President Xi Jinping is set to visit to the United States from September 23-25. His visit must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures.
In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents, and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.
In the other future, the two countries accept that neither can destroy the other without destroying much of humanity. They recognize that coexistence is not an act of charity and collaboration is not a concession. Both are necessities.
That is the significance of President Xi’s decision to travel to the United States. China’s foreign ministry has described head-of-state diplomacy as having an “irreplaceable” role in guiding relations between the two countries. The visit follows President Donald Trump’s trip to China in May and continuing negotiations over tariffs, trade, and investment. There are indications that President Xi will travel with a substantial delegation of Chinese business leaders. These facts suggest that Beijing wants to move the relationship away from the permanent crisis and towards practical engagement.
But diplomacy between China and the United States cannot merely be a photo opportunity. Nor should it be understood as a negotiation in which one side must surrender to the other. It must be based on a sober recognition of reality. Or to be precise, four realities.
The first reality is that China cannot be contained. China is not a minor country whose development can be suffocated by sanctions. It has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, a vast industrial system, an increasingly sophisticated scientific community, and deep commercial relationships across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Whatever one thinks of China, it is absurd to imagine that it can simply be excluded from the world economy. The attempt to contain China has already produced an extraordinary catalogue of restrictions: tariffs, semiconductor controls, investment prohibitions, sanctions on Chinese companies, naval patrols along China’s coastline, and the construction of new military arrangements from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Each of these measures is presented as defensive. Taken together, however, they form an architecture of confrontation. There is a dangerous illusion in Washington that pressure will force China to abandon its development. No Chinese government could accept such a demand. After the century of humiliation (from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion) the restoration of national sovereignty and the improvement of living standards are not negotiable matters for the Chinese people. The United States may slow certain aspects of China’s development, but it cannot persuade China to return to poverty.
The second reality is that economic separation is neither simple nor painless. The United States and China remain deeply connected through trade, investment, supply chains, scientific knowledge, and consumer markets. US farmers depend upon Chinese buyers. US companies depend upon Chinese manufacturing and upon Chinese consumers. China, meanwhile, benefits from access to US technology, agricultural products, and capital. Negotiators are now discussing reciprocal tariff reductions and new mechanisms for trade and investment. These are modest measures, but they acknowledge an important truth: economic warfare injures both countries. Tariffs are announced with nationalist speeches, but their costs appear quietly in grocery bills, factory closures, disrupted supply chains, and lost employment. Working people in the United States do not benefit when China is weakened. Their difficulties are rooted principally in decisions made by their own ruling class: decades of deindustrialization, the power of finance, attacks on trade unions, the privatization of public services, and the refusal to undertake serious social investment. China did not close the factories of the US Midwest. US corporations closed them in search of higher profits. The answer to inequality in either country is not economic nationalism by the United States.
The third reality is that humanity faces problems that cannot be solved by either country acting alone. The climate catastrophe does not carry a passport. Carbon emitted in one country heats the atmosphere everywhere. The United States possesses immense scientific and financial resources, while China has developed enormous productive capacity in solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, public transport, and renewable-energy infrastructure. Collaboration between them could accelerate a worldwide energy transition. Confrontation will delay it precisely when delay has become intolerable. The same is true of public health. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the human cost of secrecy, competition, and vaccine nationalism. Artificial intelligence creates another urgent area for cooperation. These technologies cannot be governed adequately by rival military doctrines or private corporations seeking maximum profit. The two countries must develop common safeguards against autonomous weapons, destabilizing cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and the use of artificial intelligence to intensify social inequality.
Finally, the fourth reality is the question of war. China and the United States are nuclear-armed powers. Any direct military conflict between them would have consequences beyond calculation. This is why Taiwan must not be transformed into the trigger for a catastrophic confrontation. The one-China framework and the existing diplomatic understandings must not be hollowed out by provocations, arms sales, or gestures designed for domestic political theater.
Peace requires restraint from both sides, but restraint cannot mean that the United States surrounds China with military bases and warships and then demands that China alone remain calm. Security cannot be achieved through the permanent insecurity of another country. There will, of course, be disagreements. Collaboration does not require agreement on every political question. Nor does coexistence require silence about differences. But disagreement must be conducted through diplomacy, international law, and the institutions of the United Nations, not through sanctions, threats, and military exercises.
