BEIJING: At a critical juncture when the world is wrestling with a once-in-a-century global health crisis and the accompanying economic fallout, the importance of a stable and sound China-US relationship cannot be overstated. When Joe Biden assumes the U.S. presidency later Wednesday, he will inherit a US-China relationship severely battered by a handful of political arsonists in the outgoing administration who were, even in their final days in office, racing to unleash their anti-China paranoia. The past four years have witnessed an unbridled campaign by the Trump administration to toxicate one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world. The new leader in Washington should start by defusing tensions with Beijing, and work with China to return bilateral relations to a rational track. Firstly, the Biden administration should stop regarding China as America’s inevitable “ideological nemesis.” It should exercise rationality and common sense over differences between the two sides. With their minds deeply entrenched in the obsolete Cold-War thinking, China hawks in the Trump administration intentionally turned a blind eye to the substantial achievements in U.S.-China relations over the past decades, and depicted China as a “strategic threat.” To justify this irrationality, they blatantly sought to tamper with history by claiming that the U.S. policy of engagement with China had gone under because Washington had failed to “induce change” in China. Washington’s allegation is a far cry from the truth. Since the two sides set out to end their decades-long estrangement back in the 1970s, recognizing and respecting each other’s different political and social systems while seeking to expand common ground had been a predominant mutual understanding. –PNP
