Experts hopeful of improved dialogue

Visible efforts seen in China, US to better pursue beneficial cooperation

US political observers at an annual conference have expressed hope for more communication between the US and China, buoyed by recent efforts.

"Recently, we've had very visible efforts by both the United States and China to put a floor under the downward spiral in US tribulations," said Kenneth Lieberthal, a senior fellow emeritus in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, in a keynote speech at the Big Data China 2022 Annual Conference held online in mid-December.

The observers praised the summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden during the G20 in Bali, Indonesia, and suggested broader and deeper dialogue.

Lieberthal described the Bali summit as a "turnaround", noting that he is "looking forward to regularized communications to prevent miscalculation that might lead to conflict".

He pointed out that the main obstacle in US-China relations is "each side's distrust of both the short-term and the long-term intentions of the other side", and that the distrust is "wide-ranging".

"Against this background, both sides want to improve the atmospherics. They want to engage in some mutually beneficial cooperation. They certainly want to reduce the chances of actual miscalculations leading to conflict," he said.

In wake of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in October and the US' midterm elections in November, both presidents "see opportunities to be a little more flexible, to look abroad more and take new initiatives", Lieberthal said.

He expects US-China relations to "remain very modest" in 2023.

"On the US side, our measures to deal with China … are increasingly, to my mind, protectionism, often involving relative or too crude industrial policies," Lieberthal said.

He said US officials are focused on competition, while competition is "kind of an all-purpose rationale" rather than "a recognizable strategy".

"Everything is to compete with China, but strategy involves specifications, you know, and goals, timelines, benchmarks, some priorities, and so on and so forth," he said.