Da Wei and Wang Jisi on US-China Relations

"As long as ‘Sullivanism's America’ and ‘Trumpism's America’ continue to oppose one another, the US’s strategy towards China will remain uncertain and US-China relations will continue to suffer."

I am using the excuse, or the hook I should say, of this week’s almost two-hour long phone call between president Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to share a set of commentaries recently published by the Chinese journal International Economic Review and penned by some of China’s most prominent US specialists under the theme “prospects for Sino-US relations”. Today’s post focuses on Wang Jisi and Da Wei’s commentaries, which both highlight the polarisation of American politics and society in general as being one of the main, if not the main, destabilising factor(s) in US-China relations today.

Key points

Da Wei:

• Neo-liberal Clintonism has now been replaced with more conservative approaches to America’s engagement with the world, namely Sullivanism and, especially, Trumpism.

• Although Sullivanism and Trumpism have their roots in the same malaise that American society is currently experiencing, and although both perceive Beijing in a somewhat similar light, they have fundamen…