The United States can no longer hold on, since the United States brazenly launched a trade war against China in 2018, the mainland has endured US suppression and sanctions in many fields such as science and technology, energy, economy and trade, and military, and the six-year high-intensity Sino-US confrontation has affected the trend of the entire international situation.
The United States did everything in its power in a vain attempt to contain and contain China's development, but China withstood the suppression of the United States. As the time enters 2023, the United States has sent a number of senior officials to visit China one after another, hoping to ease tensions with China. As for the United States' request to invite high-level Chinese officials to visit the United States, the mainland has repeatedly refused.
In October 2023, a blockbuster news broke that at the invitation of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, mainland Foreign Minister Wang Yi will visit the United States from October 26 to 28.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi's current visit to the United States has attracted extensive attention from the international community. Is Sino-US relations about to come to an end?
1. Competition between China and the United States
The trend of Sino-US relations suddenly underwent a major reversal after 2012, from the friction of small fights in the past to the intensification of confrontation. All these changes are also related to a "good deed" done by China's "kindness".
In 2008, the United States broke out in a financial crisis, which quickly spread from the United States to the world, forming an economic crisis that swept the world. At that time, China was also deeply affected by the deterioration of the external environment. You know, the mainland embarked on the road of export-oriented economy after the eighties and nineties of the last century, relying heavily on export trade.
The United States, Europe and Japan have successively fallen into economic crises, and the mainland's foreign trade exports have experienced negative growth, and the domestic economy has also been seriously affected. At this time, in response to the financial crisis, the mainland launched a package of economic measures known as the "Four Trillion Plan".
While alleviating the domestic crisis, the mainland also extended a helping hand to the United States, the birthplace of the crisis, at a time when Sino-US relations were still in a relatively friendly period, and China and the United States also had close economic and trade exchanges.
The mainland uses large amounts of foreign exchange reserves to buy U.S. Treasuries, and in a few years, China's holdings of U.S. debt have increased from $477.6 billion in 2007 to a peak of $1.3167 trillion in 2013. China has thus become the largest holder of U.S. debt.
China's "charcoal in the snow" has helped the United States stabilize the domestic economic situation and gradually get out of the financial crisis. But at this time, the United States also developed a deep fear of the mainland's economic strength. The top level of the United States realized that if China is allowed to continue to develop, then the hegemonic position of the United States will be replaced by China.
Years later, Obama wrote about his anxiety in his memoir, "The Promised Land," that as early as 20008, he found it difficult for the United States to compete fairly with China.
So the United States began a series of "unfair" measures, the first of which was the United States rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region proposed in 2012, which began to shift the strategic focus of the United States to the Asia-Pacific region, in fact, to contain China. At that time, the method used by the United States was to encourage Japan, the Philippines and other countries to deliberately provoke conflicts with China and prevent the process of regional integration in East Asia pursued by China.
This can not only avoid direct confrontation and conflict with China, but also lock in China's expansion space in East Asia, the so-called "rebalancing".
At this time, Sino-US relations have gradually deteriorated, but China's economy is still growing rapidly, and the United States' intention to consolidate the strategic position of the United States by using China's neighboring countries to contain China's development has not been realized, so when Trump took office, the Obama-era Asia-Pacific rebalance strategy was declared bankrupt, and the Trump administration brazenly launched direct trade sanctions against China.
The US-China trade war began in 2018. Prior to this, U.S. sanctions were invincible and invincible, while Japan experienced U.S. trade sanctions as early as the eighties of the last century, and the result was that Japan's economy slumped and stagnated. As a result, many people at that time judged based on past experience that China would also lose the trade war.
But these people apparently ignore the differences between China and Japan. China is a sovereign country with a population of more than a billion people, a perfect industrial system, and most importantly, an independent sovereign state, while Japan, despite its economic development at the time, was controlled by the United States. The United States demanded that Japan sign the "Plaza Agreement" and not do anything that threatened the United States, and Japan obediently obeyed.
And China is different, China's strength is not weaker than the United States, and those American intimidations do not scare us. After the United States imposed high tariffs on imports from China, the mainland immediately took countermeasures and also imposed tariffs on goods made in the United States.
The two sides come and go, and the trade war is intensifying. It's just that in the process of mutual sanctions between China and the United States, people are surprised to find out how the United States has become an "agricultural country"? The Chinese goods sanctioned by the United States are all steel products, electrical machinery, electronic instruments, etc., while the mainland's corresponding countermeasures against the United States are mostly agricultural products.
