Opinion | The enduring China-US relationship: it’s complicated, but they’re still talking 40 years on

David Shambaugh says cooperation has been the relationship’s bedrock since Carter met Deng in 1979, and through bumpy events like the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Trump’s trade war won’t undo four decades of engagement

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Published: 2:00am, 15 Dec 2018Updated: 3:02am, 15 Dec 2018

Forty years ago, on December 15, 1978, the world was stunned as American president Jimmy Carter and Chinese Communist Party chairman Hua Guofeng simultaneously announced to the world that the United States and the People’s Republic of China would establish and normalise diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979. The surprise announcement from the two capitals came after months of secret negotiations and six years after president Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China in February 1972.

It was not easy “getting to yes” in the negotiations, and there was not quite an agreement on the sensitive issue of American arms sales to Taiwan, but Carter and Deng Xiaoping – who was directly involved in the negotiations – agreed that the time had come for the two great powers to have normal interactions after three decades of estrangement. In January 1979, Deng himself commemorated the event by personally visiting the White House and several cities across the US (I had the honour of meeting Deng several times during his visit).

At a time of high stress in US-China relations today, it is worth recalling just how far the two countries have come in their relationship over the past four decades. Consider some of the areas that link the two nations.

Forty years ago, there were no students exchanged; today, there are 363,341 Chinese students studying in American universities, and about 12,000 American students in China. Scholarly exchanges have come a very long way since 1979, when I was among the first groups of American students to go to China.

Besides studying in classrooms in three different Chinese universities, I have taught many Chinese students in my classes over the past three decades. Scientists, doctors, social scientists, humanists and other specialists now interact and collaborate on joint projects. Of the several million Chinese students who have studied in the US since 1979, a considerable number have become American citizens after graduation and built lives in the US.