Project 2029: The Art of Conflict Resolution
Under the best of circumstances, the case for US-China conflict resolution is a stretch. A post-Trump proposal.
Previously, in a three-part series, “Imagining Engagement,” I attempted to make the now politically unthinkable case for US-China conflict resolution. Part I focused on the goals of engagement, what an ideal state of resolution would imply in terms of national values, common ground, and verifiable commitment. Part II was about the benefits of re-engagement and the associated requirements of collaboration — both through diplomacy and an institutional mechanism. Part III described my proposal for a new architecture of engagement, first by making earlier working groups permanent — in economics, finance, trade, commercial engagement, and climate — and then by combining them under the oversight umbrella of a new US-China Secretariat.
Easier said than done. I concluded this series with an appeal to the realpolitik of engagement — looking beyond goals, benefits, and a new mechanism for bilateral cooperation to a recognition of the practical considerations that must be addressed to temper the tensions of an increasingly fraught Sino-American relationship. Alas, as compelling as any case for re-engagement might seem, I have to concede that the odds of an immediate breakthrough are low. There is a need for all of us in the engagement camp, including yours truly, to “wake up and smell the coffee” — weighing the possibilities of a transition from conflict escalation to conflict resolution against a realistic assessment of today’s tough political circumstances. The challenge in this case is to convert impediments to collaborative action into catalysts for re-engagement.
What actions, if any, might be achievable in today’s toxic political climate? Very few, I suspect. In particular, this is not the time for bold proposals that will be easily shot down in a climate of hyper-partisan, deeply polarized political sentiment. As I wrote in Chapter 12 of Accidental Conflict, there is a logical way to think about rebuilding trust in a deeply conflicted relationship. The basic idea is, at first, to tread cautiously, with small steps aimed toward picking the low-hanging fruits of shared mutual interests. Slowly but surely, this leads to an embryonic restoration of trust building. The critical mass of engagement eventually arises out of the chemistry of people, leaders, and circumstances. In the lengthy dispatch that follows — with promises to return to short-form posts next week — three broad considerations strike me as especially promising in this regard:
People. People-to-people relations are the grass roots of engagement. Interactions can occur at many levels, through tourism, educational exchanges, and cross-border business activity. In all cases, people-to-people engagement has suffered dramatically as US-China conflict has intensified.
Tourists. In 2019, Chinese tourist arrivals in the US peaked at around 2.9 million, before collapsing during Covid and then only partially rebounding to 1.1 million in 2023, or less than 40% of the 2019 peak. A similar pattern is evident for US travel to China. At work, in both instances, were a multiplicity of forces — sharply reduced air flights, tighter visa requirements, and the long shadow of COVID-19 — most traceable to the negative sentiment associated with mounting bilateral conflict. Under current circumstances, prospects for a robust recovery in US-China tourism seem remote.
Students. Educational exchanges had long been a mainstay of US-China engagement. That is no longer the case. In the pre-Covid period, about 370,000 Chinese students were enrolled in the US, the largest source of foreign enrollment. By 2023-24, that figure has fallen to 277,000, with further reductions likely in the period immediately ahead in the aftermath of targeted Chinese student visa reductions announced by the Trump Administration. The reverse flow — Americans studying in China — has followed a similar pattern, albeit with a major disparity in the level of academic exchanges; notwithstanding XI Jinping’s recent announcement to increase US student enrollment in China by 50,000 over the next five years, American students studying in China fell to about to 700 to 1,000 in 2024, a fraction of the 15,000 peak during 2015-19. While small in numbers, the suspension of the US-China Fullbright program by President Trump in 2020 has cast a lasting pall over educational exchanges between the two countries.
Workers. A similar pattern is evident in the reduced cross-border flow of US and Chinese workers stationed in each other’s countries. A post-Covid reduction of expat staffing by US multinationals in favor of local talent has been exacerbated by collateral damage stemming from several high-profile incidents involving Chinese allegations of industrial espionage related to national security and technology concerns. In the US, a sharp recent reduction in H-1B visa approval rates has taken a toll on Chinese employment in America’s engineering, AI, and STEM-focused research sectors. This trend has been exacerbated by the Trump Administration’s early 2025 clamp-down on visa issuance to members of the Chinese Communist Party, or those affiliated with CCP cadres.
