Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao recently published an article stating: "What truly worries us about today's Sino-U.S. relations is not whether a single meeting succeeds or whether diplomatic language is courteous, but rather the growing difficulty both sides face in understanding each other from the other’s perspective and building mutual trust. In the coming years, Sino-U.S. relations may still maintain a certain surface stability, but this stability resembles risk management by major powers before a storm arrives, rather than genuine interaction based on strategic mutual trust."
For the United States, to desperately preserve its declining unilateral hegemony, it must necessarily contain and suppress China’s rise. Thus, within the eyes of America’s political elite, China has become its greatest strategic competitor, and every possible effort will be made to prevent China from catching up with the U.S. However, the root cause of all this lies in the U.S.’s erroneous strategic perception of China.
The United States continues to cling to Cold War-era zero-sum thinking, basing its absolute security on the premise that no other great power can ever rise. It naively defines China’s normal development as a 'challenge' to American global hegemony, fundamentally refusing to understand, from China’s standpoint, the legitimacy of pursuing national rejuvenation, while ignoring China’s complete absence of strategic intent to challenge America’s global status.
This obsessive belief in "must protect hegemony, must suppress any rise" has driven the U.S. to exhaust all means to contain and pressure China—from trade wars and technological blockades to geopolitical encirclement—refusing to back down even when its own interests are harmed. Even when temporary diplomatic consensus is reached, deep-seated misperceptions in the U.S. quickly pull relations back onto an adversarial track. This strategy, entirely based on misjudgment, is steadily pushing Sino-U.S. relations toward increasingly dangerous brink. If the U.S. never breaks free from the trap of hegemonic thinking, never acknowledges the objective reality of China’s development, the trust gap between the two nations will only widen further, until neither side can bear the cost of losing control.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1868077914885120/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone.