California governor’s meeting with Xi Jinping helps thaw US-China relations

When Gavin Newsom met Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People this week, the Chinese president looked relaxed and cheerful and the California governor looked like a future president. If California were a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world and China is its biggest trading partner with €166 billion in two-way trade last year.

But the meeting followed months of tension in the relationship between China and the United States, which are now at odds over Israel and Gaza as well as over the war in Ukraine. Xi said he hoped Newsom’s visit would help to improve relations between their two countries.

“The foundation of China-US relations lies among the people, the hope is in the people, the future lies in the youth, and the vitality lies in sub-national areas,” he said.

Newsom said later that Xi’s decision to meet him was indicative of a thawing of relations between Beijing and Washington, which has seen a number of senior US officials visiting the Chinese capital in recent weeks. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi arrived in Washington on Thursday for three days of talks that are expected to cover the Middle East and Ukraine as well as the bilateral relationship.

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“We’ve got to turn down the heat. We’ve got to manage our strategic differences. We’ve got to reconcile our strategic red lines. Those are well established between our two countries,” Newsom told CNN after his meeting with Xi.

Republicans criticised Newsom’s trip to China, accusing him of cosying up to the Communist Party and demanding that he raise China’s human rights record. He did not raise human rights during his meeting with Xi but they did talk about how to control the movement of chemicals from China that are used to produce fentanyl, a drug that has become a leading cause of death in the US.

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Xi spoke about his memories of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where Newsom was mayor and where Joe Biden will host leaders from the Asia-Pacific at a summit next month. The latest diplomatic moves, including Wang’s visit to Washington, suggest that Xi, who skipped the G20 summit in India and the Brics’ leaders’ meeting in South Africa this year, will travel to California.

Joseph Nye, the political scientist who popularised the concept of soft power, suggested this week that one problem with the US-China relationship is the frame through which it is viewed. He told a forum for international think tanks in Beijing that although the distribution of power during the Cold War was bipolar between the US and the Soviet Union, it was misleading to talk about today’s world as multipolar.

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“If one looks at the world today in terms of the distribution of power, we really should use the analogy of a three-dimensional chess game. At the top level, let’s say, of military power, there’s only one country which has global military power projection capabilities – and that’s the US,” he said.

“In the middle level, the middle board of economic power, the world is multipolar and has been for two decades: US, China, Europe, Japan, basically, these are roughly equal powers. But if you go to the third board, the bottom board of transnational relations of things that cross borders, outside the control of governments, it makes no sense at all to talk about multipolarity or bipolarity or unipolarity. This is a totally different world, and yet this is where many of our problems come from.”

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Although China and the US were engaged in great power competition, they also faced challenges such as climate change and global pandemics that required co-operation. Nye said that in today’s world, countries had to learn to encompass two contradictory thoughts as they competed at one level and worked together at another.

“One has to imagine not just power over other countries, but power with other countries. These issues, the transnational issues, cannot be solved by exerting power over other countries. You have to have power with other countries,” he said.

“Think tanks should be careful not to be captured by historical metaphors that mislead. I would argue that multipolarity is one. I would argue that cold war is another. Instead, we have to think of how do we reconcile both competition and co-operation at the same time. Because if we fail to do that, we’re going to all suffer, not just the US and China, but the world climate and the world economy.”