It’s Not All on Trump: China Favors Confrontation With the U.S.

Professor Carl Minzner, an expert on U.S.-China relations, was quoted in an article for the Washington Post, regarding the ongoing trade war and tension between the two nations, and the possibility of a truce.

As the United States and China limp to a truce in the trade war, two very different story lines have played out on opposite sides of the Pacific. In the United States, a series of high-profile American figures — a columnist, a former treasury secretary, a former World Bank president and an expert on foreign relations — have weighed in with laments about the course of America’s ties to China and have criticized the Trump administration for its handling of Beijing.

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In China, however, no such parallel concern has been expressed publicly. There has been no criticism of Xi Jinping for running his country’s relations with the United States into a ditch. Instead, since Nov. 20, there has been a striking upsurge in condemnation of the United States on a level not seen since 1999, when a U.S. missile mistakenly destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese reporters.

For the past several weeks, the main state-run nightly news program, watched by hundreds of millions, has been devoted to disparaging Americans and their government. The United States has been blamed for fomenting the six-month-long demonstrations in Hong Kong and for meddling in China’s internal affairs over criticism of the treatment of the Uighurs.

Carl Minzner, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Fordham University, has watched the newscast every day since Nov. 20 and notes that each night the United States has been attacked not once or twice but in multiple news segments — 13 on Dec. 4 alone, followed by eight the next night. Then on Dec. 13, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, blasted the United States for “almost paranoid” behavior that has seriously damaged “the hard-won foundation of mutual trust between China and the United States.”

Read the full article.