Trust between Washington and Beijing has hit rock bottom. At the root of the decline is Washington’s belief that China seeks to undermine the current international order, and Beijing’s view that the United States seeks to curb China’s rise. Exacerbating such fears on both sides are deep feelings of betrayal over words and actions that don’t align.
The spiral of mistrust assumes a life of its own, leading “both sides to double down on signals of resolve,” and fueling extreme, at times cartoonish narratives about the other, says Michael Swaine, an expert in Chinese defense and foreign policy.
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Is trust the bedrock of international relations, or is predictability? In recent years, the U.S. and China have had to learn how to navigate growing mistrust and make progress toward stability.
To be sure, trust between nation states is often challenging. A level of suspicion has always existed between the U.S. and China. But today’s extreme trust deficit is leading to alternative approaches – ones that stress top-level communications, transparent competition, and reciprocity – as ways to promote predictability, experts say.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping signaled their interest in a more stable relationship when meeting outside San Francisco last November. That has led to other critical dialogues, and high-level military communications have resumed after more than a year’s hiatus – a step toward preventing dangerous miscalculations.
“We’re definitely at a better place,” says Yun Sun, director of the Stimson Center’s China Program. “The two governments can actually talk to each other without … having a complete meltdown.”
In the spring of 2019, Matt Pottinger, then the Asia director for the National Security Council, was working at his office in the White House when a rare document caught his attention.
A secret speech delivered by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to China’s Communist Party Central Committee in 2013, not long after Mr. Xi took power, had just been published in China’s top party journal, Qiushi. Mr. Pottinger found it especially revealing of Mr. Xi’s worldview.
“The language was so explicit,” Mr. Pottinger recalls of the speech, in which Mr. Xi laid out an ambitious strategy for China’s Communist Party to win a fierce ideological struggle against the capitalist West. “Capitalism,” Mr. Xi said, “is bound to die out.”
Why We Wrote This
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Is trust the bedrock of international relations, or is predictability? In recent years, the U.S. and China have had to learn how to navigate growing mistrust and make progress toward stability.
The stark difference between Mr. Xi’s internal call for party leaders to steel themselves for protracted conflict with a hostile West and his outward promotion of “win-win” cooperation abroad underscored what Mr. Pottinger saw as a pattern of deliberate deception and dual messaging by Beijing.
“I was struck by how wide the disparity was,” says Mr. Pottinger, a fluent Chinese speaker who helped craft a major U.S. policy shift on China during the Trump administration.
In recent years, trust between Washington and Beijing has hit rock bottom. At the root of the mistrust is Washington’s belief that China seeks to undermine the current international order, and Beijing’s view that the United States seeks to curb China’s rise and overthrow its Communist Party leadership. Exacerbating such fears on both sides are deep feelings of betrayal – over words and actions that don’t align.
“That’s the danger – you have these behaviors that are not in line with what each country is saying publicly, and they are regarded by the other as … hypocrisy, if not betrayal, in original understandings and commitments,” says Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert in Chinese defense and foreign policy.
From engagement to suspicion
For decades, the U.S. had operated on a strategy of engagement. It was predicated on the belief that China’s market reforms and opening would promote the country’s integration into the U.S.-led, liberal post-World War II order – as well as, possibly, political reforms.
Yet Beijing’s increasing assertiveness abroad and repression at home convinced Mr. Pottinger and other senior U.S. officials that such assumptions were wrong, and that China’s leaders had disguised their true intentions. The 2017 national security strategy that Mr. Pottinger helped design labels China as a threatening, “revisionist” power determined to reshape the international order and displace America in Asia – a position shared by the current administration.
Trust, some officials concluded, was no longer relevant in U.S.-China relations. “The idea that you can build trust” with China’s leaders “is an oxymoron,” says Mr. Pottinger, now chairman of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank focused on national security, and author of the forthcoming book “The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps To Defend Taiwan.”
