Panelists: China, US lean toward practical management of risks

Panelists at a Davos panel on Wednesday said Washington and Beijing, after last year's bouts of economic pressure and countermeasures, are leaning toward practical risk management — strengthening communication channels and crisis guardrails to keep frictions over trade, technology and other flashpoints from escalating.

Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who has written extensively on the "Thucydides Trap," cautioned against treating any near-term easing in US-China tensions as a permanent settlement.

"A landing point, as if we had a permanent place to land, is not likely," Allison said at the panel discussion on "US and China: Where Will They Land?" during the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Looking ahead to 2026, he said that the relationship is shaped by "mutual deterrence," as both sides have demonstrated an ability to inflict "significant harm" on the other, an awareness he suggested can have a stabilizing effect.

"A mutual deterrence in which each of us can do significant harm to each other has a certain stabilizing effect," Allison said.

The Douglas Dillon professor of government at Harvard Kennedy School noted that in addition to top-level diplomacy that may set the tone, long-term stability also requires a "forensic" approach to governance — constant, lower-level technical communication to prevent accidents from turning into catastrophes.

"There need to be at least one or two levels of their assistance who are in continuous, candid, private conversations about potential misunderstandings," he said, citing the Biden-era channel between US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi as an example of advance communication intended to reduce miscalculation.

Allison also noted that the US is beginning to view China as a "full-scale economic peer," a realization that he believes "reflects some more realism in Washington".

Also speaking at the panel discussion, former Australian prime minister and current Ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd said that the key challenge in US-China relations is not to seek a final "endpoint," but to build practical mechanisms to manage strategic competition and reduce the risk of crisis, conflict and war.

Rudd said the core question is whether a bilateral relationship management framework is possible — what he has long called "managed strategic competition."

Without it, "unmanaged strategic competition" can end in confrontation, leaving the world to stand back and wait for Graham's Thucydides logic to "unfold with all of its problematic consequences," he said.

He also said both sides appear interested in stabilizing the relationship "for the year ahead," for "different but partly overlapping reasons," but added he did not think it was possible to "project beyond that."

Rudd distilled the complex US-China relationship into three specific arenas that determine the temperature of the global order: the "three T's": tariffs, technology and Taiwan.

Angela Zhang Huyue, a law professor with the University of Southern California, said she was optimistic that the relationship could be more stable this year than a year ago, for three reasons.

First, she said Washington has started to recognize that a containment strategy and "maximum pressure" have not worked as intended and may even have accelerated China's rise as the technological gap narrowed.

Second, she said last year's trade war and economic turmoil helped both sides identify each other's "choke points," reducing uncertainty and the risk of miscalculation by clarifying vulnerabilities and strengths.

Lastly, she said neither side has an appetite for instability because both have strong incentives to keep the relationship steady.

The law professor argued that the technology contest is more fluid than many policymakers assume, with pressure sometimes producing unintended consequences.

"Could you imagine one day there is a scenario that America actually wants China to buy its chips, just like how it wants it to buy soybeans? It's not a joke," Zhang said.

Another panelist, US Senator Christopher Coons, said that there is "bipartisan support for a clear-eyed engagement with China," and that the two countries are economically intertwined but face serious security tensions, and that the most pressing issue is artificial intelligence.

He also noted that there are opportunities to establish a framework to work with China, but said that risks of accidents and misunderstanding remain high, in part because "there aren't enough lines of communication between our militaries."

Zhao Hai, director of international politics studies at the National Institute for Global Strategy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pushed back against the narrative of a "tech war," suggesting that the existential risks of AI require bilateral regulation rather than containment.

He said AI is not a zero-sum contest, but a shared challenge, warning that advances in the technology could threaten humanity's common security.

"We should re-establish government-to-government and people-to-people talks on how to regulate AI and how to minimize its negative impact on both of our societies," he said.

The expert also said he advocated for formal, multi-level mechanisms to regulate the relationship.

"So hopefully this continuous dialog between the two top leaders will maintain at least the stability of the bilateral relationship, and on top of that we can improve our strategic reassurance and have more trust between the two countries," he said.