The clear-eyed guard against misfortune,

and the wise plan for disasters the future may bring.

明者防祸于未萌，智者图患于将来

–A Three Kingdoms saying, quoted by Xi Jinping on May 19, 2015

 

This essay analyzes trends in Chinese views of U.S.-China interdependence from Xi Jinping’s rise to the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how Xi Jinping put forward an expansive vision of national security that highlights the risks of interdependence, while also expanding China’s use of its leverage in interdependent relationships to coerce others. These efforts have intensified significantly due to the Trump administration’s coercive actions on trade and technology. Xi’s and Trump’s shifts also accelerated a reassessment of the risks and benefits of interdependence among a broader set of Chinese elites. Most significantly, many former officials and prominent thinkers appear to be newly convinced that longstanding forms of interdependence with the United States pose intolerable risks to China. This essay concludes by assessing the evolution of elite Chinese views of U.S.-China interdependence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which many see as a potential opportunity for China to reset its interdependence with other countries on more favorable terms for China.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world, leaving healthcare systems in crisis and economies paralyzed, many prominent voices are reassessing the risks and benefits of globalization and interdependence. In the United States, some officials and scholars have begun to observe that the frozen state of global trade provides a unique opportunity to restructure the interdependent U.S.-China economic relationship by bringing supply chains home and reducing integration with Chinese markets. In China, where an economic recovery is already underway, elite voices are calling for the leadership to use the crisis to reset the terms of U.S.-China interdependence to the benefit of China—building on a major, years-long reassessment of interdependence. That reassessment, from Xi Jinping’s rise to the COVID-19 pandemic, is the subject of this essay.[1]

The debate in the United States on what some call “decoupling” (脱钩) is often curiously devoid of the views of the Chinese side of the couple. Many accounts pay far too little attention to how Chinese elites understand Sino-American interdependence, often caricaturing Chinese leaders’ views. As scholars and policymakers assess the fraught future of U.S.-China relations after COVID-19 and the centrality of geo-economics to 21st-century strategy, it is essential to understand Chinese thinking on U.S.-China interdependence. Interdependent relations are maintained not only by flows of trade, investment, and technology transfer but also by people’s beliefs that such relations are benign or tolerable. Across multiple domains, Chinese officials and elites are reassessing the risks and benefits of interdependece.

The article's full-text is available here.

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