US-China Relations: the Dialogue
On June 7th, the following was announced as one of the outcomes of the 8th U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED):
The United States and China decided to accelerate cooperation with the African Union and African Union Member States to launch the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC). The two sides plan to provide support for infrastructure and capacity building to foster the success and sustainability of the Africa CDC and its associated Regional Collaboration Centers. Continuing their cooperation to build public health capacity in West Africa, the two sides plan to explore working with the Government of Sierra Leone to establish a national public health institution supported by China. The two sides intend to continue contributing to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
Not only is this great news for global health, it also demonstrates that there is much more breadth to the US-China relationship than some might imagine, particularly in areas like global development and poverty reduction. The S&ED has been key in bringing about this kind of cooperation and stabilizing an often troubled relationship. In this piece I’ll look at how this dialogue works and why it is so significant.
The relationship between the US and China is arguably the most consequential bilateral tie in world politics. However, it is also often fraught. Accusations and rebukes are common from both sides and the media love to report on (and occasionally stir up) the various tensions between the two countries, from alleged militarization of the South China Sea to accusations that China is manipulating its currency or stealing American technology. Even the Chinese Ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, is candid about the high levels of suspicion between the two sides. During a speech at the US China Leadership Forum in Sunnylands in May 2016, which offered a China perspective on certain contentious issues, including the South China Sea, he admitted that “there are people in the United States who believe that everything China does is aimed at challenging the U.S. position in the world. And there are people in China who think that everything the United States does is intended to contain China.”
At a time when the US-China relationship can appear unstable and mistrustful, the agreement to accelerate joint support for the Africa CDC is extremely positive news, and just one of a whole raft of agreements that the two countries announced last week at the end of the eighth round of US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, or S&ED for short.
Established in 2009 by President Hu Jintao and President Obama, the S&ED is an opportunity to air differences on a comprehensive range of topics. Built on and replacing the previous US-China Senior Dialogue and Strategic Economic Dialogue that President Hu and President George W. Bush had created in 2004 and 2006 respectively, the aim of the S&ED is to link strategic security issues and economic issues within a cross-cutting structure, while maintaining distinct strategic and economic tracks. The idea is that if the two countries reach an impasse on one track, they might have a better chance of finding a breakthrough on the other track.
This year’s talks were led by John Kerry and Jacob Lew on the US side and Vice Premier Wang Yang and State Councilor Yang Jiechi on the Chinese side. Although the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, is nominally in charge of Chinese foreign policy, in the Chinese political system ministers are actually relatively junior and there are several people higher up the chain of command who have more say over foreign affairs (like Yang and Wang above).
What’s significant about the S&ED, perhaps more even than the content of the dialogue, is that it has gone a long way to help increase trust and understanding between the two sides. Over the past years, the scope of topics discussed has increased and deepened, demonstrating a growing level of mutual understanding and greater willingness to cooperate on a broader set of issues.
Back in 2010, when Hu Jintao was still president, the number of outcomes on the strategic track published by the State Department was just 26; this year saw 120 different outcomes and agreements, often of a much more substantial nature than in the past. As the S&ED has evolved over the last few years, there has also been a shift to include more and more issues of global consequence, like ensuring full implementation of the Paris Agreement or enhancing nuclear security, as well as greater focus on cooperation in areas such as human development, humanitarian aid and disaster response. All these areas feature in the outcomes of this year’s dialogue.
Another good example of this increased focus on global issues is the commitment to cooperate on food security and sustainable development. Building on an agreement made at last year’s S&ED, this year the US and China have agreed to collaborate on food security in Timor Leste and Africa, explore new areas of development cooperation in Afghanistan and jointly support the objectives of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).
The ‘economic track’ is almost as broad in its scope as the strategic one, with agreements to continue market-oriented exchange rate reform, improve economic transparency and expand RMB trading and clearing capacity in the US. One of the most significant outcomes of this year’s S&ED related to the proposed Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). This agreement, which has already gone through 24 rounds of talks since 2008, aims to substantially increase Chinese and U.S. investments in each other’s markets. Key to this is China’s promise to provide a ‘negative list’ to the US, which will allow foreign investment in all industries and sectors of its economy, except in a number of specified areas. This is in contrast to the ‘positive list’ in place up to now, which closes off all sectors of the economy, except those specifically open to foreign investment. The ‘negative list’ approach will help to open up a number of closed sectors, including financial services, telecom, media, logistics and energy.
This isn’t to say that the S&ED is some kind of panacea for bilateral relations. It can’t be expected to eliminate the underlying differences and suspicions that still taint US-China relations and indeed there has been criticism of the lack of concrete outcomes on some issues like excess capacity. The controversy around steel ‘dumping’ is unlikely to go away soon, as any large-scale reduction in Chinese steel production would make millions unemployed, something the government isn’t prepared to do. But the S&ED does have an important role to play in stabilizing the world’s most important bilateral relationship and reinforcing a shared awareness of mutual responsibilities. It also provides a channel for both sides to voice concerns and differences candidly, thereby avoiding strategic misjudgments with potentially serious consequences.
This means that, while tensions will probably rumble on for the time being, we can remain confident that cooperation on global health and development, as in the case of the support for the Africa CDC, will continue and deepen in the coming years, and we at the Gates Foundation will be there to support and promote these efforts where we can.
As a brief postscript, I wanted to highlight a 2012 Brookings Institution publication released prior to the 2012 election: Establishing Credibility and Trust: The Next President Must Manage America’s Most Important Relationship. As America nears the election of its next president, it’s interesting to look back at this, especially the section on “Policy Recommendations”; these proposals feel largely valid even today.
Philip Nelson contributed to this article.
