The first high-level meeting between the United States and China under President Joe Biden was held on March 18-19 in Anchorage, Alaska. Signs showed that the three-session talks were unlikely to thaw the big chill between the two powers. In fact, the two had not expected too much from it, either. Fiery tit-for-tat in the opening remarks and unusually long and heated exchange of spar before the reporters foreshadowed the failure to reach any substantial agreement. But the importance of the meeting can not be underestimated as it marks a key point where a new international strategic order is being formed. Will there be a new battleground for US- and China-led alliances? The Anchorage meeting can be seen as a trendsetter.

The tensions between U.S.-China have been escalating since half of the way through Trump’s term. Trump’s administration saw China as a “strategic competitor,” saying it poses a number of challenges to America’s national interests ranging from economy, values to security. And wrong policies over the past two decades are to blame. The policies have argued for engagement with China and inclusion of it in the international political and economic order, helping it to be a trustworthy partner and a benign player. However, it is not the case in most situations. Trump’s China policies tried to right the wrong by introducing a wide range of tough measures.

Beijing, which believes “the East is rising and the West is declining”, has assumed that the U.S. getting tough on China shows its fears about its declining national power. Biden, who served as vice president under Barack Obama, has had a long history of engagement with China, which is looking to him to return to the pre-Trump approach. Since Biden took office, Beijing has made frequent attempts to shift the blame to the Trump administration for the worsening bilateral relations. For example, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a speech that to right the wrongs and bring the relations back to the right track, the U.S. has to tear down the walls of misperceptions about China. He urged the U.S. to bring the China policy back to reason. In Anchorage’s meeting, Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi, director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, made a long address in their opening remarks, restating what had been said and demonstrating their hard-wired mentality.

Neither of them came to identify a dramatic change in Washington’s strategic perception of China. As mentioned above, a National Security Strategy published in 2017 said the engagement policy with China is proved to be a mistake. Not only Trump administration accepted the position, even Kurt Campbell, who was then in opposition and is now appointed by Biden as Indo-Pacific coordinator, made the same argument in an article published in Foreign Affairs.

Less than two months after Biden took office, he released Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, identifying China as the only major competitor potentially capable of challenging the international system. Meanwhile, State Secretary Antony Blinken elaborated in a speech, saying “international system” refers to “all the rules, values and relationships that make the world work the way we want it to.” And China is the only country capable of challenging the order, a key factor contributing to the increasingly contentious U.S.-China relationship over the past years.

In other words, despite differences in policies and practices between Biden’s and Trump’s administrations, both place equal importance on the values that underpin the international order. China has gained a lot from “engagement policy”, which the West has used as a way to convince China to move toward a free and more open society. But it has worked the other way around, including suppressing the dissidents at home, challenging the world order, threatening regional security and universal values to a point where the West is unwilling to tolerate any longer.

In his opening statement, Blinken made clear Washington’s strong concern over China’s actions against Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. “We will also discuss our deep concerns with actions by China, including with Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States, and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threatens the rules-based order that maintains global stability. The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.” In this regard, an alliance of competing values and ideologies is not unlikely in reality. The media camera recorded the rocky start at the pre-meeting photo session, exchange of barbs, and long opening remarks by Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi which the U.S. described as a grandstanding for its domestic audience. From what unfolded in the meeting, we have every reason to assume a long competition and rivalry is taking shape. Can Taiwan, at the center of the game, give it a profound thought?

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