This is where America's predicament lies. In 2018, the total bilateral trade between China and the United States was US$633.52 billion, of which the mainland exported US$478.42 billion to the United States, imported US$155.1 billion from the United States, and China's trade surplus with the United States reached US$323.33 billion.
This is a huge trade deficit for the United States, in other words, the United States must import a large number of goods from China to supply domestic consumption, and the United States no longer has the production capacity corresponding to its consumption capacity.
Therefore, although the United States is fighting a trade war, it hopes that China will import more American goods, but it cannot reverse the trade deficit between China and the United States. So the United States played the second card, that is, technology sanctions.
Second, the United States, which is poor in donkey skills
In 2019, the United States launched sanctions against Chinese companies, which marked the beginning of a change in thinking in the United States. The United States has gradually changed from an industrial power to a financial empire through industrial transfer, and its low-end manufacturing industry has long been transferred abroad, and those that remain in the hands of the United States are those high-end manufacturing industries.
And this is exactly the direction in which China launched the sprint. As early as 2015, the mainland announced to the world our goal, that is, "Made in China 2025", to promote China to become a manufacturing powerhouse. One of the big differences between us and the United States and the West is that we have a strategic blueprint with a clear purpose and direction, and then move forward steadily.
We don't plan to hide it, and industrial upgrading can't be hidden. The United States can never sit idly by and watch China's rise, so it has brazenly launched a scientific and technological war against China, especially chip sanctions.
Although Biden reversed various policies of the Trump era after taking office, he retained the containment sanctions against China. This is the fundamental interest of the United States, so no matter who comes to power, the US government will try to suppress China.
The United States has "ambitions" in a vain attempt to achieve "economic decoupling" from China, but China has long been deeply bound to the global economy, and the United States is even more inseparable from China, which makes the US sanctions against China become the effect of killing 1,000 enemies and damaging 800. While China is resisting US pressure, the United States itself is not happy.
In 2022, the total trade in goods between China and the United States reached a new historical record of $690.6 billion, and after several years of trade wars, the "Sino-US decoupling" that broke their throats was all speechless in front of this figure. Biden also stopped mentioning any "decoupling", and instead used "de-risking" to explain his China policy.
What is "de-risking"? That is, the United States realized that it could not get rid of its dependence on China, but did not want to see China's rise, so it adopted the method of technology regulation and took strong restrictive measures on limited products and technologies to maintain the dominant position of the United States in these fields.
The chip sanctions imposed by the United States against China have become the main work of the United States to combat and curb China's development in high technology by restricting the export of chips to China.
From this, we can see that from the broad trade war to precise chip sanctions and semiconductor export controls, the scope of the United States' suppression of China is getting smaller and smaller, and finally has to face the reality that it can no longer contain China, and can only pray to slow down China's development.
In the process, the United States has also fallen into a situation of internal and external difficulties, with the pressure of sky-high debt at home and part of its external efforts to deal with Russia. For China's sanctions and suppression, the United States has also turned back three times in one step. In 2023, the United States is obviously unable to hold on, and has sent a number of senior officials to visit China one after another.
U.S. officials have come to China for one purpose: to ease tensions with China. It's just that whether it is Blinken or Yellen, they did not show a sincere attitude of "asking for people", but still looked high-spirited.
Since the talks cannot be reached, there is no need for the mainland to give the United States a good look. The mainland refused all US invitations, and if it wanted to talk, the United States straightened out its attitude. Who exactly is asking for whom now, is it not clear in the hearts of the United States itself?
By October 23, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict broke out and the United States fell into two wars at the same time, which made the United States completely unable to hold its breath and constantly softened its attitude towards China.
After six years of confrontation, the United States failed to defeat China's suppression, and the mainland also withstood the pressure and properly defused the US offensive. Although China has been on the defensive in this Sino-US conflict, the United States can not help China by playing all its cards, which is enough to prove that we are invincible.
And the change in the offensive and defensive trend of China and the United States is in the near future. As long as China maintains its usual strategic focus and does not fall into various external disputes to distract itself, with China's growing strength, China will one day sound the clarion call for a strategic counteroffensive.
Now the United States is like a "paper tiger", its strength can only scare and scare people at best, but once the United States really wants to start, the United States will run out of donkey skills, if the United States does not want to provoke a Sino-US war that destroys the world, then Sino-US relations may move towards temporary peace, and it is also possible.