Diplomacy matters Do the US need a Cold War with China?

For most of 2022, we remained sealed off from the world by China’s strict pandemic policy. Shanghai, my home for the past decade, endured a particularly traumatic Covid lockdown that kept us confined at home for two months starting in late March, scrambling to obtain groceries. While locked down, we found out that my wife, who is Chinese, was pregnant. It took a combination of bluster and desperate pleas to local officials to get us to a hospital for a prenatal checkup.

When the lockdown ended last June, I emerged, blinking into the sunlight, to find that China had been transformed into America’s enemy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was calling China a threat to “universal values” in language that made me think of the U.S. containment policy toward the former Soviet Union. The rhetoric has only hardened since then. Today China is labelled an “existential” threat to the United States; there is talk of a new cold war.

Really? Must we wage a new cold war? From Shanghai, the idea seems absurd. The city’s people are immersed in American culture, having grown up using iPhones, sipping Starbucks coffee, following the N.B.A. and polishing their colloquial English by watching “Friends”. Chinese friends of mine studied in the United States and listen to American pop music. My wife watched YouTube videos about child-rearing by U.S. influencers. Vintage clothing shops, a music lounge called Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai, the N.Y.U. Shanghai campus — the city incessantly, self-consciously, compares itself to New York. Many urban Chinese are closer to American lifestyles and sensibilities than they are to those of their parents (and many young Americans likewise have more favourable views of China than the generation before).

My work sits at the intersection of these worlds. I edit books by Chinese writers about their country’s politics and economy, publishing them in English so that the West can understand their view. We must try to understand what they are thinking, the inherited fears, traumas, resentments and intergenerational conflicts that shape how they interact with us.

Just underneath the paint on Shanghai’s trendy new restaurant facades are slogans from the Cultural Revolution, still faintly visible in some places, like scars in the psychology of an older generation that make for a paranoid conservatism. This trauma is barely understood by younger Chinese, who are shielded by censorship and a code of silence from knowing in detail the horrors of China’s recent past. China is a diverse society with contesting visions of the future, a nation constantly remaking itself.

The influential Chinese scholars who I work with still hold a deep respect for the United States, its values and its civil society. In fact, many of the Chinese who I know have more confidence in America’s durability than some of my anxious friends in the United States, who fret about Trumpism and what they see as other threats to democracy and liberal values.

We could win a cold war with China yet still lose some of what makes us great. We toppled Saddam Hussein and crippled Al Qaeda, but at the cost of reduced freedom in the US through extended powers for the N.S.A., the Patriot Act and the festering sore of Guantánamo Bay.

The United States can badger China about its flaws all it wants. But is our ultimate goal to score political points or to live in a peaceful world where we cooperate on real problems like climate change? America is strongest when it leads by example, by remaining open, generous and free. Cancelling an important diplomatic visit to China over a balloon was our choice; moving past that could be our choice, too.