Ali Wyne
A more u.s.-china-centric order
As difficult as it may be to remember now, it seemed at the beginning of 2020 that the United States and China might be poised to press pause on the deterioration of their relationship, at least in the economic realm. After a year and a half of escalating trade tensions, then president Donald Trump and Chinese vice premier Liu He signed an interim trade deal on January 15. But any goodwill between Washington and Beijing soon dissipated with the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Trump administration argued that China had effectively loosed a deadly virus upon the world to sabotage the U.S. economy and damage Trump’s re-election prospects, while Chinese officials and their “wolf warrior” representatives on Twitter accused the United States of attempting to deflect attention away from its own mismanagement of the pandemic and even suggested that Covid-19 may have originated at Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army research facility in Maryland.
Tragically, rather than occasioning emergency bilateral coordination, the pandemic has served to bring the U.S.-China relationship to its lowest level since normalization. In addition, it has demonstrated China’s resilience: among the major economies, China’s was the only one to register positive growth in 2020, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that China posted the second-highest growth rate in 2021 (8.1%, behind India’s 8.9%).2 In 2020, the United States and China together accounted for 41.9% of gross world product, and the IMF estimates that that proportion will grow to 43.6% by the end of this year.
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