China/US Relations

Many economists believe that a country’s trade balance has an impact on the general health of the economy, including currency value, budget deficit, Gross domestic product (GDP), employment, Trade Volume (TV), Foreign direct Investment (FDI), Domestic Investment/GCF (Gross Capital Formation as percentage of GDP), Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Institutional Quality (IQ), budget balance, national income, living standards, and international competitiveness. The US-China trade deficit is one of the major points of contention in US China relations, which may cause President Trump to adopt protectionist trade policies regarding China.

This paper will utilise game theory to analyse the impact of trade deficit on the economy as well as the possible steps President Trump may take to remedy the US-China trade deficit, in order to determine the optimal policy recommendations for US-China Trade.

This article argues that current passive and static conceptualizations of Chinese approaches to nuclear and conventional deterrence are no longer appropriate. Recent evidence indicates that these postures are far more integrated, flexible, and dynamic than Beijing’s official rhetoric suggests​ and that during the past decade a de facto shift toward a limited nuclear war-fighting posture has already taken place. By applying an International Relations (IR) structural-realist lens to conceptualize a relatively under-researched discourse that relates to recent indications that China is contemplating the deployment of nuclear weapons for war-fighting (or victory-denial) purposes. A radical doctrinal shift of this kind (or even the perception of one) could presage a paradigm shift in China’s long-standing nuclear posture and the nuclear balance in Asia.

近年南海领海争端加剧以及中国与日俱增的经济影响，一直在激化亚细安内部的分歧。各成员国立场的差异，从今年六月和七月分别在云南和老挝举办的多国会议上可见。亚细安成员国当时要在南海主权问题上建立基本共识所面对的困难特别明显。今年九月在万象举行的亚细安－中国高峰会议上，各方似乎也只能暂时回避异议，再度同意遵守已有的海军《海上意外相遇规则》(Code for Unexpected Encounters at Sea，简称CUES)。除非亚细安成员国正视并着手整合其组织的内部运作和操作，这个历经冷战和后冷战时期的东南亚区域组织恐怕会面临被现实淘汰的可能。为了开拓亚细安的未来，成员国或许需考虑如何推动内部协调、理顺决策过程，甚至调整心态接受其他东南亚区域组织的存在等改革方向。

（見頁52-55）

Although the US and its Western allies had long relationship with Africa in various categories of aid and development, China’s recent entry into the Dark Continent caused huge displeasure to the traditional donors. The Asian giant’s economic investment in Africa was so huge that it engaged scholars to analyze the trend from various perspectives including politics, economics, commerce, governance, human rights as well as security. The move also became an awakening or a reawakening for the US and its think tank in that, with the magnitude of rich resources under its soil, Africa is to be redefined in a more appealing fashion very unlike the Dark Continent the West had misinterpreted it for calculated hidden interests. It is based on this background that this study problematises the nature of the competition between the two giants and the implications it may hold for Africa.

In 2015, Harvard’s Graham Allison wrote an evocative article discussing the
“Thucydides Trap” in relations between China and the United States, highlighting the danger of war between a rising power and a reigning power in the international system. Can China and the United States avoid the Thucydides Trap as China rises? This analysis identifies and analyzes seven reasons China and the US might not be able to avoid the trap: the bilateral strategic trust deficit, lack of agreement on the nature of the US pivot, recent trends in China’s maritime policies, disagreements over cyber security, security dynamics underlying China’s Anti-Access/Area Denial and Washington’s AirSea Battle strategies, recent trends in Sino-Russian strategic alignment, and Washington’s concerns about China’s increased defense spending.

Chinese translations of U.S. literature manifest a shift from the third-world internationalism and anti-Western and anti-capitalist politics of the 1950s toward
a diminished rhetorical antagonism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. Because translation introductions are instrumental in introducing
Chinese readers to the social context of U.S. literature, we surveyed a broad sample
of prefaces. Based on this survey, we theorize China-U.S. translation relations
within a world system; examine the ideological character of post-Revolution
translation introductions to American literature; and identify shifting ideological
tides following the Cultural Revolution.

