Opinion | The US and China can find middle ground and get past the trade war. Here’s how

China’s economic rise poses significant political and strategic challenges to the existing global order. The emergence of a new superpower in Asia has inevitably produced geopolitical tensions that some have warned may eventually result in military conflict. Even absent war, the hardening of China’s political regime, amid credible allegations of myriad human-rights abuses, raises difficult questions for the West.

Then there is the economics. China has become the world’s top trader, and its increasingly sophisticated manufacturing exports dominate global markets. While China’s international economic role is unlikely to be insulated from political conflict, it is also inconceivable that the West will stop trading with China.

But what kind of rules should apply to trade between countries with such different systems? I recently teamed up with Jeffrey Lehman, vice-chancellor of New York University’s Shanghai campus, and Yao Yang, dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, to convene a working group of economists and legal scholars that could devise some answers. Our working group recently issued a joint statement, with support from 34 additional scholars, including five Nobel laureate economists.

China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 was predicated on the implicit premise that national economies, including China’s, would converge to a broadly similar model, enabling significant economic integration. China’s unorthodox economic regime – opaque government intervention, industrial policies, and a continuing role for state-owned enterprises alongside markets – has been very successful in reducing poverty. But it makes deep economic integration with the West impossible.

A perspective gaining ground in the United States is that its economy should decouple from the Chinese economy. This would entail high trade barriers to Chinese exports and severe restrictions on investment flows. Such an approach would render permanent President Donald Trump’s trade war.