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Thomas L. Friedman

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion columnist

There were plenty of surprises and quiet laughter this month when President-elect Donald Trump invited President Xi Jinping to Washington for his inauguration. Foreign leaders don’t attend our inaugurations, of course, but I think Trump’s concept was truly a smart concept. I just got back from China and I can tell you that if I had to paint a picture of the rendezvous between our two countries today, it would be two elephants chasing each other with a straw.

It’s not good. Because the United States and China have much more to talk about than industry and Taiwan (and who is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the 21st century).

The world today faces three historic challenges: rampant synthetic intelligence, climate change, and the spread of disorder caused by the collapse of states. The United States and China are the world leaders in AI superforces. They are the two largest carbon emitters in the world. And they have the two largest naval forces in the world, capable of projecting their force on a global scale. In other words, the United States and China are the only two forces that in combination can offer hope. to deal with superintelligence, superstorms, and small teams of superstrength men in failed states (not to mention superviruses) at a time when the world has gone into overdrive.

That’s why we want an update to the Shanghai Communiqué, the document that set the parameters for normalizing relations between the United States and China when Richard Nixon visited China and met with Mao Zedong in 1972. Right now, unfortunately, we are denormalizing. Our two countries are developing more and more at each and every level. In the three decades I have visited Beijing and Shanghai, I have never felt what I felt here: like I was the only American in China.

Of course not, but the American accents one regularly hears at a primary exercise station in Shanghai or in a hotel lobby in Beijing were noticeably absent. Chinese parents say many families no longer need their children to go to school in the U. S. because they worry it will be unsafe, according to the FBI. They may simply stick to them while they were in America, and their own passing government may simply be suspicious of them when they return home. The same is true now for American academics in China. A professor in China who works with foreign scholars told me that some Americans no longer need to study there for semesters abroad, in part because they don’t like to compete with super-intensive Chinese scholars. And in part because, in those days, reading or running in China can raise suspicions of safety among potential U. S. employers in the long run.

True, underneath all the talk of the new China-U.S. cold war, there are still over 270,000 Chinese students studying in America, according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, but there are now only about 1,100 American college students studying in China. That is down from around 15,000 a decade ago — but up from a few hundred in 2022, not long after Covid peaked. If these trends continue, where will the next generation of Chinese-speaking American scholars and diplomats come from and, similarly, Chinese who will understand America?

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