Advertisement
Supported by
Thomas Friedman
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion columnist
There were plenty of surprises and quiet laughter 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 got back from China and I can tell you that if I had to paint a picture of the rendezvous 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 much more to talk about than industry and Taiwan (and who is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the 21st century).
The world today faces three epochal challenges right now: runaway artificial intelligence, climate change and spreading disorder from collapsing states. The U.S. and China are the world’s A.I. superpowers. They are the world’s two leading carbon emitters. And they have the world’s two biggest naval forces, capable of projecting power globally. America and China are the only two powers, in other words, that together can offer any hope of managing superintelligence, superstorms and superempowered small groups of angry men in failed states — not to mention superviruses — at a time when the world has become superfused.
Which is why we need an updated Shanghai Communiqué, the document that set out parameters for normalizing U.S.-China relations when Richard Nixon went to China and met Mao Zedong in 1972. Right now, unfortunately, we are denormalizing. Our two countries are drifting farther and farther apart at all levels. In the three decades I have been visiting Beijing and Shanghai, I had never felt what I felt on this trip — as if I were the only American in China.
Of course not, however, the American accents one regularly hears at a primary exercise station in Shanghai or in a hotel lobby in Beijing were noticeably absent. Chinese parents say many families no longer need their children to go to school in the U. S. because they worry it will be unsafe, according to the FBI. They may simply stick to them while they were in America, and their own passing government may simply be suspicious of them when they returned home. The same is true now for American academics in China. A professor in China who works with foreign scholars told me that some Americans no longer need to study there for semesters abroad, in part because they don’t like to compete with super-intensive Chinese scholars. And in part because, in those days, reading or running in China can raise suspicions of safety among potential U. S. employers in the long run.
This is true, everyone is talking about the new Sino-American relationship. During the Cold War, there were still more than 270,000 Chinese scholars reading in the United States, according to the U. S. Embassy in Beijing, but now there are only about 1,100 American scholars reading. in China. That’s down from around 15,000 a decade ago, but it’s up from a few hundred in 2022, shortly after the Covid peak. Where will the next generation of Chinese-speaking American scholars and diplomats come from, and likewise, the Chinese who will perceive the United States?
We are having retrieving the content of the article.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we determine access. If you’re in Reader mode, exit and log into your Times account or subscribe to the full Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Do you want all the Times? Subscribe.
Advertisement