The U.S.-China bilateral agenda is dominated by issues like trade, intellectual property rights, monetary policy, human rights and security issues. However, given the fact that critical national infrastructures and the private sector are increasingly dependent on digital assets, cyberspace has become an important aspect of their bilateral relationship. The purpose of this paper is to define the nature of U.S.-China relationship in cyberspace and identify issues that cause conflict between Washington and Beijing. For both sides, cyberspace is a realm where they exercise power politics in order to pursue their national interests. The two global competitors have different positions on most of the issues that relate to cyberspace. Fear and uncertainty are present in cyberspace for both Washington and Beijing. Nevertheless, they also have common goals. The level of interdependence between them is high and avoiding misperception and escalation is a mutual priority. Therefore, both sides are trying to avoid mistrust and conflict in cyberspace and establish some cooperative mechanisms. Based on previous practice from nuclear diplomacy, both sides are in the process of identifying diplomatic tools (e.g. confidence building measures, Track II diplomacy and simulations) in order to avoid unnecessary tension in cyberspace.

The increasing rise of China's strength and the widespread perception (or just a misperception) that China's rise is simultaneously accompanied by America's decline has undoubtedly intensified the already sensitive China-U.S. relations. Faced with the U.S. " Asia-Pacific rebalancing " strategy, Chinese government proposed to build a new model of major power relations between China and the U.S. Because of their substantive and static perspectives, the mainstream international relations (IR) theories do not hold optimistic attitudes toward the Chinese initiative, let alone provide any positive theoretic guidance. Processual constructivism stands out for its focus on the process consisting of dynamic relations, but problems remain due to its liberalism bias in constructing the theory. Under the framework of processual constructivism, this article employs rationalist methods to unravel a constructivist puzzle, namely, the building of the new model of major power relations between China and the U.S., through the discussion of the concept and mechanism of preventive cooperation as a dynamic of the governance of relations to ensure the dynamic relations always keeping on a progressive track. Then, it puts it into the analysis of the current China-U.S. interactions, with an eye to building a new model of major power relations between them.

Paper Starting Finance La Trappola di Tucidide e la sua influenza nello scontro Cina-USA

Quella fra USA e Cina è solo una tregua, per permettere alle due superpotenze di riprendere fiato. Infatti, la Cina difficilmente sarà disposta ad accettare un posizione subordinata agli USA. Questi ultimi, invece, vorranno probabilmente sfruttare la loro posizione di vantaggio nei confronti di Pechino. La guerra commerciale sembra ancora molto lontana dalla parola fine. Quali potrebbero essere, sul piano geo-politico, le conseguenze di una situazione del genere? Quali sono i possibili scenari?

https://www.startingfinance.com/news/usa-cina-tregua-no-pace/

Sommario

Il seguente elaborato analizza la guerra commerciale tra Stati Uniti e Cina confrontandola con un’analisi storica riguardante lo scontro egemonico tra Atene e Sparta, e con un focus che mette in risalto alcuni scenari geopolitici di egemonia cinese o statunitense in Asia e una simulazione di una possibile crisi commerciale che potrebbe tramutarsi in confronto militare.
Infine un’ulteriore analisi mette a confronto l’attuale scontro commerciale con quello che avvenne tra Regno Unito e la Germania Imperiale per la supremazia tecnologica navale.

Indice
Introduzione
La Trappola di Tucidide
La Stabilità Egemonica nella Trappola di Tucidide: Atene vs Sparta
Il Dualismo tra Atene e Sparta come precursore del bipolarismo
Cina vs Stati Uniti: i possibili scenari
Simulazione di una possibile Trappola di Tucidide: da una guerra commerciale ad un conflitto bellico
La Guerra per la supremazia tecnologica nel XX secolo: Regno Unito vs Germania Imperiale
Conclusioni

The commentary is devoted to China's becoming a technological superpower and its competition with the United States.

The introduction of the commentary focuses on China's technological progress since 1992 in a chronological way and then addresses the subject of China's goals and plans in the technological field. It concludes with comparisons between the two superpower countries, addressing the likely new technological hegemony of the future.

