China-US disputes need engagement, not estrangement

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"Americans talk incessantly about the need to compete with their country's greatest rival and how to do it. Yet many US policymakers have never been to China," The New York Times (NYT) published an opinion piece after US President Donald Trump announced he would postpone his China visit by several weeks.

In Washington, it has become a "new normal" to speak of China almost entirely in the language of threat. The competition is real. But this is precisely why American officials need to intensify ties with China, not distance from it.

As Beijing has reiterated, the issue of strategic perception is like the first button of a shirt that must be put right. The stakes of misunderstanding between the world's two largest economies are too high to ignore. The US cannot manage its ties with China – the world's most important pair of bilateral relations – from a distance, through assumptions, headlines, and talking points alone. It must first understand China as it is, not as it imagines it to be.

However, debate often proceeds with limited knowledge of China. Too few officials travel to China, and too few speak directly with Chinese counterparts. Too many judgments are formed through layers of secondhand analysis.

Between 2010 and 2019, 177 US lawmakers joined 59 congressional delegations to China, the NYT cited data compiled by scholar Scott Kennedy. But since 2020, those exchanges have largely come to a halt. The same pattern holds at the presidential level: Every American president from Ronald Reagan onward visited China at least once during their tenure, but no president has visited China since Trump did in 2017 during his first term.

"The United States is losing its bench of China expertise at a moment when it can least afford to," the US-China Education Trust said in its newly released report. "Where have all the American China experts gone?" Rory Truex, an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, asked in his article published on The Washington Post, urging Washington to invest more in understanding rather than in weapons and semiconductors.

Washington's lack of knowledge of China is partly a natural result of the country's political bias. In Washington, advocating for deeper China engagement – or even academic exchanges – carries a political cost. Lawmakers and public opinion have converged to frame China primarily as a threat, sidelining voices who argue for a nuanced stance on China.

Domestic polarization in the US amplifies anti-China sentiment. Blaming China has long served as a political tool to unite the American society and forge consensus across political factions. In this context, voices calling for intensified engagement with China are marginalized in the United States where a hardline stance on China is bipartisan "political correctness."

The push for economic and technological "decoupling" has hardened into ideology. This worldview assumes that separation is both possible and desirable. An ideological commitment to self-reliance crowds out the pragmatic knowledge needed to actually reduce misunderstandings and miscalculations.

This creates a vicious circle. As China expertise dwindles, policymaking grows more alarmist about its development. "The greater strategic danger lies in American policies that are based on stale assumptions, secondhand impressions and an incomplete understanding of what China is building," the NYT said in its article.

True, direct engagement does not eliminate conflict. But it can make conflict more manageable. When officials meet in person, they gain a clearer sense of priorities and red lines. Contacts cannot guarantee agreements, but can reduce the risk of dangerous miscalculations.

In fact, business communities and ordinary people from both countries yearn for friendlier ties and greater mutual understanding. Instead of demonstrating an anti-China stance as a gesture of "political correctness," American policymakers should visit China more to witness its realities. This is a necessary step to correcting biases and calibrating perceptions, steering the world's most important bilateral relationship toward stability.

The author Jianxi Liu is a Beijing-based analyst of political and international relations. With 10 years of experience in media, she writes on topics pertaining to the US, the EU, and the Middle East.

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