Panelists: China, US lean toward practical risk control

After last year's economic measures and countermeasures, the United States and China are leaning toward practical risk management, strengthening communication channels and crisis guardrails to keep frictions over trade, technology and other flashpoints from escalating, experts said on Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland.

They made the remarks at a panel discussion on the topic "US and China: Where Will They Land?" held as part of the ongoing World Economic Forum annual meeting.

Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon professor of government at Harvard University, who coined the term "Thucydides Trap" — a situation in which a rising power sparks fear in an established power, which escalates toward war — cautioned that any near-term easing in US-China tensions should not be seen as a permanent settlement.

"A landing point, as if we had a permanent place to land, is not likely," he said.

Last year, the US launched a series of economic sanctions on China, imposing steep tariffs on Chinese goods and adopting measures to block Chinese products and investments. China was compelled to take countermeasures, and a truce was reached only after five rounds of high-level economic and trade negotiations.

Looking ahead to 2026, Allison said that the US-China relationship is shaped by "mutual deterrence", as both sides have demonstrated the ability to inflict "significant harm" on each other, noting that this awareness could have a stabilizing effect.

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, Allison said.

He added that the US is beginning to view China as a "full-scale economic peer", a realization the Harvard Kennedy School professor said he believes "reflects some more realism in Washington".

Kevin Rudd, Australian ambassador to the US, said 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 risks of crisis, conflict and war.

Rudd, who has also served as Australia's prime minister, said the core question is whether a US-China bilateral relationship management framework is possible — a framework he described as a "managed strategic competition".

"Unmanaged strategic competition" can end in confrontation, leaving the world to wait for the Thucydides Trap to "unfold with all of its problematic consequences", he said.

Rudd distilled the complex US-China relationship into three specific areas that determine the temperature of the global order — tariffs, technology and Taiwan. He said that both sides appear interested in stabilizing the relationship in the year ahead for "different but partly overlapping reasons", adding that it was not possible to "project beyond that".

Angela Huyue Zhang, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said she was optimistic that the US-China relationship would be more stable this year for three reasons.

First, Washington has started to realize that a containment strategy and "maximum pressure" do not work as intended, and these may have even accelerated China's rise as the technological gap narrowed.

Second, last year's trade war allowed both sides to identify each other's "choke points", and this clarification on vulnerabilities and strengths helped reduce uncertainty and the risk of miscalculation.

And third, neither side has an appetite for instability, because both have strong incentives to keep the relationship steady.

Zhang argued that the technology competition 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."

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

There are opportunities to establish a framework to work with China, but the risk of misunderstandings remains high, in part because "there aren't enough lines of communication between our militaries", Coons said.

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

AI is not a zero-sum contest, but a shared challenge, Zhao said. "We should reestablish 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."

Zhao also advocated formal, multilevel mechanisms to regulate China-US ties. "Hopefully, the continuous dialogue between our two leaders will help maintain stability of the bilateral relationship," he said.

huanxinzhao@chinadailyusa.com