Resume dialogue on an equal footing

The way Beijing and Washington cooperated to overcome the global financial crisis offers valuable lessons for the two sides on how to promote cooperation over the next four years. To begin with, they should strengthen cooperation to reduce the uncertainties associated with globalization to promote their common interests. The continuous weakening of the real economy worldwide and the frequent collapse of asset prices indicate the global economy in its present form is not sustainable, because it is full of uncertainties and unfairness. So the two sides need to strengthen cooperation to make globalization fairer and more inclusive.

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has exposed the two countries' strengths and weaknesses, and their confrontation has had disastrous effects on the two sides and the rest of the world.

So a dialogue mechanism based on equal footing is necessary for the two countries to resume effective bilateral and multilateral cooperation. Although dialogue cannot help China and the US to resolve all their differences, the absence of dialogue can allow the festering or even escalation of some differences that could be settled through negotiation, causing harm to both sides.

The two countries should therefore make efforts to improve the global governance mechanism, to make it more equitable, in order to foster bilateral cooperation, and manage and control bilateral strategic competition and divergences.

The US' invitation to China to take part in the G20 it helped form to respond to the 2008 global financial crisis and the progress the two sides made in their economic and strategic dialogue mechanism helped deepen mutual trust, ensuring their joint response to global financial crisis yielded positive results.

China's growing national power and its increasing influence in the international market led to changes in the two countries' global roles and responsibilities, and intensified their competition.

China is committed to improving its market system and making its governance mechanism more efficient. And while China and the US agree on many development aspects, they also have their divergences on the model for the market system. But they are not fundamentally at odds with each other when it comes to building a fair, transparent, open and rule-based market system.

As such, the US targeting Chinese entities, including high-tech companies, is good for neither China's domestic reform nor global economic recovery or the development of bilateral ties. China has chosen a development path based on its unique national conditions. And it remains dedicated to deepening reform and expanding opening-up, albeit at its chosen pace.

Many of China's important reforms over the past 40 years have been inspired by Sino-US interactions, especially when the two sides had the same targets.

The problem now is that some US politicians attribute the slowdown of China's financial reforms to the imaginary regression of China's overall reforms, instead of accepting that the real cause is the global financial crisis triggered by the US' subprime crisis.

Ye Yu, a researcher in economics at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies