Opinion | US-China strategic competition has worsened the impact of the coronavirus, harming the people of both nations. It needs to stop

China’s failure to cooperate during the onset of the virus, coupled with America’s massive reduction of its health care presence in China because of both governments’ focus on strategic competition, has potentially cost thousands of American and Chinese lives. It is urgent that we re-establish channels for Americans and Chinese to communicate and reduce the damage of this strategic competition.

Beginning in 2017, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reduced its staff in Beijing from 47 people to 14, with losses including epidemiologists and the position of an American trainer of Chinese epidemiologists. In the same period, the US’ Agency for International Development and National Science Foundation, both of which have roles in monitoring disease, closed their Beijing offices.

On January 6, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar offered to send a CDC expert team to China. That offer was repeated later in the month, including by me personally, but it wasn’t until February 10 that several American experts participated in the World Health Organisation’s joint mission. Too little, too late.

The crisis perfectly illustrates why the United States and China must cooperate. While the two countries will compete economically and diplomatically, strategic competition – with the accompanying suspicion, restrictions on economic activity and increased defence spending – only harms the American and Chinese peoples.

In 1979, US president Jimmy Carter and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping inaugurated an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity in East Asia. In the preceding five decades, a quarter of a million American soldiers had died on the battlefields of Asia.