China and the USA, the (Im)possible Balance
An interview with me from Renewable Matters, by Giorgia Marino
You can get the latest English edition of of Renewable Matter at this link. There’s an interview with the legendary Chinese environmental activist Ma Jun and my good friend Alex Wang, the UCLA Environmental Law professor!
Giorgia Marino: US-China relations are playing an increasingly pivotal role in global geopolitics and the global economy, but all too frequently, the “moves” taken by the two superpowers are based on deep-rooted preconceptions and self-fulfilling prophecies. Today, however, the drive for greater mutual understanding could start from the bottom up.
Kaiser Kuo: Attraction and repulsion, rivalry and complementarity, fascination and misunderstandings. The relationship between China and the United States is now, more than ever, at the very heart of international geopolitics. Every bilateral summit, every exchange between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, awaits and is observed with a mixture of hope and fear by the nations of the Global South, with undisguised apprehension in Europe, and, in general, with a certain unease across the globe. Stock markets, energy prices, the flow of raw materials, and even more seemingly mundane aspects of daily life, such as access to social media, all depend on the fluctuating tensions and de-escalations between the two superpowers.
But what are the real changes in Sino-American relations in the era of Trump’s second term? And what do the Chinese think of the Americans today, and vice versa?
We spoke about this with an exceptional observer. A rock guitarist, former member and founder of China’s first heavy metal band (Tang Dynasty), former director of international communications at Baidu, journalist and expert in new technologies, Kaiser Kuo was born in the United States to Chinese parents and lived for more than twenty years in Beijing, where he has recently returned. Since 2010, on the hugely successful Sinica Podcast, he has been discussing and analysing Chinese politics, economics, society and culture. He is considered one of the most original and insightful voices on the relationship between China and the United States.
Giorgia: How has the mutual perception of the American and the Chinese changed in recent years?
Kaiser: It has changed significantly very recently, but not evenly across the entire population. Looking at the polls, for example the Pew Research Center’s, it is clear that in the United States views on China were very negative across most demographic groups: more so among Republicans and older people and less so among Democrats and young people. Over the past year, negative sentiment has declined significantly, most notably among Democrats and young people aged 18 to 35. The shift largely reflects growing disaffection with the US government under the Trump administration.
Giorgia: And what about the Chinese perspective? Some say that the Chinese know Westerners far better than Westerners know China. Do you agree?
Kaiser: Yes, broadly speaking, yes. Let’s say that mutual understanding is rather limited on both sides. The dominance of Western narratives, particularly American ones, in the world means that it is impossible for a Chinese person to know nothing about the United States: global popular culture, television and American news programmes have a very dominant voice.
Now, that doesn’t mean the Chinese education system necessarily does a better job: the Chinese are subjected to the same kind of heavily biased information about the United States that the American public sees about China. I do not believe they are making any more effort to understand Americans. It simply comes down to the dominance of Western narratives.
Giorgia: What has really changed in the China-US relationship with Trump’s return? And what has instead remained simply consistent with the past?
Kaiser: The situation is changing by the month, as evidenced by the ongoing war in Iran. When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, there was a real belief that relations with China would deteriorate. Most people in China expected another round of the trade war, but were also well aware that they were far better prepared to deal with it. And this took the United States completely by surprise. When Trump announced tariffs on “Liberation Day” on April 2, China was one of the few major economies to stand firm: it did not seek a deal, it did not flatter Trump and it did not attempt to evade the new tariff regime. Rather, it reacted forcefully, imposing tariffs of its own and forcing Trump to back down. Shortly afterwards, when the United States expanded the list of Chinese companies subject to sanctions under the so-called 50% rule, China responded by introducing controls on rare-earth exports, once again forcing Trump to yield. Seeing a visibly irritated Trump faced with calm and level-headed Chinese leadership has influenced the American public’s thinking: in the United States, the country lurches from one political crisis to the next, while China appears relatively stable.
