the Unclese have been spinning/dancing every other way-- Bitten actually amplified Dumb Trump's policies. Those policies have collapsed and the Unclese have to change tack-- you can tell by the difference body languages of Blinking and Wang Yi when the 2 met at the recent Munich meeting.
The following is one of the articles which says better than I can:
{In his speech, Sullivan reasserted that China is the “only state with both the intent to reshape the international order and the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it”. Moreover, Beijing sought to “catch up and surpass” the US in hi-tech. It is “working to make the world more dependent on China” and “taking steps to adapt the international system to accommodate its own system and preferences”, he said.
Yet, notably, Sullivan did not frame US-China relations as “democracy vs communist autocracy”. This is in sharp contrast to the US-China dialogue that took place in Anchorage in 2021, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to legitimise America’s right to interfere with what China considered its internal affairs, by stating that China’s actions, “including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the US and economic coercion towards our allies … threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability”.
This “my way or the highway” hubris was Bidenism at its best. In other words, whether the bilateral relationship is competitive, collaborative or adversarial, it is all China’s doing. The US does not need to make any adjustment.
More than three years later, and this approach has achieved little with China. Now, with two wars raging, in Ukraine and Gaza, there has been a rude awakening within the Biden team that its “democracy vs autocracy” strategy has all but collapsed. It has dawned on many in the administration that war is not determined by the nature of the regime.}
{The real question is, why does the West keep blaming China for a non-convergence scenario of the two political systems when no Chinese leader has promised to justify such a trajectory? The answer has to be found in the paucity of knowledge of Chinese culture and history.}
{Debate over the nature of the Chinese system is not new. One early debate took place in the mid-17th century. The Chinese rites controversy was a bitter dispute within the Catholic Church over a question raised by the Jesuit missionaries in China: were cultural traditions, such as rituals honouring ancestors, compatible with Christianity? The Jesuits believed in accommodating these practices, but most others disagreed.
At that time in Europe, the modern notion of democracy had not yet been established as a rhetorical tool to disparage other political systems, so whether the Chinese way of governance was legitimate was irrelevant. But the Western dominance of the globe since the 18th century has created hegemony of Western thought.}
{Sullivan offered a tacit admission that Bidenism has failed, and America’s partial return to a realpolitik approach to great-power relations should be welcome, but it can only offer a halfway house for those ideological fanatics to sober up a bit.
No one should expect the recent easing of US-China tensions to last very long. A new Trump administration, by contrast, may offer a real chance to reset the relationship, precisely because it would be a departure from Bidenism.}
