The Xi-Trump summit: Competition above, cooperation below

Editor's note: Krzysztof Pelc, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor of international relations at Oxford University. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

US President Donald Trump arrives in Beijing on May 13 for his summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. The agenda is dominated by trade with a pledge to hold tariffs at the current level between the two among the best realistic outcomes. There may be modest announcements of Chinese purchases of American soybeans, beef and other agricultural products, which would allow President Trump to go back home claiming a win. Beyond that, expectations about meaningful cooperation are thin. Yet any historic meeting such as this is an opportunity to rethink what is possible in the relationship between the world's two most powerful countries.

Western commentary has converged on a grim view of that relation: Stability is only the result of mutual fear. One metaphor that keeps being invoked is an image with its origins in the Cold War: China and the US are like two scorpions in a bottle. Each side is only constrained by the damage it knows the other can inflict. It's a dramatic metaphor but also a misleading one: It leaves little room for anything beyond mutual threat.

It's certainly true that the West is alarmed by China's economic power. A wave of reporting has been announcing a "second China shock": Chinese manufacturers are now flooding the world with high-end industrialized goods at prices their foreign rivals cannot match – in electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, robotics and a lengthening list of advanced sectors.

The "first China shock," two decades ago, was described as destroying low-end manufacturing jobs across industrialized countries and fed the populist backlash that brought Donald Trump to power in the US. The "second China shock" is now depicted as threatening something the West had assumed was safe in the near term: its advantage in high-end industry.

But China should not rejoice over Western fears. A fearful partner is an unreliable partner. In this sense, China has every reason to seek to allay Western concerns, rather than stoke them. The fact is that while the Chinese trade surplus recently reached a record high, the surge in exports is considerably less dramatic than it was during the original China shock. And China's own manufacturers are suffering: The "overcapacity" that makes Chinese goods so cheap is devastating profit margins at home, with industries, like solar panels, posting losses, even as output climbs. This is not the picture of an invincible juggernaut but of an economy where internal competition has become self-consuming, producing volumes the world struggles to absorb and margins that might pose challenges to the producers themselves.

China, in turn, has every reason to fear a partner that has proven itself to be erratic and often unreliable. As a result of this climate of mutual fear, the dominant Western attitude – and some might say, increasingly, the dominant Chinese attitude as well – is to treat the relationship as a single contest along a single axis, where every gain for one side is a loss for the other: two scorpions in a bottle, two wrestlers in a ring, a duel between two opponents.

Yet such zero-sum games are rare in political life, and they are an especially poor description of the US-China relation. That is because the two countries are not playing one game. They are playing many games at once, across trade, technology, finance, climate, security, public health, energy, migration, artificial intelligence and global governance. The stakes in these arenas do not line up neatly; the balance of advantage varies from one domain to another. Vulnerability in one sector is offset by dependence elsewhere.

I have always preferred a different image for the US-China rivalry, this one taken from ecology. Consider the relationship between two species of trees commonly found in the Canadian forest. Above ground, birch trees and Douglas firs compete fiercely for sunlight. But below ground, their roots are connected by a network of fungi in the soil, and through that network, the trees exchange carbon. Birches leaf out early in spring and run a surplus when the firs are still dormant; later, the evergreen firs keep photosynthesizing through winter, when the bare birches cannot. The two species face stress at different times, and that difference in timing makes the underground exchange valuable. Each species grows better in the other's presence. The competition above ground is real, but so is the cooperation below.

This is closer to the actual structure of the US-China relations than any image of scorpions in a bottle. The competition between the two is genuine – over technological supremacy, influence and the shape of the next economic order. But beneath it, the two countries have common interests and offsetting vulnerabilities. America relies on rare earths extracted and processed in China; China relies on advanced lithography it cannot produce domestically. American consumers depend on the scale of Chinese manufacturing; Chinese exporters need foreign markets to absorb what Chinese households cannot. Both countries face artificial intelligence risks that neither can manage alone. Both are exposed to pandemics, climate shocks and financial contagions, the timing of which no one controls.

The complexity of these interactions makes exchange more valuable than self-sufficiency – and it makes the present posture, in which each side races to eliminate its dependence on the other, self-defeating for both.

As opposed to the diplomatic discourse, none of this requires any special friendship between the two leaders. Forests do not run on affection and goodwill. They run on a naturally evolving infrastructure of beneficial exchange, where asymmetric stress is shared rather than weaponized.

AI safety is one clear opportunity for such a buildup of cooperation: The risks are shared, and modest cooperation on testing standards, in particular, would cost neither side any competitive edge. China was early in calling for risk-based AI testing. But mistrust has prevented progress on joint testing, shared evaluation protocols or technical cooperation. Modest cooperation on testing standards would not require either side to reveal model weights or surrender a competitive edge. It could begin with common definitions of high-risk capabilities and emergency channels for dangerous AI incidents.

The image we choose for the relationship between the world's two superpowers is not just a metaphor. It shapes what is considered possible. If the only available image is of two scorpions in a bottle, the only achievable result is mutual paralysis. But if we are willing to look beneath the surface, a different kind of summit becomes imaginable – not of small zero-sum gains but one built on the recognition that competition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive and that the network underfoot is worth tending to. Forests grow slowly, but they can die quickly.

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