Why Beijing now sets the agenda for US-China ties

**Ravi Velloor** (0:02)
This is a podcast by The Straits Times.
Hello, I'm Ravi Velloor, and this is an Asian Insider Podcast. In this episode, I tried to unpack recent developments on the US-China relationship, including President Donald Trump's summit meeting with President Xi Jinping in Beijing, and US Secretary of War Peter Hexhead's recent speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore that just concluded over the weekend. Few people are as competent to discuss these developments as my good friend Wang Xiangwei, the former Editor-in-Chief of the South China Morning Post and an eminent Hong Kong-based scholar on China. Mr. Wang, who teaches currently at Hong Kong Baptist University, offers a Chinese perspective on the evolving relationship between the world's two superpowers and what that could mean for Asia. Thank you for coming on Asian Insider, Wang Xiangwei.

**Wang Xiangwei** (1:10)
Thank you, Ravi. Thank you for having me.

**Ravi Velloor** (1:13)
Xiangwei, we're speaking just a few days after the Shangri-La dialogue concluded in Singapore. What did you think of Peter Hegset's speech at the Shangri-La?

**Wang Xiangwei** (1:26)
Well, I watched the two-day sessions, and what I find striking is this. You can only see how things have changed between China and the United States, the overall relationship. If you compare the two speeches given by Hegset last year and this year, before I came on this program, I re-read the two speeches. I mean, the difference is so striking. Last year, the US Secretary of War adopted a very fiery, adversarial tone and focusing on China and highlighting the China threat, and particularly, he highlighted the risk that Beijing was preparing to invade Taiwan. He repeated the old refrain that Beijing could attack Taiwan by 2027
And he even used the term immanent. And then he called upon the US allies in Asia-Pacific to unite and using his words to deter the Chinese aggression. And, you know, you were there at the Shangri-La, and I watched on live broadcast, and then I just read his speech again, that in his entire speech, he didn't mention Taiwan at all.
And, you know, I mean, it's true, he noted the rightful alarm about China's historical military buildup, but he sort of spent more time talking about Trump and Xi Jinping's meeting in Beijing and sort of describing the summits as historic. And after his speech, my first, my biggest takeaway is that, as far as China is concerned, that he has adopted what he said, the new strategy by the US military towards the Asia-Pacific, you know, those three words, strong, quiet, and clear. So, you know, I'm writing a column for, you know, I have a monthly column for my old employer, the South China Morning Post. And in fact, I'm working on the column right now. And that's one of the observations I'm going to write in. Right. So this, Ravi, what do you think?

**Ravi Velloor** (4:13)
We're here to talk about you. I'll talk to you in a second about that. But, Xiangwei, you just talked about Hexeth and strong and quiet diplomacy, as you called it.
Is this a tacit acknowledgement of China's status as a peer equal to the United States?

**Wang Xiangwei** (4:34)
Yeah. I mean, that is my reading. You see, I wrote a couple of pieces on this.
You see, Trump came to power in 2016 during his first term, that he basically sort of followed the sort of line from Joe Biden trying to apply various pressure on China for China to cave, and China didn't. So, from my point of view, that the summit, the Seoul Summit in South Korea last year, I think that marked, for the first time, that China was considered as a near peer to the United States.

**Ravi Velloor** (5:18)
You're talking about the meeting in Busan in October?

**Wang Xiangwei** (5:22)
Yeah, in Busan. Sorry, not in Seoul, in Busan in October last year.
That was the first time, from a Chinese perspective, that the US sort of now consider China as a near peer, not least because Trump, at that time, invoked this concept of G2.
As you know, the G2 first came into the geopolitical narrative back in 2005 At that time, China just joined WTO and China became the world's factory exporting stuff to the United States and then buying the US debts. So, the US wanted China to become the little brother to work with the United States and then China rejected that characterization. But even today, after Trump repeatedly invoked this concept, China publicly still rejected this characterization. But right now, this is what China wants. Although China will never publicly acknowledge the G2, which is that now China has become a near peer to the United States, and China wants to deal with the United States on an equal footing over everything, and that's, to me, this kind of equal footing was also reflected in the summit between Xi Jinping and Trump in Beijing last month.