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The time is always right to do the right thing - Building a new model of major-country relationship between China and the United States

(GMW.cn)

Updated: 2015-09-27 15:02:57

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The time is always right to do the right thing - Building a new model of major-country relationship between China and the United States

President Xi Jinping (L) addresses a welcome ceremony held by US President Barack Obama at the South Lawn of the White House in Washington DC, the United States, Sept. 25, 2015. Xi arrived in Washington, the second stop of his state visit to the United States, on Thursday after a busy two-and-a-half-day stay in Seattle. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - China and the United States need to seize the opportunity to show the world that both countries are willing and able to cooperate and make common progress.

Since our two countries agreed to build a new model of major-country relationship, we have obtained a series of "early harvest" in many aspects, such as the expansion of pragmatic cooperation and effective control of divergences. At present, the international structure and the Asia-pacific conditions are undergoing profound and complex changes; China and the United States have also started another key phase of transitional development.

Under the new situation, as long as our two countries can seize the precious opportunity of President Xi's state visit, show the world our willingness and ability to cooperate, help each other, rather than undermine each other, tolerate each other, rather than repel each other, coordinate with each other, rather than be egoistic, we can inject new vitality to the new model of major-country relationship between China and the United States and make us an important support for jointly maintaining the stability and orderly evolution of international order in the 21st century.

If we strengthen cooperation and coordination, we will provide "twin-engine" for maintaining an increasing, open, mutually beneficial international economic system. Since the international financial crisis in 2008, the fragility and differentiation of weak recovery of world economy have been obvious.

Besides, many weaknesses of the global economic governance system are still serious and the lack of coordination and even contradiction of major economies' policies are bound to further increase the overall risks of the world economy.

The United States and China, as two largest economies with more than one-third of the world economic aggregate, have played key roles in containing the spead of risks, promoting world economic recovery and cooperating to improve global economic governance system.

Currently, China and the United States need to help each other to overcome domestic resistance, speed up the pace of our own economic transformation and upgrading, expand cooperation including international capacity to promote effective and sustainable demand of the world economy, promote the opening up and universal benefits of global multilateral trade and investment system, actively resolve systemic risks in the international financial system, and jointly promote the reform and development of global economic governance mechanism.

To strengthen understanding and mutual trust between China and the United States will be the basis for building a balanced, stable and effective international security system, especially in the Asia-pacific.

At present, security threats and challenges interweave, competition and mutual dependence in the field of international security upgrade simultaneously, but military security alliances based on the concept of zero-sum game and confrontation is still in vogue.

It should be noted that Cold War mentality and exclusive "circles" not only exacerbate strategic doubts and security dilemma between countries, but also restrict the great potential of countries in expanding security cooperation and coping with the increasingly complex security challenges.

China and the United States should have innovative thinking, overcome bottlenecks in cooperation in the field of military security, determine our security goals with "relative safety" rather than "absolute security", define our scope of security interests with "common security" rather than "unilateral security", design the approach and mechanism for maintaining regional and international security with "cooperation and safety" rather than "zero-sum confrontation" and make the security order in the Asia-Pacific region and the whole world develop towards a more balanced, stable and efficient direction.

As the breadth and depth of global governance expand increasingly, international community has growing consciousness of globalization-based communities of shared interests and responsibilities. On the other hand, the inclusion of a batch of new public domains including ocean, internet, space and polar areas not only further highlights the complexity of competition and asymmetry of global governance, but also intensifies the contradiction between international society's demand for fair and efficient governance and the current global governance undersupply .

China and the United States are the two key variables that affect the development of global governance, so our coordination not only can provide a great deal of material public goods for global governance, but also can give full play to the characteristics of our complementary advantages, jointly cope with the major threats and challenges faced by sustainable development, including climate change, energy resource security, water, soil and food security through innovative management, promote the establishment of rules and regulations in global governance.

 
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