This paper traces the evolution of the US’s laws and policies toward Hong Kong running through the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act (US-HKPA), Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy (HKHRDA) to Hong Kong Autonomy Act (HKAA). The US-HKPA, enacted under the Clinton Administration, after the Tiananmen massacre but before the handover of Hong Kong, is a product of US’s China policy based on engagement policy. It represents a compromise between the Congress and Executive and reflects soft-law nature, of which the implementation is largely dependent on Executive discretion. After three decades of engagement polices and more than twenties of China’s resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong, the US’ China policy gradually changes and has seen a significant turn under the Trump Administration. In the midst of US-China tension and with the bipartisan support from the Congress, the HKHRDA and HKAA strengthen the review, reporting and sanctioning mechanism on the human rights, democracy and autonomy in Hong Kong. Nonetheless, the Trump Administration decision to suspend the preferential treatment of Hong Kong under the US laws on the ground of the erosion of high degree of autonomy guaranteed by the Sino-British Joint Declaration and HKBL poses questions about legality and legitimacy under public international law and WTO law. We argue that the US’s sanctions against individuals and entities in undermining Hong Kong human rights, democracy and autonomy can be justified based on international human rights law given its limited scope, special designation and effectiveness and proportionality. We also argue that the trade related measures can be justified under general exception (public morals) and national security exception. We observe that the termination of preferential treatment based on separate customs territory status may cover four dimensions: rule of origin, tariffs, export control and currency. We submit that there is little guidance from GATT/WTO law on ‘full autonomy in the conduct of its external commercial relations and of the other matters provided for in this Agreement’, historical and comparison approaches may be adopted in appreciating whether Hong Kong still enjoys full autonomy in sustaining its WTO membership by virtue of separate customs territory status.

China's rising comes as the most pronounced but complicated feature of the twenty-first century. In the past few years, people over the world, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, have witnessed increasing tensions in U.S.-Chinese relations, from all levels and in a wide range of areas. Graham Allison, a world-famous expert on international security and also the founding dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, was the first person to combine the concept of the " Thucydides Trap " with the analysis of China's ongoing rise, with recent commentaries published in global influential newspapers and websites such as the Financial Times, the New York Times and the Atlantic. In those articles, he warned that over the past five hundred years of human history, twelve of all sixteen cases of global tensions resulted in shooting wars. What's more, he argued that a Thucydides trap has arisen between the United States and China in the western Pacific in recent years. Thereafter, some world-class masters, including Zheng Yongnian, Robert Zoellick, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Patrick Porter and T. J. Pempel, followed in using this popular term when talking about U.S.-Chinese relations today or in the years ahead, regardless of their personal attitudes toward such a pessimistic term. Its impact was so great that China's President, Xi Jinping, had to respond to it publicly once again during his state visit to the United States, when he delivered an address to local governments and friendly groups in Seattle. He presented himself as a constructivist IR scholar, in the eyes of skeptical American realists, by emphasizing the importance of mutual intentions and interactions while rejecting the pessimistic prospect of bilateral relations projected by the widespread identification of a so-called " Thucydides Trap " between the two countries. Unfortunately, it is the constructivists that always remind us that either discourse or prediction might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most scholars in China reject the so-called metaphor from history and regard this simplistic historical analogy as the newest vision of the longstanding " China Threat Theory. " However, from an academic point of view, theoretical and empirical analysis is still necessary. Objectively speaking, the widespread use of the term " Thucydides Trap " just indicates a period when a rapidly rising power has obviously narrowed the gap between itself and the system's dominant power, simultaneously stirring up fears and anxieties in other countries that are satisfied with the existing distribution of power. As Allison himself puts it, the two crucial variables are rise and fear. The real risk associated with the " Thucydides Trap " is that business as usual—not just an unexpected, extraordinary event—can trigger large-scale conflict. War is not destined, though risks undoubtedly become very high compared with other periods in the bilateral relationship. Similarly, it implies a period in which all countries, especially emerging and ruling powers, should be very cautious in dealing with their relationships and divergences if neither has any intentions to embark upon a devastating war. We will now illustrate the concrete scenarios of the gathering " Thucydides Trap " between the two giants.

