Saturday, February 17, 2018

Are the US and China Inevitable Rivals? Scholars Explore


Trevor Williams, GlobalAtlanta

Image from article, with caption: The Carter Center's China program hosts an annual exchange of scholars to explore issues in the bilateral relationship.

Excerpt:
Are the U.S. and China inevitable adversaries, stuck on a collision course as one rises and the other aims to maintain its super-power status?

Apparently, it depends on whom you ask, how you frame the question and which country you’re from.

Four scholars exploring the issue diverged on lines of nationality at a Carter Center Young Scholars Forum, which brought budding foreign-affairs students together with established experts on Jan. 30-31 at Emory University. ...

Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center [:]...

“China is doing what any large, wealthy, continental power would do,” he said. “We end up speaking as if China’s rise is aimed at us. It’s not at us at all, it’s for them. It’s about human flourishing, and they’ve been very successful with that.”

That’s an important point in a relationship where intentions can be hard to parse out. Americans are at times doomed to short-termism and can be ill-equipped to read nuance, Mr. Daly said.

And China has undertaken efforts to exert influence in the U.S. in both overt ways — like inbound investment, educational exchange and public diplomacy — and in unacknowledged ways, such as economic manipulation and covert espionage.

“This is a tricky, unprecedented complex challenge,” Mr. Daly said, but it’s “manageable” with the right level of understanding on the American side. ...

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