Opinion | China’s strategic opportunities are Beijing’s to lose

It’s more than likely that a final solution to the six-month US-China trade war can be reached when President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump next meet, with a few affordable concessions from China, But what after that? The first two decades of the 21st century has been officially described as “a period of important strategic opportunity” which China “must seize tightly”. The question is: is that opportunity slipping away?

Many are crying wolf over two challenges in particular – the slowing of the Chinese economy and the ever-competitive nature of China-US relations. But how serious are they? Yes, China’s economy is slowing, but that is because it has been growing at an incredible average annual rate of 9.5 per cent for 40 years and people’s expectations still remain high. With per capita gross domestic product reaching nearly US$10,000 by 2018, China is already an upper middle-income country. According to Standard Chartered, even if China’s economic growth rate drops to 5 per cent by 2030, it will still surpass the US to become the world’s largest economy.

The greater challenge looks like American bipartisan consensus on a toughened China policy. China was labelled a “top competitor” in the latest versions of both the US national security strategy and its national defence strategy. When asked about China-US relations at a dinner in Beijing, in November 2018, Henry Kissinger reportedly said that they would never return to where they were.

This is probably true, but it is also misleading, in that it gives people a wrong impression, as if the US had been generously supporting China in the “good old days” (in Michael Pence’s words, “We rebuilt China in the last 25 years”) but became disappointed only recently. From Beijing’s view, Washington has never ceased its efforts to change China through a “peaceful evolution” strategy. This explains why Beijing has been calling for a new major-power relationship built not on confrontation but on equality and mutual respect.

If the US cannot fix Afghanistan or North Korea, how can it bring the second-largest economy to its knees with an increase in trade tariffs? The economic interdependence between the two countries is such that “decoupling”, as Washington has threatened, is like taking blood capillaries from the body.