Chinese diplomats urge Harvard audience to build trust and not heed 'narrow-minded' Americans
South China Morning Post
6 min read
US leaders and lawmakers should focus on improving China-US relations and building trust rather than listening to "narrow-minded" Americans keen to blame outsiders, senior Chinese diplomats said Saturday.
Speaking at the Harvard College China Forum, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang and New York Consul General Huang Ping said improved ties between the US and China transformed the world over the past half-century, adding that whether the countries choose destructive competition or beneficial cooperation will transform the next 50 years.
"China-US cooperation is indispensable, and yet we're faced with dark clouds that involve misreading and misjudging," said Qin, citing the danger of a "new Cold War". "What does the future hold for the bilateral relationship and how do we find a new way to get along? These are questions that will garner the attention of the world."
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Following up a few minutes later, Huang called on the US to avoid stoking irritants. Citing the virtual meeting in November between President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping, he called on the US to live up to its word by not supporting Taiwan independence, not using its alliances against China and not taking steps that lead to conflict.
New York Consul General Huang Ping speaking Saturday at a conference at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo: SCMP/Mark Magnier alt=New York Consul General Huang Ping speaking Saturday at a conference at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo: SCMP/Mark Magnier>
"The most important event in the next 50 years will be for China and the US to find a way to get along with each other," Huang said. "Do not learn from spiders who make their own webs but bees who make their own honey together."
The senior Chinese diplomats said future ties between the world's largest developing country and the world's largest developed nation are inextricably linked, with more that binds than divides. This includes two-way trade of US$750 billion, investment of US$240 billion, extensive people-to-people ties and a shared interest in tackling global terrorism, financial instability and climate change.
The officials said the US achieved its rise to wealth and power in two centuries and should not frustrate China's own development efforts built on a 5,000-year history.
"We hope the US will respect the path independently chosen by the Chinese people and accommodate a peaceful and prosperous China," Huang said. "The two major countries have differences, inevitably, but what matters is how we manage and control them."
Bilateral competition should be like a track and field meet in which the two teams learn from each other, Huang said, rather that the mutual suspicion and deception of Squid Game, referring to a popular dystopian Korean television series.
"American society has always advocated spiritual diversity and inclusiveness," Huang said. "But they are also some narrow-minded people who find it difficult to accept those countries with different histories, cultures and systems from the US and always point fingers at those countries."
The Harvard venue, however, underscored some of the difficulties and missteps Beijing has faced getting its message across in recent years as its wolf warrior rhetoric has ramped up and bilateral relations spiralled down.
Largely absent from Saturday's two hundred or so attendees were the average Americans and lawmakers that Beijing seeks to convince. Instead, most in the Harvard hall were Chinese-born students at elite Boston-area US universities sympathetic to China's message that its rise is peaceful and its development non-threatening, even as tensions mount.
Chinese Ambassador to the US Qin Gang and National Zoo Director Brandie Smith placing bamboo on a fruitsicle cake for the zoo's pandas earlier on Saturday. The zoo celebrated 50 years of its iconic panda exchange agreement with the Chinese government. Photo: AP alt=Chinese Ambassador to the US Qin Gang and National Zoo Director Brandie Smith placing bamboo on a fruitsicle cake for the zoo's pandas earlier on Saturday. The zoo celebrated 50 years of its iconic panda exchange agreement with the Chinese government. Photo: AP>
"Communication between the two countries needs improving," said Audrey Mao, 24, a Boston University data science student from Shandong province. "We need more mutual understanding."
In Congress, both parties support increasingly tough policies toward China, a view mirrored across US society as the two nations feud over everything from defence and trade to human rights and technology.
Some 54 per cent of Americans view China as a competitor and 35 per cent see it as an enemy, according to recent Pew Research Center polling, compared with just 9 per cent who view Beijing as a partner. In China, likewise, distrust has grown as has the view that Washington is primarily motivated by holding China down.
Qin urged the two countries to defy prevalent conventional wisdom and entreated the more than 1,000 Chinese students at Harvard to help turn the tide. "I hope every one of you present here will be an icebreaker," he said.
Further complicating Beijing's soft power efforts, the US business community, its traditional ally in Washington, has become increasingly frustrated with Chinese trade barriers, market-access constraints and forced data- and technology-transfer policies.
In a nod to that constituency, Huang argued Saturday that China's business environment and supply chains are improving and its global macroeconomic ties growing stronger, even as it promotes trade facilitation and works to shorten its list of economic sectors off limits to overseas investors.
"China's reform and opening is always under way. And our goal will only open wider," Huang said, adding that the Asian giant continues to foster "common interest and shared opportunity with the world" through its signature global Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.
US business leaders and lawmakers counter that China needs to take more concrete steps in order to back up vaguely worded promises.
"It's the same old playbook," said Jeffrey Moon, head of China Moon Strategies consultancy, formerly with the US Trade Representative Office.
The senior diplomats also sought to tap US cultural references and historic milestones in their effort to bridge the bilateral divide, citing China's love of Hollywood, Disney and Starbucks and former President Richard Nixon's 1971 visit to China.
Other speakers at the two-day conference voiced similar hopes and concerns.
"As brothers in the family of man, we are not without jealousy, sibling rivalry, mutual suspicion and tendency to squabble and quarrel," said Larry Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University and former US Treasury secretary. "The extraordinary histories we have compiled compel us to find ways and means of cooperation."
The US-China tension is also spilling into US society, others said. Henry Tang, co-founder of the Committee of 100 civic group, said even as the world has focused on Covid-19, another pandemic is prevalent in the United States, namely anti-Asian prejudice.
"How many more decades must we Asians endure this pain, this hurt," Tang said. "The time has come to fight for our integrity."
Added to the atmosphere of distrust and mutual suspicion, said Harvard political economy professor Dwight Perkins, are recent moves by US and Chinese leaders.
"There's plenty of reason on both sides why we've gotten into this downward spiral in international relations," Perkins said citing China's expansion in the South China Sea and punitive tariff increases launched by former president Donald Trump. "We need to get off of this downward spiral ... We badly need a way out."