Contribution to Special Issue of Journal on “Considering Opportunities: American Efforts to Reconcile U.S.-China Relations during the Great Interregnum.”  Uses the views on China and Asia of Will L. Clayton, under secretary of state in the late 1940s, to explore the views of the US foreign policy elite on recognition of China and policy towards Taiwan during the 1950s and 1960s.  Clayton was a strong supporter of recognition of China, and feared that US commitments to the Nationalists might provoke a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.  Many in the US foreign policy elite, including David Rockefeller, Senator J. William Fulbright, Eustace Seligman of John Foster Dulles' law firm, shared his apprehensions, and would have welcomed a rapprochement with China.

Hedging is a common approach that regional states in the Asia-Pacific seek to adopt in order to navigate between an ascendant China and a still dominant USA. Undergirding such a strategy is a desire among regional states to avoid “choosing” between the USA and China. However, there tends to be less policy and scholarly attention paid to how hedging strategies actually fare in securing the interests of regional states during power transition. This is of particular concern given the increasing tensions that seem to be afflicting the Asia-Pacific in spite of efforts by regional states to hedge, particularly following the American rebalance to Asia. This chapter examines the downside risks that may result from efforts by regional states to hedge between China and the USA.

The study indicates that public-private partnerships (PPPs) can play "strategic", "practical", or "regulative" roles by making use of "instrumental", "institutional", and "normative" approaches in tackling political issues between countries. PPPs have often been discussed in studies of urban development, service provision, health care, and so on, but they have rarely been analyzed in terms of international relations and political problems on global environmental issues. This study takes environmental problem-Sino-US energy and climate change cooperation-as a case study to inspect the possible roles and approaches of PPPs. Sino-US cooperation has been launched such as under the Strategic & Economic Dialogue (S&ED) by both administrations, which has significantly contributed to their reconciliation of domestic abatement policies in climate change, environmental protection, and energy. The establishment of schemes such as the Ten-Year Framework for Cooperation on Energy and Environment (TYF), the EcoPartnerships, and wide-ranging dialogues and initiatives on clean energy and clean vehicles, in which both public and private actors participate, are among the important approaches of facilitating bilateral cooperation. The study concludes that these schemes have played strategic and practical roles in strengthening the degree of mutual trust and in facilitating the progress of cooperation, although more investigations are needed to considerate their regulative roles. The application of instrumental, institutional, and normative approaches have been observed through the implementation of the TYF and EcoPartnerships.

Is conflict between a rising China and a declining United States inevitable? One of the main purported drivers of the “Thucydides Trap” is that declining states face intractable uncertainty about rising states’ future intentions. Since a declining state cannot be sure how a rising state will use its power in the future, the decliner faces strong incentives to initiate preventive action, possibly war, to forestall the power shift, even if the rising state has behaved cooperatively to date. A common conclusion is therefore that preventive war is often unavoidable under large power shifts, even between states with truly compatible goals. Drawing on recently-published formal work, this paper argues that the uncertainty underpinning the Thucydides Trap is not as pervasive as conventional wisdom holds. Indeed, even under large power shifts, rising states’ cooperative signals should be sufficiently credible that preventive war should not occur when the declining state is initially uncertain of the riser’s intentions. Rather, preventive war should occur only if the declining state has high confidence that the riser’s intentions are truly hostile. The analysis yields two main conclusions. First, China’s cooperation has been sufficiently credible to avert preventive war, but not to avoid a substantial degree of competition with the US, which has rationally hedged against China’s rising power. However, American observers have often misinterpreted the credibility of both cooperative and non-cooperative Chinese signals, and the current US government is far too confident that China harbors hostile intentions. This leaves open the possibility of a US-China war due to psychological misperceptions.

In 2016, there were cries of outrage and calls of “conflicts of interest,” related to China when CNN Money reported that Donald Trump’s suits and ties were made in China.  CNN went on to say that numerous items in the Ivanka Trump fashion line were also made there. Another example of a possible conflict of interest arose when ABC news reported that in February, 2017, a Chinese woman paid nearly $16 million for an apartment in a Trump New York property. A separate CNN Money report from the same year reported that numerous Chinese holders of the EB5 investment visa, which offers a US Green Card in exchange for $500,000 to $1 million investments, are funding the Trump Bay Street skyscraper, a project headed by Trump’s son-in-law Jarred Kushner.  According to CNN, 100 Chinese nationals had invested a total of $50 million in the project. In March 2017, claims of payoffs and conflicts of interest were again raised when the Associated Press reported that China had granted Donald Trump numerous trademarks which he had been pursuing for some time. Prior to this ruling, hotels and other businesses in China which had no connection to Donald Trump bore his name.
While there may or may not be other conflicts of interest within the Trump organization, none of these Trump-China ties seem legitimate reasons for concern when examined in greater detail.

