Future depends on tests ahead

If a trans-Pacific partnership is going to work, as Fu Ying, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress, told Kissinger in a recent dialogue, America must be able to accept China as “an equal brother.” But that goes both ways: China must also step up to the plate with a global perspective of its responsibility that it has never had as a regional power.

The Xi-Obama deal on curbing climate change announced at the APEC Summit in November is a welcome, even historic, step in this direction.

For China, the “mutual respect” that would undergird any partnership means recognition by the US of the legitimacy of its political system. This is not a sharp edge of conflict, but it always shades the background of every other aspect of the US-China relationship.

Regime change or fomenting a “color revolution” in China is not an active US policy, as many in Beijing seem to think. But it is an ideological expectation of the worldview of America’s political class which continues to believe that China is “on the wrong side of history.” No leading American politician would today publicly acknowledge that China’s system of governance - despite pronounced flaws not unlike democracy itself - is not only legitimate but admirable in key respects, notably the capacity to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty in only three decades

Absent this kind of objective acknowledgement - or “symmetry of validity” - that changes the narrative, a “cold war” taste will continue to sour the idea of a new relationship. It holds back any fuller embrace and raises suspicions over every initiative.

If the political class in the US would look honestly and less ideologically at the whole world scene, it would see that China is more socially aligned with America’s goals –scientific development, the opportunity of upward mobility for all its citizens, and in particular, the advancement of women “who hold up half the sky” – than others with whom America clashes around the globe.