US-China conflict resolution needs more than a latter-day Nixon going to Beijing

President Xi Jinping, for example, insisted on sitting at the head of the table in his brief 35-minute meeting with Blinken, casting the senior US diplomat in a decidedly subservient light. No sooner had Blinken left the country than US President Joe Biden referred to the Chinese leader as a dictator, further inflaming China’s sensitivities.

Such an approach no longer works because diplomacy derives its legitimacy from domestic politics. On the US side, poisonous anti-China sentiment tied Blinken’s hands long before he set foot in Beijing. US Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the new House Select Committee on China, has the audacity to blame the country’s China problem on engagement, arguing on CNBC and in The Wall Street Journal that “engagement invariably leads to appeasement in the face of foreign aggression”.

Unfortunately, Gallagher speaks for a strident anti-China Washington consensus that left Blinken with few options. Bipartisan support of such an extreme view all but ruled out any creative US diplomacy.

Despite its one-party system, domestic political considerations are equally important in China. The legitimacy of Xi’s power rests on his so-called Chinese dream, which promises “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Yet without sustained economic growth, Xi risks breaking that promise and facing a wave of public and Communist Party anger.

That makes a growth shortfall in China especially of concern. While a widely expected stimulus could alleviate near-term pressures on the economy, the confluence of demographic and productivity headwinds is far more problematic for medium- to longer-term growth prospects. Add to that the foregone growth that comes from ongoing conflict with the US and its allies and there can be little doubt that Chinese politics are tightly constrained by the country’s mounting “rejuvenation deficit”.

Fragile egos only exacerbate the problem. Rhetorical miscues, stagecraft and name-calling all get blown out of proportion. When leaders lack the tough skin required for conflict resolution, the hair-trigger reactions of personalised diplomacy backfire.

A new approach is urgently needed. Shifting to a more institutionalised model of engagement would take conflict resolution out of the hands of hyperreactive, politically constrained leaders. That means reworking the architecture of US-China engagement to be more process-oriented, incorporating greater technical expertise at the working-group level and focusing more on a strategy of mutual problem-solving.

My proposal for a US-China secretariat goes well beyond earlier attempts at institutional engagement – namely, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue and the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade. Both efforts failed to prevent the current conflict before being cancelled by the Trump administration, and Biden has opted not to resuscitate the initiatives. But that is because they didn’t go far enough in providing a permanent, robust framework for relationship management.