State Council member Yang Jiechi and Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi will meet US State Secretary Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan this week in Anchorage, Alaska, to discuss the predicament Sino-US relations are in. In general, it is considered that a meeting is better than nothing, but on one has high hopes for the outcome.

I am convinced there is a layer of deeper meaning of “socialist diplomatic thought with Chinese characteristics for a new era” concerning Xi Jinping’s choice of the venue for the meeting in Alaska of bitter cold to break the ice. The Bering Strait, which separates Asia from North America now, was a piece of land about 18 thousand years ago. It was said in early years those who arrived in North America first were Mongolians who went there from Siberia overland. That’s why there is some resemblance between Indians and Chinese. It proves one more time the Chinese nation stemming from a distant origin, being of an outstanding breed and a pioneer of civilization. Having a negotiation this time with barbarians on the land where our ancestors trampled on is a sign of our national prestige resurfacing. The disposition of combat forces is made formidable before beating the rival.

Surely, the theory of “the Bering land bridge” has been proven wrong by some recent research. A relatively convincing saying is Mongolians sailed along the coastal line of North America and finally set their feet on the continent. As for Peking Men we learned about at primary school, which was pretty eye-opening in our childhood, they have been proven to be Homo erectus of the later period. Modern mankind originating from Homo sapiens in Africa is already an undisputed fact.

I have gone too far. Let’s go back to Sino-US relations, and the West disconcerted by the rise of China. I have shared my view with some friends from overseas at a symposium that Sino-US relations nowadays and the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union last century are as different as chalk and cheese.

First of all, while the race between the West and the countries behind the Iron Curtain in those years was all about military strength, there was not much economic interaction between the two camps. Now that all other countries are lagging behind the US in terms of military power, China is totally aware of the situation and so has no intention at all of overtaking the US in the short run. What China is most afraid of is to follow the same old disastrous route taken by the Soviet Union and be implicated in an armament race which is going to drag down its economy. Moreover, after half a century of liberalization, various economies all over the globe have become inextricably intertwined. So, it is hardly possible for any country to deal others a blow at zero cost. Culturally, the Soviet Union is actually a branch of the western civilization, with the Eastern Church as its state religion which is even more orthodox than the one in Rome. Most Russians think they pertain to the West rather than the East. By contrast, the Chinese society which has been nurtured with Confucianism for more than two thousand years is always tinged with a little servility to authority, hence pretty resistant to freedom and democracy from the West.

The meeting in Alaska will not alter the overall Sino-US arrangement. While China aspires to carry on benefiting from trading, and fend off intervention in its internal affairs including the Taiwan issue, the US continues to exert pressure on China with universal values, and together with its allies pick China off militarily in an omnibearing manner. Hong Kong will keep on being a chessman in the game between the two parties.

(Cheung Chung-wing, Senior Partner and CEO, Asia Pacific at StormHarbour Securities)

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