What Does China Think U.S.-China Relations Should Look Like?

Kathleen Kingsbury

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As the 20th century closed, I sat as a teenager in a lecture hall and listened to Henry Kissinger declare that China would soon be the next global superpower — and all young Americans needed to know more about it.

For reasons I still can’t fully explain, the message resonated. I began studying Mandarin that same year and took my first trip to Asia, arriving in Hong Kong just two days before Britain handed the territory over to Chinese rule. I’d return several times to live in and report from Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong.

Kissinger was right, of course, though one could argue that he never quite grasped the threat of what his own China mentor, Richard Nixon, saw as an unrelenting authoritarian regime that exists to “nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.”

As both The Times’s news and opinion pages have extensively documented, as its economy and industrial policies drove generational change, China has corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs and other religious minorities into internment camps. It has denied basic human rights to its citizens. It has smothered any hint of political opposition. And it has made menacing moves, through militarization and land grabs, toward the United States and its regional rivals.

Today, we are publishing an Op-Ed by Fu Ying, a government official in China, which gives insight — in both what it says and what it doesn’t — into the thinking in Beijing in 2020. Ms. Fu is an important person in China’s government — much more important than her titles convey. She is among the highest-ranking women in China and generally considered a moderate.

So far, this Op-Ed is the only official statement, beyond the usual platitudes, that has come from the government about the election of Joe Biden to the presidency, and for that reason we thought it was worth publishing. There’s no denying that U.S.-China relations have been damaged over the past four years. Ms. Fu is setting out the terms under which her government plans to work with a new Biden administration.

Those terms, which include both veiled threats and olive branches, could have significant consequences for American foreign policy for the rest of our lifetimes. Ms. Fu believes that our militaries should be talking at the strategic level. She sees room for cooperation on climate change, public health and digital security. “To tackle these challenges, China and the United States should join hands and cooperate with all other concerned parties,” she writes. “Only then can multilateralism continue to bring hope for the betterment of humankind.”

It’s a key sentiment — the need for multilateral cooperation — and one that Biden and his team also seem committed to. At the same time, as every president since Richard Nixon could tell you, the question with China always is: at what price?