There are plenty of low-hanging fruit in a peoples-based US-China re-engagement agenda, including but not limited to increasing nonstop air flights between the two countries, relaxing visa requirements (especially for students), reopening closed consulates in both countries (i.e., Chengdu and Houston), resuming the Fullbright program as a good-faith gesture by the US government, and successful execution of China’s 50,000 five-year US student enrollment target. Bringing the two peoples back together is necessary, but not sufficient, for conflict resolution. But it is an important and perhaps the easiest of the initial steps that might be accomplished in the current contentious climate.
Mutual challenges. As Xi Jinping is fond of repeating, the world is facing “great changes not seen in a hundred years.” If anything, that may be an understatement. While that may well apply to pandemics, there are even deeper problems of near existential significance for the planet — namely, climate change, AI governance, and cybersecurity.
As responsible stewards of their own nations, Sino-American leaders face the urgent imperatives of collective action in dealing with global threats. The US and China not only share the same atmosphere, pathogens, and cyber connectivity but their geostrategic posturing has decisive consequences for the balance between world peace and war. It is in the best interest of both nations to resolve joint existential problems on mutually acceptable terms.
Again, easier said than done. History is replete with tragic outbreaks of war that could have been avoided by responsible collective action. Repeatedly, the power politics of territorial ambitions have gotten in the way. But today’s trifecta of threats — climate, health, and AI — are very different than the territorial power grabs that have sparked kinetic conflicts in the past. They impinge on the shared quality of life for all of us.
Problems of that order of magnitude can only be resolved by collective action. As the two leading nations of the world, both the United States and China need to accept joint responsibility for nothing short of saving the planet. While this shouldn’t be a political issue, unfortunately that is not the case. Debate still rages over the COVID origins debate, deflecting attention away from collaborative efforts needed to avoid the inevitable next pandemic. The US political pendulum has swung back in support of climate-change denial and anti-vaccine sentiment. And as AI action plans of both the US and China indicate, the two countries are each addressing AI governance on their own terms, rather than through a common lens, framing AI supremacy as more of a race than a shared responsibility.
Contentious political considerations aside, the agenda for collective action in addressing mutual existential threats is relatively straight-forward: an enforceable climate agreement, new protocols for health and disease collaboration, and endorsing the establishment of global AI standards. That, of course, is all but impossible under current circumstances, especially with the US having once again withdrawn from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the World Health Organization, while at the same time continuing to embrace a containment strategy — the “small yard, high fence”— to counter Chinese progress on AI. It will take a major shift of the political winds in both the United States and China to frame the vision and muster the courage that will be required to address these mutual problems of existential significance.
Blame. The politics of conflict escalation are central to my take on the character of the US-China relationship. I have written two books on US-China codependency, Unbalanced and Accidental Conflict, arguing that over the past 45 years, both nations have become heavily dependent on the other as sources of economic growth and prosperity. Initially, China drew support from US external demand as the main source of its export-led growth model. At the same time, income-constrained American consumers benefited from low-cost Chinese products while a saving-short US economy relied on China’s outsized purchases of US Treasuries to help fund chronic budget deficits while China quietly emerged as America’s third largest and most rapidly growing major export market.
However, as is the case in the psychopathology of humans, US-China codependency broke down when both partners started to change the terms of engagement. To a large extent, this arose out of political expedience. For the US, it became easier to blame China for Americas gaping trade deficit, than to accept responsibility for a trade imbalance arising from a shortfall of domestic saving traceable to outsize budget deficits. For China, it became easier for its leadership to blame the nation’s mounting economic growth problems on America’s China containment strategy than to accept responsibility for its own problems like the property crisis and debt-intensive growth.
Codependent human relationships fall apart when one partner blames the other for self-inflicted problems. The US-China blame game is very much an outgrowth of that same insidious interplay. America views China as its major threat from the standpoints of trade, manufacturing, AI, intellectual property, and national security. China has a similar take of the US, casting America as its major threat to the Chinese Dream of prosperity and rejuvenation.
