Sino-US relations: a game of defensive play
Lanxin Xiang says China and the US - which have vastly different ideas of political legitimacy - are caught in a strategic framework that prioritises cutting losses over maximising gains
The Chinese saying, "playing music to an ox", describes the phenomenon of two people talking past each other. It's apt imagery for the recently held Sino-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which ended as expected, with no serious progress and hardly any improvement in bilateral understanding.
During the 6½ years of the Obama administration, bilateral relations have sunk to their lowest point since the Nixon- Kissinger period of the 1970s. Leaders in Beijing and Washington have not only disagreed about how to solve major problems in the international trading system, global governance and regional security, they have also consistently been talking past each other on the key issue of how to define their relationship.
This is the ultimate result of failing to overcome their fundamental difference about what constitutes legitimacy for a nation state. For Washington, legitimacy has only one element - the democratic procedure, which it considers a universal model applicable everywhere. For Beijing, no political system is universally valid, and the claim that decision-making procedures alone determine political legitimacy is a myth. On this issue, Washington seems to have occupied the moral high ground.
Similarly, whereas Washington claims its intense military and diplomatic alliance-building activities in the Asia-Pacific are "rebalancing" for the sake of regional stability, Beijing clearly sees it as a containment strategy. But more worrisome is the fact that the two leaders use quite different reference points to describe their bilateral ties: President Xi Jinping speaks of a "new type of major power relations", while President Barack Obama insists on a "new model" of relations.
In his opening speech at the dialogue, held in Beijing this month, Xi emphasised that this relationship has no historical precedent or ready-made model as guidance. Obama's opening statement at the dialogue implied, however, that his "model" is based on the idea that he would never compromise on the question of democratic legitimacy, but is willing to build a working relationship with China contingent upon what the US considers proper Chinese behaviour.
China's behaviour will be judged according to what Washington holds as the universal standard. Thus, Obama the lawyer deliberately stresses the term "model", which implies an example to follow or imitate.
Why do Beijing and Washington keep talking past each other? One plausible explanation is found in the Nobel Prize-winning "prospect theory" of behavioural economics, which posits that people are willing to take greater risks to avoid losses than they are to achieve gains. Instead of making decisions that maximise their overall expected gains, people tend to focus on a particular reference point and give more weight to losses than comparable gains.
