Download
Why the U.S. should stop speaking to China from 'a position of strength'
By Kate Kui
04:01

China and the U.S. apparently had intense debates on each other's policies in the first high-level strategic dialogue in Alaska in the past couple of days.

While the U.S. is criticizing China for breaching protocols, the focus is still that they think "China has no intention to change its ways" without recognizing how the U.S. itself has been handling issues with China, interfering with China's own domestic affairs and whether it will have its own intention to comply with international rules and make a change.

While China's delegation showed its sincerity and arrived in Alaska to renew the dialogue mechanism, which has existed for many years during the Obama administration and facilitated as a productive conduit to promote bilateral communications, the U.S. viewed it more or less as a one-off event.

Before the talks, the U.S. took a series of actions against China, including subpoenas to multiple Chinese information technology companies over national security concerns, and sanctions on 24 Chinese officials involved in the implementation of stringent security laws in Hong Kong.

While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made blunt remarks in his opening remarks: "We will discuss our deep concerns with actions by China including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the united States, economic coercion of our allies." 

China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi responded in his speech that the United States is using its military power and financial supremacy to exert pressure on countries and abusing national security to threaten the future of international trade.

The U.S. has no right to talk to China from a position of strength, he added.

From monetary and fiscal policy to governance, the U.S. has much more on its own plate to clean up before trying to act superior to other countries in the world. 

As the most important economy globally, it has failed to act responsibly on global trade, its own domestic human rights issue, and even climate change. Its recent irresponsible money printing has not only created a huge fiscal deficit to itself but also is exporting inflation globally. Most likely, it is China, as the second largest economy, that will have to pay the price for such irrational behavior.

Moreover, the current U.S. fiscal debt is about $30 trillion while its GDP stands at $21 trillion, such a debt ratio is similar to that of Greece in 2010, when the nation went bankrupt. While we are not saying that this time U.S. government will default necessarily, it did once breached the international treaty. The gold price was fixed at $35 per ounce in 1971, when the U.S. abandoned the gold standard unilaterally, leading the gold price to soar to $180 per ounce at the end of 1974.

If the U.S. government keeps printing money to defer its hidden crisis with increasing fiscal deficit, the result will be obvious: either the U.S. government will go bankrupt, or the world gives up on the U.S. dollar as an anchor.

On the contrary, China's central bank is the only global major central bank that has kept shrinking its balance sheet since 2009. From this perspective, China has a lot more credit globally than the U.S. 

Last year, the Chinese government has demonstrated to the whole world that its governance is efficient and transparent during the control of the pandemic, while the U.S. government's failure to act in the crisis is an obvious comparison.

Search Trends