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Global Impact | Will ‘golden times’ return for China? Analysts, observers and military personnel have their say
- Global Impact is a weekly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world
- In this week’s issue, we share some highlights from Open Questions, a new series from the Post that interviews global opinion leaders
Reading Time:8 minutes
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The series kicked off with political scientist Li Cheng, founding director of the University of Hong Kong’s Centre on Contemporary China and the World, saying that tensions between China and the US would be “with us for a long time”.
Li said it would likely take between 10 and 15 years for China and the US to return to the normal relations seen a decade ago, despite the meeting between presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in San Francisco late last year.
“The San Francisco meeting is not supposed to reverse the US policy towards China. This is only to provide a floor preventing a further downward spiral, but we’re not changing back to the previous period,” he said.
Li also said he did not think that mainland China would use force over Taiwan, with “an incident” in the South China Sea more likely to happen.
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Then, global affairs expert Joseph Nye, a former US assistant secretary of defence, said a full-scale trade war between China and the US would be a “very bad idea”.
Trump himself is very unpredictable, and you never know quite what his policies will be
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