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Thomas Friedman
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion columnist
There were plenty of surprises and quiet laughs this month when President-elect Donald Trump invited President Xi Jinping to Washington for his inauguration. Foreign leaders don’t attend our inaugurations, of course, but I think Trump’s concept was truly a smart concept. I just returned from China and I can tell you that if I were to paint a picture of the relations between our two countries today, it would be two elephants chasing each other with a straw.
It’s not good. Because the United States and China have a lot more to talk about than the industry and Taiwan (and who is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the 21st century).
Today’s world faces three historic challenges: rampant synthetic intelligence, climate change, and the spread of disorder caused by the collapse of states. The United States and China are the world leaders in AI superforces. They are the two largest carbon emitters in the world. And they have the two largest naval forces in the world, capable of projecting their strength on a global scale. In other words, the United States and China are the only two forces that in combination can offer hope. to deal with superintelligence, superstorms, and small teams of super-forced men in failed states (not to mention superviruses) at a time when the world has exploded.
That’s why we want an update to the Shanghai Communiqué, the document that set the parameters for normalizing relations between the United States and China when Richard Nixon visited China and met with Mao Zedong in 1972. Right now, unfortunately, we are denormalizing. Our two countries are developing more and more at each and every level. In the three decades I have visited Beijing and Shanghai, I have never felt what I felt here: like I was the only American in China.
Of course I wasn’t, but the American accents you would usually hear at a big Shanghai train station or Beijing hotel lobby were notably absent. Chinese parents say that many families no longer want their kids to go to the U.S. for schooling, because they fear it’s becoming dangerous — the F.B.I. might follow them while they are in America, and their own government might suspect them when they return home. The same is now true for U.S. students in China. A professor in China who works with foreign students told me that some Americans don’t want to study there anymore for semesters abroad, in part because they don’t relish competing against superintense Chinese undergraduates and in part because, these days, having studied or worked in China can raise security suspicions with future potential U.S. employers.
True, underneath all the talk of the new China-U.S. cold war, there are still over 270,000 Chinese students studying in America, according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, but there are now only about 1,100 American college students studying in China. That is down from around 15,000 a decade ago — but up from a few hundred in 2022, not long after Covid peaked. If these trends continue, where will the next generation of Chinese-speaking American scholars and diplomats come from and, similarly, Chinese who will understand America?
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