This line of argument has one critical feature that is highly relevant to the agenda of conflict resolution that I am attempting to put forth. The political expedience of the blame game noted above is largely based on a multiplicity of false narratives that I featured in my most recent book, Accidental Conflict. Like Japan in the 1980s, China is seen as the principal culprit in our current trade deficit — a bilateral exaggeration of a multilateral problem that is at odds with the far more powerful macro role played by domestic saving imbalances; similarly, the Chinese technology threat conveniently masks America’s own under-investment in basic research and higher education. China is equally guilty of embracing false narratives about the US as a convenient excuse for its own struggles. I have emphasized the confluence of censorship, regulatory constraints on the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurs, as well as premature great-power aspirations as misplaced justifications for China’s own profusion of false narratives about the US.
It follows that the blame game of conflict escalation can only be tempered by an honest look in the mirror — by an acceptance of the role played by home-grown problems. The conflict resolution agenda in this case is also straightforward: In the economic sphere, it emphasizes structural rebalancing of both the US and Chinese economies: America needs to save more and consume less while China needs to do the opposite — save less and consume more. Technology conflict is better addressed by market-based competition, investment in human capital, and scientific research than by exaggerated allegations of cheating and intellectual property theft. And geostrategic tensions stand a better chance of being diffused if the two nations temper the paranoia of national security fears that have reached a crescendo in recent years, stemming from extraordinary outbreaks of global instability, especially those in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the South China Sea.
Wishful thinking? I will be the first to concede that implementation of this agenda at any point in the next few years is a stretch, at best. Today’s toxic political climate all but rules out that possibility. Neither the United States nor China seem amenable to substantiative compromise, irrespective of the responsibility that each nation could play in resolving the conflict between them. Even the low-hanging fruit of my proposals for people-to-people engagement seem out of reach. The United States is swept up in the virus of Sinophobia, with little sign that the fever is about to break. And China is moving on, turning its sights more to the Global South than back to the ideals of a now tarnished American Exceptionalism.
In today’s toxic political climate, you can forget about the wisdom and courage needed to resolve mutual problems — climate, health, and AI — let alone the honesty of facing up to deep-rooted homegrown sources of the blame game. The classic conflict of codependency arises from a reactive, defensive posture — that it is far easier to blame others for problems of your own making than to accept responsibility for tough solutions. Only then can an aggrieved nation — whether it is a perpetually victimized US or China with its humiliation complex — chart a different course that draws the instinctual politics of conflict into sharp question.
Call me naïve, but ultimately, I am left with a yearning for a major shift in the political winds as the best hope for US-China conflict resolution. As I see it, as long as a conflict-prone Donald Trump, or his MAGA acolytes, are in power in the United States, sustained conflict resolution with China is all but impossible. I don't see any art in the on-again, off-again “deals” as a serious recipe for lasting conflict-free stability. I fully realize that this observation comes across as a political statement that half a polarized US electorate would reject. My apologies to those readers who might be so offended. At the same time, this view is not intended to cast China in the role as the white knight, a stable political force in an otherwise tumultuous, conflict-torn world. In a one-party Chinese political system that has consolidated power and open-ended support behind Xi Jinping, it makes little sense to speak of an enlightened potential for shifting political winds in Beijing.
By default, that probably puts a disproportionate share of the onus of conflict resolution on United States. On one level, that may not seem fair to those under the spell of Sinophobia. But, as was the case in the immediate aftermath of World War II when the US reached out to Japan and Germany and offered a Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-ravaged Western Europe, there have been pivotal moments in the past when America’s global leadership truly lived up to the lofty art form as the bright light of a “shining city upon a hill.” Avoiding accidental conflict with China may well require such magnanimous spirit.
For today’s polarized America, that spirit may be especially difficult to recapture. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. It may well require nothing short of a new US political revolution to get from here to there, from the chaos of the moment to a new era of civility, reason, and conflict resolution. That undoubtedly spells later rather than sooner for US-China conflict resolution — framing such a possibility as more of a post-Trump action plan. It’s not too early to start thinking about “Project 2029.”