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.