Editor's note: U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen is visiting China from July 6 to 9. And the world is watching whether her trip will bring about some shifts and changes to the relationship between the world's two largest economies. We've interviewed Warwick Powell, the Adjunct Professor at the Queensland University of Technology and the Chairman of Smart Trade Networks. We've covered how America's deeply-rotted systematic problems and present-day political pressure are shaping U.S.'s relationship with China and talked about how the results of Yellen's visit will be affected by these elements.

Edited excerpts:

CGTN: Professor Powell, here's what everyone's thinking about. Several weeks ago, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in China. Many saw that trip as having yielded little results. Do you see the same for Yellen's visit?

Warwick Powell: I think the first thing that we need to come to grips with, if you will, around the world and each country and each group of people will have its own perspective on this, and that is we have already left the unipolar world. The unipolar world or the unipolar moment has ended. Pax Americana, is no longer the practical reality of how the world works today. In other words, we have entered into the early stages of a new, multipolar, global order. That's the first thing. Coming to grips with that fundamental reality helps ground you in the realities of the world as it is as opposed to the hopes and wishes that one may have about how the world ought to be.

The thing to be mindful of, in my view, with these sorts of visits is the promise that the talk will somehow be followed by the walk. And I think it is increasingly clear to people around the world, not just in China, but any observer from the Global South and elsewhere that the U.S., in particular, has developed a habit of speaking and saying one thing whilst doing another.

So in the Chinese would say, "Shuo Yi Tao, Zuo Yi Tao (说一套做一套)." And the habit is something that the world by and large has actually become accustomed to and knows exactly what's going on.

CGTN: Now, clearly, China and the United States are not loving each other at the moment. We can't even say we trust one another. And this "Shuo Yi Tao, Zuo Yi Tao (说一套做一套)" is at the center of it. The Biden administration keeps on saying that it wants better relations with China, but it also keeps slapping all kinds of sanctions and restrictions on China as well.

And there's an elephant in the room, no pun intended. We are looking at the 2024 Presidential Election. Republicans are announcing their runs one after another. So, even if Yellen's visit gets some positive results, shouldn't we be worried about the administration bow under domestic political pressure and do something that negates all the good coming out of this?

Warwick Powell: Absolutely. So, the common thing across the political spectrum is that the U.S. has adversaries, and China is actually the main game. The only difference is a tactical one. Do you deal with Ukraine and Russia first? Or is that a distraction from China? That's it. So, Biden has got pressures domestically, coming from all sides, whether it's coming from the sort of Democratic challengers who aren't getting much air at the moment, Kennedy and others, who are basically saying that the U.S. should pull out of the Ukraine debacle and focus its energies on China. And then on the Republican side and the neo-con side, you've got that mixture of attitudes as well. He's got no room to move. If he's going to find a pathway forward to November. In fact, in this kind of feeble environment, any bit of loose rhetoric that could be interpreted or spun as weakness and concessionary will be used against him.

So, the next 18 months or so is going to see, I think, a domestic environment in the U.S. which drives the political establishment to increasingly hostile rhetoric at a minimum, and possibly a need to prove that you're not just talk. The fact that the administration got pressured into spending $400,000 on high tech missile technology to knock out a balloon, tells you how much pressure is on this administration now in relation to its stance vis-a-vis China.

I think the fact of the matter is this: The challenges that the U.S. has faced over the last 10 to 15 years has eventually boiled to this point. But what are the challenges? The challenges have been an economic system that has failed to live up to the promise. De-industrialization and hollowing-out has been a reality. And the debate has been whether it's because of trade with China, that is China stole the jobs, or because technology automated the jobs away.

The reality though is that on the trade front. Yes. Some of the activities that used to happen in North America now happen in China, but it has delivered aggregate benefits. That's what trade does. The problem has been distributional. The aggregate benefits didn't get distributed across the American body politic in a way that made the benefits fair across the system. Wall Street benefited, but Main Street didn't. That's a domestic policy problem and a system problem. Because finance capital has actually become the dominant player in the way that value flows and political decision-making works in North America.

Now, until those issues get resolved, until the domestic economic circumstances and system actually delivers better living standards and better social infrastructure and better economic infrastructure. Then there's always going to be the pressure to blame somebody, right? And to pass the buck onto someone else. That's what's going to happen.

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