The countries of the Global South have a particular interest in the success of this visit. They do not want to be instructed to choose between China and the United States. They do not want their ports, minerals, telecommunications systems, and political institutions turned into battlefields in a new cold war. They want access to finance, technology, medicine, and markets without political subordination. They want development, not recruitment into rival military camps. Xi Jinping’s visit therefore carries a responsibility that extends far beyond Washington and Beijing. The world does not need an agreement merely to divide markets between Chinese and US corporations. It needs a commitment to reduce the danger of war, dismantle unilateral coercive measures, restore normal economic relations, cooperate on climate and public health, and strengthen the principles of the United Nations Charter.
The importance of the visit lies not in ceremony but in possibility. It offers both countries an opportunity to step back from the cliff. The United States must abandon the fantasy that it can preserve its primacy by preventing China’s development. China, for its part, has repeatedly said that it does not seek to replace the United States as a hegemonic power. That principle must become the basis of a durable relationship: no containment, no domination, no war.
There is an old habit among powerful states of treating compromise as weakness. In the nuclear age, the opposite is true. It takes no courage to order another warship into contested waters. It takes political courage to recognize that one’s adversary also has legitimate interests, that coexistence requires reciprocity, and that the survival of humanity is more important than the vanity of supremacy.
This visit should therefore carry a simple message from Washington to the world: collaboration is not surrender, diplomacy is not weakness, and peace is not an abstraction.
Confrontation offers neither country a future.
Collaboration offers the world a chance.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books(New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Chinese President Xi Jinping underlined the need for stronger international coordination for common security in West Asia and a reaffirmation of the UN Charter and international law.
Xi demanded external powers must respect sovereignty and territorial integrity of the countries in the region and stop interfering in their internal affairs.
China is ready to work with the countries in the region to “safeguard the security of international shipping lanes, advance development cooperation, promote the convergence of interests of regional countries, gradually enhance mutual trust, and eliminate root causes of the conflict,” Xi proposed.
Xi made the statement during his two day state visit to Egypt on Wednesday, September 2. This was his first state visit to the country in 10 years.
Xi’s visit coincided with the 70th anniversary of establishment of bilateral relations between the two countries and took on greater significance in the context of ongoing wars in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
Xi and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi signed a joint declaration which recognized Palestine as the core issue in the region and underlined the importance of “reaching a just and lasting settlement based on the two-state solution” and creation of an “independent and sovereign” Palestinian state as per 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as the capital.
Both the countries also rejected “any plans to displace the Palestinian people from their lands under any pretexts or names” and called for a true ceasefire in Gaza with unrestricted flow of humanitarian aid.
Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza since the ceasefire was announced last year in daily attacks. It has also prevented the flow of humanitarian aid to the region and expanded the war against Palestinians by launching attacks in other occupied territories such as the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Xi presented a four-point proposal for enhancing common security in West Asia, which will keep the external forces out and achieve lasting stability and peace in the region.
Guo Jiakun, official spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explained Xi’s four points during a regular press conference on Thursday.
As per Xi’s proposal, increasing dialogue among the countries in the region is the first necessary step in achieving common security. This step must be followed by building comprehensive regional governance of hotspot issues.
Third, Xi claimed, increased possibilities of mutual development would pave the way towards lasting stability and security in the region.
Identifying that lasting peace and stability in the region is “fundamentally dependent on development” Xi also offered Chinese help to the countries in the region in achieving the same.
This regional set up, as the last step, needs international backing by institutions such as the UN for sustenance. The support of the countries in the region to the UN will in turn make it “play a tangible role in regional affairs” as well.
The China-Egypt joint declaration talks about their efforts to amplify the voice of the Global South by “supporting the right of the developing countries to fair and balanced participation in international economic and political decision making.”
Egypt recently joined BRICS, a 11-member group working for a multipolar world and democratization of the global governing institutions including the UN and international financial institutions.
It also participated in the recently concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek as a Dialogue Partner. The summit adopted a joint declaration talking about the democratization of the global governance mechanisms.
Apart from BRICS and the SCO, Egypt and China are also part of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum and Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. All these organizations have the stated goals of working against unilateralism and acts of bullying in international politics.
Their joint declaration also talked about strengthening political and security coordination on regional and international issues of common interest which may include conflicts in the region.
China is one of Egypt’s largest trading partner with their bilateral trade reaching $20 billion last year.
As a part of the larger agenda of the countries in the Global South to reduce their dependence on the US dollar, both the countries signed an agreement to pay for all their bilateral trade in their local currencies.
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