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, who also served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, put it bluntly on a Wall Street Journal podcast last August. “We’d like to have a great relationship [with China], but if they are going to keep lying and cheating as a modus operandi of the state … you would be a fool to go into that … negotiation not cognizant of what they’re doing,” he said.
Ng Han Guan/AP
For its part, Beijing, too, is suspicious of what it views as incongruity between U.S. words and U.S. actions. It sees growing American support for Taiwan – especially military sales and training – as violating past U.S. commitments, with the aim of making Taiwan a sovereign security ally and weakening China.
“The U.S. has no heart to honor its commitment to China … no intent to preserve the consensus reached with China [on Taiwan],” says Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based international relations scholar and expert on U.S.-China ties. “The U.S. wants to stop China from attaining unification.”
Beijing sees U.S. controls on technology exports to China not as valid national security measures, but as part of a broader plan to hurt China’s economy and threaten the party’s legitimacy. Beijing believes “the U.S. wants to prevent China from challenging America, to sustain America’s overwhelming dominance,” Dr. Shen says.
The spiral of mistrust assumes a life of its own, leading “both sides to double down on signals of resolve,” and fueling extreme, at times cartoonish, narratives about the other, says Dr. Swaine.
Last fall, the two countries clashed over deception itself. After a U.S. State Department report said Beijing was funding a multibillion-dollar global disinformation campaign, China’s Foreign Ministry shot back, calling the U.S. the “empire of lies.”
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Building a “workable paradigm”
To be sure, trust between nation states is often challenging. A level of suspicion has always existed between the U.S. and China. But today’s extreme trust deficit is leading to alternative approaches – ones that stress top-level communications, transparent competition, and reciprocity – as ways to promote predictability, experts say.
President Joe Biden and Mr. Xi have pressing domestic priorities – China’s economic woes for Mr. Xi, and reelection for Mr. Biden – and amid the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, they both seek to lower U.S.-China tensions.
The two leaders signaled their interest in a more stable relationship when meeting outside San Francisco last November. Asked whether he trusted Mr. Xi, Mr. Biden responded, “‘Trust but verify,’ as the old saying goes. That’s where I am.” He added that, over many hours of meetings, Mr. Xi has “been straight.”
Regular calls and meetings between the presidents can help avert misunderstandings, experts say, especially given Mr. Xi’s concentration of power and mistrust within China’s opaque system, which could limit what lower officials tell Mr. Xi.
The Biden-Xi meeting has led to other critical dialogues between the governments. High-level military communications have resumed after more than a year’s hiatus – a step toward preventing dangerous miscalculations.
“We’re definitely at a better place,” says Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a think tank focused on issues related to global peace. “The two governments can actually talk to each other without … having a complete meltdown.”
Chinatopix/AP/File
Both sides are also encouraging ties between ordinary American and Chinese people, whose friendly bonds can flourish despite official mistrust.
“Now’s the time to look for the opportunities that remain to expand relationships” among scholars, students, and other individuals, says retired Gen. H.R. McMaster, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who served as national security advisor from 2017 to 2018.
Greater stress on reciprocity – in trade and other exchanges – is also creating opportunities for progress, experts say. Unlike during the trade war, reciprocity could be used as positive leverage moving forward, says Yasheng Huang, a professor of global management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You lob tariffs on me; I lob tariffs on you – that is reciprocity but in a negative way,” says Dr. Huang, author of “The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead To Its Decline.”
Instead, for example, Washington could hold off on tariffs for six months, giving Beijing a chance to act to avoid them. “You give the other side some optionality … rather than immediately undertaking punitive action,” Dr. Huang says.
Moreover, as the two countries vigorously compete in pursuit of their divergent national interests, clarity around their priorities can promote stability, even when trust is absent, experts say.
“The more candid we are about things that Beijing does that harm our interests, the closer we are to a workable paradigm,” Mr. Pottinger says.