As China focuses on the pursuit of common prosperity, reforms should encourage making the overall cake bigger, so that more can find its way to labor. This will unleash consumption as a growth driver and bring many other benefits.

China’s image abroad is a pressing concern for its senior leadership. If they hope to expand their international influence, Chinese officials must accept criticisms of their actions or risk alienating societies who share differing values.

The narrative of Sino-American relations often concerns high-level interactions - yet people-to-people and other societal exchanges can reveal and repair more than official dialogue can often accomplish.

China’s younger generations have seen their country prosper and grow stronger for nearly their entire lives, cultivating a sense of pride and identity unique from their older counterparts. Now, as the United States has begun to openly challenge China’s rise, attitudes toward America are being eroded.

The current world is undergoing a dichotomy of development. On the one hand, the tangible and intangible bindings of international community become increasingly intertwined, thus not only making the world an earth village, but also an integrated entity. On the other hand, there are also forces pulling the world apart and making the international community fragmented and in piecemeal. Moreover, arising are some worrying social thoughts such as unilateralism, protectionism, extremism and Xenophobia. These phenomena are also teaching us that physical power is far from enough to combat the current and future challenges to the mankind. Indeed, to meet these challenges we need to synchronize both physical and cultural strength.

In 2019, U.S. Customs seized 3400 pounds of invasive Chinese mitten crabs at the Cincinnati, Ohio airport. The mitten crab threatens commercial fishing and biodiversity and is listed on the top 100 worst invader list. China is hosting the 15th meeting of the Convention on Biodiversity and is in a position to show leadership in protecting aquatic environments.

China’s recent achievements in space exploration are starkly contrasted with privately led efforts at the center of American aerospace development, and highlight how the two nations remain on separate tracks in the field of science.

The 2021 Olympics was a major milestone in a world reeling from COVID. Thousands of athletes and national representatives congregated in Tokyo to demonstrate that the tensions being traded by political leaders don’t always reflect the hearts and minds of their constituents.

Why should the shared interest in middle class development in China and the United States be a key driving force in the bilateral relationship today?

In 2018, US President Donald Trump declared that the US had erred in backing China’s accession into the World Trade Organization in 2001. He was convicted that such political establishment had been lulled by China’s still juvenile economic situation in the late 1980s, and that American politicians failed to grasp that supporting China’s candidacy would create a political and economic risk to the US’ global hegemony.