This chapter introduces the evolving geo-strategic and security landscape shaped mainly by the big powers, the US and China, in the Indo-Pacific region. It further focuses on India–Australia bilateral strategic relations and their respective policy orientations in the Indo-Pacific region. No doubt, Donald John Trump’s march to the White House has given rise to new but conflicting dynamics as a result mainly China and other countries in the region are in the process of reorienting their policy postures to adjust to the new ambiance.

Whether in political science books, mass media programmes, or records of ancient philosophers we repetitively encounter the statement that no relationship will be as important to the twenty-first century as the one between the United States of America (USA) as the world’s superpower, and China (PRC), the world’s rising power and the candidate to sharing global primacy. China’s development is directly transforming the lives of one-fifth of the world’s population and is otherwise influencing billions more. China’s rapid economic growth, expanding regional and global influence, continued military modernisation, and uneven human rights record are also shifting the geopolitical terrain and contributing to uncertainty about China’s future course. After thirty-five years of “engagement,” the USA and PRC have a relationship that was truly unimaginable two generations ago. At the same time, there are some Americans who believe that China’s strategic interests are incompatible with those of the USA. Offensive realists like Mearsheimer (2001) maintain that it makes good strategic sense for states to gain as much power as possible and, if the circumstances are right, to pursue hegemony. The argument is not that conquest or domination is good in itself, but that overwhelming power is the best way to ensure one's own survival. This paper argues that survival must be considered in terms of the survival of the whole planet and not just egoistically only by the most powerful states. Why is that? Since selfishness in international politics has led to two destructive wars for world domination, thus one idea that scholars of International Relations ought to be working on how to prevent great power rivalry and arms racing.To achieve that goal countries must engage in honest negotiations to resolve differences in a civilised manner. For that reason, the development of a de facto G2 between USA and China during the administration of President Obama, which has previously emerged in the finance sector is a very positive, promising trend. A widely held promise is that it will gain momentum and begin to play a more important role in global climate politics eventually leading to a solution to the climate crisis. The U.S.-China relationship is of particular strategic importance, and clean energy cooperation has become the centrepiece of this bilateral relationship. America and China have been cooperating on climate change and clean energy for several decades. Since 2009, this cooperation has been greatly enhanced and expanded, resulting in thousands of people from both countries working together to do collaborative research, to share experiences and information, and to develop commercial ventures to deploy clean energy technology (Lewis, 2017). While a longstanding debate continues among realists whether bipolarity or multipolarity is more or less war-prone, this paper argues that China should be able to coexist peacefully with both its neighbours and America. Surely, the structure of the international system will at some point force both great powers to compete among themselves for power, but China can rise peacefully if USA and China agree on the crucial priority of the upgrade of civilisation, and subsequently, the creation of joint institutions of global power sharing thereby avoiding of the resource-draining rivalry, a rivalry that would surely disrupt the stability of global markets and trade. In an era in which the risks of a massively destructive “clash of civilisations” are rising, the deliberate promotion of a genuine conciliation between the Chinese and Western civilisations is urgently needed. The concept of “a harmonious world” reflects most accurately the shared future of both civilisations. It is a mission worthy of the two countries with the most extraordinary potential for shaping the Sino-American future. How much sincerity is there in numerous attempts to integrate both countries into common institutions aimed at global power sharing such as G2? Are the political leaders trying hard enough, or is it just an unrealised, starry-eyed idea full of diplomatic splendour, high-ranking visits, flash photography, but without a deeper, realistic meaning? If the idea of US-China mature, strategic partnership is to be realised in this century while upgrading global civilisation, it will require more active engagement and building common institutions as the demand for global cooperation is greater than ever. This paper outlines in what way such an upgrade could be realised. Type I: Planetary Culture civilisation as described by Kardashev (1964) would be slightly more advanced than those currently found on Earth. It would be capable of utilising all available resources on the planet, skilfully harnessing the energy output of an entire world while economically​ sharing energy among the most powerful states, not wasting it on unnecessary competition or conquests. Such development would be a bold step for the whole civilisation in the direction of a more secure and prosperous future. The planet needs urgently genuinely shared efforts mainly by the USA and PRC but also by other great powers to institutionalise stability. As Brzezinski (2017) noted,, "the ideal geopolitical response to the crisis of global power is a trilateral connection between the United States, China and Russia." America and China have a particularly high stake in providing for a framework for global prosperity and stability. U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and U.S.