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US-China relations
ChinaDiplomacy

Open Questions‘Intense testing period’: US sentiment on China does not equal consensus, Rick Waters says

Ex-US Department of State official discusses the role of civil diplomats and whether US should have an end-state goal in its China strategy

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Illustration: Henry Wong
Alyssa Chen
Rick Waters is managing director of Eurasia Group’s China practice. He spent nearly three decades with the US Department of State where he oversaw the creation of the Office of China Coordination and was deputy assistant secretary of state for China and Taiwan. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.

Beijing and Washington had many interactions in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 20. How should we interpret these early interactions, and could they help manage bilateral ties?

We have to start with the reality that the US-China relationship is structurally competitive in almost every area, so frictions are going to be considerable. But it is a good sign that the early signals are President Trump reaching out to China, he and Xi Jinping having a phone call, and the Chinese side decided to make this fairly unprecedented step of sending Vice-President Han [Zheng] to the inauguration and to meet on the side – [with Vice-President J.D. Vance] and others.

But again, these are positive initial signals. It is unlikely to tell us much about the trajectory of where the bilateral relationship will go because China and the US have a lot of structurally competitive issues in the bilateral, regional and global areas. And it is going to take a much more robust period of diplomacy and testing before we can draw firm conclusions about the trajectory of the relationship, given the depth of distrust and policy differences they have to manage.

SCMP Series
Open Questions – SCMP interviews with global opinion leaders
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