A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
President Trump is delaying what was supposed to be the first U.S. presidential visit to China in more than eight years. The two countries have had their fair share of disagreements since Trump returned to office, from trade to technology controls to friction over rare earth minerals. The U.S. and China also have, perhaps surprisingly, similar views of each other, with each thinking the other is a declining power. Here's NPR's Emily Feng.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Ask most of China's top international relations experts these days, and most are confident about China's future in technology and foreign policy. That includes Wang Wen. He is a dean at Beijing's Renmin University and a former opinion editor at the official paper, the Global Times.
WANG WEN: China is quietly, steadily suppressing the United States, including economic expansion, infrastructure, technological breakthrough, new energy transformation.
FENG: And China's foreign policy analysts, like Wu Xinbo at Shanghai's Fudan University, are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the U.S.' prospects.
WU XINBO: We think the U.S. is currently suffering from a kind of, you know, the decline of hegemonic syndrome.
FENG: According to them, the U.S. has unfixable problems. It has lost manufacturing capability, while China has leaped ahead.
WU: The U.S. is suffering from some structural problems, like, you know, the hopeless federal debt. You can never expect the U.S. to overcome this kind of issue.
FENG: And this is why they say all China has to do is sit back and let the U.S. sabotage itself with political polarization and tariff spats with other countries, especially with its allies. Here's Wang Dong, an international relations professor at Peking University in Beijing.
WANG DONG: A common external perception was that the U.S. economy could look resilient on paper, but the political system appeared more fragile.
FENG: Chinese distrust of America is not new, but these days, Chinese official rhetoric is filled with discourse on how America is in irreversible decline, exacerbated by Trump's actions in Venezuela and Iran. And yet here is the irony - the U.S. thinks much the same of China.
DAVID LAMPTON: What we have is a mirror image process that see each other as adopting of a strategy, a national security strategy that's inimical at the core to the other country's interests.
FENG: This is David Lampton, a veteran U.S.-China relations scholar and professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University. He recently penned a joint piece with the influential Chinese international relations scholar Wang Jisi this year, warning the U.S. and China need to find common ground, but that fewer people-to-people interactions from both countries means the U.S. and China are trapped in cycles of what they called embedded hostility towards each other.
LAMPTON: There's a school of thought in the United States that looks at China's financial circumstance, banking solvency, provinces that have insufficient revenues, houses that can't sell, entire ghost cities, and that feeds an idea this is the time to push China.
FENG: In other words, just as China sees the U.S. buckling under national debt, the U.S. sees China weakened by its own domestic economic problems, like corporate and local debt. And just as China suspects the U.S. is trying to contain its growth, the U.S. believes China's security interests means Beijing wants to dominate over the U.S. This thinking can embolden both countries, says Jonathan Czin, a former CIA China specialist and National Security Council director.
JONATHAN CZIN: Both sides seem to see that time is on their side.
FENG: He points out the Trump administration began last year with high tariffs on China until China hit back unexpectedly hard by threatening to choke off rare earth exports to the U.S., which then led China to read the U.S. economy as fragile.
CZIN: And if China chooses to impose additional economic pain on the United States, that will hurt President Trump and the Republican Party's prospects in the midterm elections.
FENG: Elections in November. Neither country has been able to persuade the other its intentions are innocent. Wang Dong at Beijing's Peking University says there's a big perception gap between the threat the U.S. thinks China poses and what China believes it is actually doing.
D WANG: They tend to misread China's national development as a threat.
FENG: While Wang Wen at Renmin University says, although he truly believes China will become the world's most powerful country one day...
W WANG: But it will definitely not become a hegemon like the United States, let alone invade the United States.
FENG: But those reassurances are seen suspiciously in the U.S., and the danger experts in both countries say is the mirroring of these perceptions leads the U.S. and China to assume the worst about each other.
Emily Feng, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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