THERE was something vaguely comic about the shooting down of the Chinese weather balloon — or spy balloon, depending on your geo-politics — floating over the United States in February, scuppering plans by the US Secretary of State to visit China. But it represented a five-year nadir in relations between the world’s two largest economies, which has serious implications for the rest of us.
The hostility, which began under President Trump, has hardly ameliorated under his successor, Joe Biden, while, in China, President Xi Jinping, the country’s most intimidating leader since Chairman Mao, has secured an unprecedented third term, and replaced the usual Communist Party apparatchiks with men who have deep experience of China’s military-industrial complex.
Muscle-flexing on both sides has put an end to co-operation on trade, climate change, and cross-border crime. Most alarmingly, many military-to-military communication channels have stopped working, resulting in several near misses, as US fighters responded to large-scale military exercises in which 28 Chinese warplanes crossed the median line of the Taiwan Straits.
When Antony Blinken eventually got to China this week, its Foreign Minister, Qin Gang, told him, behind closed doors, that relations between the US and China were “at the lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic relations”. The two men then talked for nearly six hours.
They had plenty to talk about. President Xi upped the ante on Taiwan in October by saying that “the wheels of history are rolling on toward China’s reunification”; he went on to say that “all measures necessary” would be deployed against foreign “interference” in defence of the island — to which President Biden is committed.
Mr Blinken raised China’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; its wide-ranging human-rights violations; Beijing’s spy base in Cuba; and China’s export of the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, the opioid that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
In a dialogue of the deaf, US restrictions on the export of advanced technology were condemned by Beijing as an attempt to hobble the Chinese economy, although Washington insisted that they were just a reasonable measure to retard other nations’ nuclear weapons and hypersonic missile programmes.
But something has changed. China’s post-pandemic recovery has begun to lose momentum. Economic growth is flagging, and foreign investment is falling. Last year, China’s population shrank for the first time in six decades; soon, there won’t be enough working people to pay for all the old folk.
It is in no one’s interest for the world’s second largest economy to stall. The US spends $500 billion a year on Chinese goods; and more than 95 per cent of its rare earth materials come from China. China is a dominant source of raw materials for many of Germany’s biggest industrial firms, as well as one of their biggest markets. That is why Germany is now building bridges with China, too.
Moreover, Taiwan is the centre of global electronics. It makes more than 95 per cent of the most advanced semiconductors integrated into our computer systems, medical equipment, smartphones, and much else. War over Taiwan could create a world recession that would make the economic shockwaves from the Russian invasion of Ukraine seem minor.
China and the US have pulled back from the brink. They must now find ways of working together where they can, and agreeing respectfully to differ where they cannot.