-China Dialogue on the Global Economic Order are the institutional arrangements that have a chance to build mutual trust, enhance communication, identify issues, and propose solutions to novel global challenges. Climate change and clean energy have become powerful, unifying issues in the U.S.-China bilateral relationship (Lewis, 2017). In particular, "high-level engagement between the leaders of the two sides, including but not only through the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), allowed both countries to discuss politically sensitive issues, from trade barriers to international security, and it ensured that the two largest national economies in the world had a diplomatic means of diffusing potential conflict." (Ibid). The two world’s largest economies have a strong incentive to work together to fix the current order by solving these challenges rather than see it fall apart. The good news is that a grand bargain to achieve this objective may be achievable. However, "with President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, China’s leadership has responded with the disappointment and disapproval now shared by many other countries around the world." (Ibid). Climate change is an area of global concern that could unite various great powers in problem-solving sharing of sovereignty. Despite the U.S. withdrawal, China has made clear that it will stick to its commitment to fulfilling the 2015 Paris Treaty pledges. China had shown itself both a great collaborator and leader in global governance. When America retreats, China could take responsibility for global issues. As American climate change politics evolve under the new Trump administration wise advisers always appreciate the benefits of the partnership since ''Sino-American action could stabilize the world. At a minimum, we should agree to limit our disagreements; more sophisticatedly, we should identify projects we can undertake together'' (Kissinger, 2016). There are many untapped areas for fruitful cooperation when countries build trust. Thus, Americans must avoid a major, recurring problem from past outlooks on China, namely the mistaken belief that U.S. policies will have a decisive effect on China's future. On the contrary, in military, economic, cultural and strategic positions America should be cooperative and supportive, not hostile and threatening (Oksenberg and Oxfam, 1973: 12). Ultimately China's future will be decided by Chinese people and in their response to domestic, Asian and global developments. When both countries cooperate the seeds of ingenious activism are sown while other great powers such as Russia could join in the common, trilateral project of global stewardship. Opportunities for collaboration in addressing climate change are plentiful, but moving forward at the scale needed will require high-level political support in two very different societies: American and Chinese that have to develop so much needed trust for each other. Great powers willing to create 'a more inclusive system of global power management' must accept joint sacrifices, open more formalised channels of dialogue and resolve some of the most pertaining regional issues, i.e.: climate change, energy security and nuclear proliferation for the sake of collective stability, global peace and given the unpredictability of any projections of world order. This is a project for a new, Chinese-American future and civilisation's advancement based on partnership.

I give here some hitches about China's new political leadership after the Bo Xilai' scandal. The CCP appeared in public eyes to loose some of its appeal by insisting in some traces of cronyism, favoritism and individual gain that put him apart of the common people of China. The new "Glorious Seven", the inner-circle of the Chinese Communist Party (Standing Committee of the Politburo) are well-prepared politicians, stiff, self-disciplined and very focused on the survival of the CCP and the monolitist regime. They are children of the Cultural Revolution, former "red" guards or sibilings of former Communist apparatchiks. The author argues that the distinction between maoists and pragmatists which was used to characterize Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao' leadership is of no use anymore. Most of these people are graduate and their university degrees were acquired in China but except in one case (Xi Jinping) they still lack international experience and fluency in English. the author antecipates that their 10 year mandate in the leadership of China will be more tough, ideological, centralized and inner-oriented then what come from the Hu Jintao era. It will be a two-head leadership divided by Xi Jiping (the President) and Li Keqiang (the Prime-Minister).