few years, there is a very small possibility of the U.S. returning to the Bush administration’s policy of 2001, in which China was considered a “strategic competitor” that threatened U.S. national interests.