US should manage ties responsibly to prevent competition veering into conflict: China Daily editorial

Although US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's visit to China, starting on Tuesday, marks his first China trip in that post and the first visit of a national security advisor of the United States over the past eight years, his meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is their sixth in the past year and a half.

That their meeting came soon after his arrival in the Chinese capital conveys the sense of urgency with which the two sides want to get down to business, with both sides hoping the talks will be productive in terms of their respective agendas.

The Chinese side released a list of redlines and to-dos for the US side on Sunday, while Sullivan's busy itinerary ahead of his China trip showed the US was keen to try and put some leverage in place for the to-do list it has issued for Beijing.

Since the topics of discussion include the two countries' respective approaches to the Taiwan question, South China Sea disputes and the economic and trade issues that have become prominent friction-makers, how productive the visit can be is open to speculation. Particularly since China's efforts to try and help resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Middle East crisis and the Korean Peninsula issue only hinder Washington's geopolitical game-playing.

Sullivan is probably in a better position than anybody else in the Joe Biden administration to know how the US has transformed relevant security cooperation, dialogue and exchanges, based on mutual respect and equality, into confrontation, bickering and disconnection. It is the US' misjudgment of China that has made itself a victim of its own paranoia that it might lose its hegemony.

So although Beijing and Washington have more than 20 dialogue and communication channels open in various fields thanks to their consensus that they must responsibly manage their differences and effectively control risks to prevent conflicts, the effect of these has been limited. The root cause of the problems between the two sides is that the US does not have the right perception of China and thus it is unwilling to meet China halfway to develop stable, healthy and thriving relations featuring win-win cooperation, mutual respect and equality as Beijing has proposed.

If the US side had the correct perception of China, it would realize that China does not desire hegemony nor is it seeking to export its ideology. China pursues peaceful development and win-win cooperation, and it firmly upholds the international system and international order with the United Nations at its core. The US should appreciate China's systemic complementarity to it in not only economy and trade, but also culture and governance.

The US has its core interests and redlines that it requires countries to respect. In turn, it should respect those of other countries. It should accept that as the global superpower it has a corresponding responsibility to the world rather than the entitlement to make itself a law unto the international community.

The US national security advisor should therefore make good use of his first visit to China to gain more firsthand experience of the country to see how it is different in reality to that portrayed in Washington as the "primary strategic challenge" to the US. If Sullivan makes his visit with a closed mind and an inflexible message, no matter how many times he communicates with the Chinese side in whatever place, he is just turning an opportunity for promoting productive ties into a show for show's sake. Sullivan said in Beijing that there was an effort to ensure US-China competition did not veer into conflict "and that we find ways to work together where our interests align". The US should act on those words.