Guardrails will fail if US allows ties to be hijacked by hysterical neo-McCarthyism: China Daily editorial

Given the global attention as well as the significance of China-US relations, it is natural that the world's most important pair of nation-to-nation ties featured prominently in the news conference Foreign Minister Qin Gang held on the sidelines of the ongoing session of China's top legislature on Tuesday.

Citing the recent unmanned airship incident as an example, Qin gave a succinct account of how the US overreacted and allowed the incident to snowball into a diplomatic crisis that could have been avoided.

The US hysteria over the so-called Chinese spy balloon incident is clear proof that the US perception on China has deviated far from the healthy and rational track.

As Qin vividly put it, like the first button in the shirt being put wrong, the United States, viewing China through a distorted lens, not only deems China as its primary rival but also the most consequential geopolitical challenge. Hence, it is seeking to pin China down with various containment and suppression policies in a wide range of fields, including on the economy, science and technology, and geopolitical fronts.

What the US is doing is engaging China in a zero-sum game, which can only produce an all-lose outcome and do a disservice to world peace and stability.

The US says it is establishing guardrails for relations with China and is not seeking conflict, but what this means in practice is that China is not supposed to respond with words or actions to the US' damaging smears or deeds.

No independent country can accept such corralling.

Obviously, if not reined in, the US' containment and unfair competition targeting China will run wild, and no guardrails will be able to prevent bilateral ties from derailing. The only way out for China and the US to break the current impasse is that the US must rid itself of its strategic anxiety and recover its reason and rationality.

Drawing experience from his previous post as Chinese ambassador to the US, Qin said the China-US relationship should be determined by common interests and the shared responsibilities of the two countries, and by friendship between the two peoples, rather than by US domestic politics or hysterical neo-McCarthyism.

For common interests, we do not need to look further than last year's bilateral trade, which hit a record high of $690.6 billion in 2022, according to newly released US official data, despite the dark shadow cast by the US' decoupling rhetoric and growing hostility toward China.

Not to mention that all the common woes and challenges the world is facing today, ranging from climate change to the Ukraine crisis, require smooth communication and close collaboration between Washington and Beijing to address. It is high time the US took the right direction to get along with China as that would benefit both countries and the world at large.