Constructive Communication Between the U.S. and China Gets Harder
Summary
At the outset of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidency, many people hoped that relations between the United States and China, after four years of battering, would slowly start to improve. “The one thing that has held over from Trump to Biden is that the U.S. is doing a bad job talking to our own people about China,” Alan Bersin, the executive chairman of the supply chain software Altana AI and a former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said last week during a discussion as part of the DealBook D.C. policy forum. Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who was also part of the discussion at the forum, said there was some overarching bipartisan agreement on China issues that doesn’t exist in other areas. “Being blamed by some U.S. lawmakers for purposely unleashing a deadly virus on its own population to infect the West, which is obviously ludicrous, has caused the once-positive image of the U.S. for the average Chinese citizen to fade,” said Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Chinese officials are issuing warnings that, after heavy rainfalls last autumn, a disappointing winter wheat harvest in June could drive food prices — already high because of the war in Ukraine and bad weather in Asia and the United States — further up, compounding hunger in the world’s poorest countries.