Many other changes have taken place in the last year alone. In early 2025, the Chinese start-up DeepSeek launched an LLM (Large Language Model) that was trained at a fraction of the cost of the most advanced American models: quite a shock. Then, when it seemed that TikTok was about to be shut down in the United States, many American users signed up to the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (Red Note), catching a glimpse of life among the urban classes in big cities like Shanghai and Hangzhou. All of a sudden, they found themselves thinking they had been deceived by their own media and political class, whose portrayal of China was very different from what they could see with their own eyes. From there, a trend known as “Chinamaxxing” took off. Throughout 2025, many American influencers and YouTubers travelled to China, travelling on high-speed trains and filming themselves against the futuristic urban backdrops of Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hangzhou. They all came back, almost unanimously, impressed. So for the whole year, Americans were immersed in a sort of “Chinese infrastructure porn”, wondering: what on earth has happened to America? Why have we stopped building?
Awareness is also growing of the fact that China has built the kind of energy system the world needs: vast amounts of solar and wind power, batteries, electric vehicles and a modern, efficient ultra-high-voltage transmission grid. At the same time, the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, blocked offshore wind projects in which hundreds of millions of dollars had already been invested, and dismantled the legal framework that enabled the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This stark contrast is contributing to a profound shift in the narrative and in the way Americans perceive China.
Giorgia: Returning to the shocks that Americans, but also Europeans, are still experiencing every time China overtakes them in some cutting-edge sector such as renewables, electric cars (BYD) or AI (DeepSeek), what will be the next major shock we should expect?
Kaiser: If only I knew, so I could invest in it! One thing is clear, though: China is investing heavily in nuclear fusion. We are likely to witness breakthroughs in new materials, battery chemistry and quantum computing. But the biggest advances will probably come from the life sciences and biotechnology, which receive less attention. China has built a very solid foundation in pharmaceutical discovery: in the past, it merely acted as an external supplier of molecular analysis services on behalf of major Western biopharmaceutical companies. Now, however, many of these Chinese companies are operating independently, and I believe that in the coming years we will see significant pharmaceutical discoveries emerging from China.
Giorgia: The “technological containment” that the United States is trying to impose on China is a policy that cuts across party lines, from Democrats to Republicans. But what do scientists, both Chinese and American, make of this? Is there no hope of achieving constructive scientific cooperation?
Kaiser: I believe that scientists on both sides consider this policy an absolute tragedy. It is a loss for all of humanity that collaboration between the scientific communities of China and the United States – two of the largest, best-funded and most creative in the world – is suffocated by geopolitics. Unfortunately, in the United States, even within the scientific community, many people are still obsessed with national security, convinced that China must be kept away from the most advanced technologies. The debate over which policy is the right one is still ongoing.
In China, however, there is no doubt. They are angry, believing this policy to be fundamentally immoral, but at the same time they believe it has sparked a fuse, forcing scientists and engineers to redouble their efforts towards innovation. And China has indeed achieved considerable progress towards greater self-sufficiency, particularly in the production of semiconductors.
Giorgia: However, if we take AI as an example, China is implementing much stricter regulations than the US. Why, then, are the Americans so afraid of China’s technological development?
Kaiser: I interpret this mainly as a projection: Americans believe that any other power would behave just as they do. Faced with enormous capabilities that would allow a country to aspire to global hegemony, they believe that any nation possessing such technological strength would exercise it immediately. In essence, they think that China would do what they imagine the United States would do. Never thoroughly analysed, this assumption is the basis for much of the paranoia emerging, particularly from Silicon Valley. But I do not think it is a valid hypothesis. In fact, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Relating to another country on this basis means demonstrating your own bad faith, proving that you are willing to bring it to its knees. How can anyone think this will not influence their perception? It will generate precisely the kind of hostility that was taken for granted from the outset, but it was their own actions that created it.
This, at least, is my interpretation. I would argue that an open and collaborative approach across all these technological frontiers would have significantly reduced China’s propensity to try to exert leverage over the United States.
Giorgia: Expanding the discussion to global geopolitics, there is much talk today of China as a new responsible power and a defender of multilateralism. But does China actually want this role? What sort of global power does it want to be?
We must be very careful with this kind of assumption. For the same reasons that we should not assume China would use every technological weapon at its disposal, we should not assume that it wants the same kind of global hegemony as the US.
It is clear that China acknowledges that it has benefited from the so-called rules-based international order; it admires some aspects of it and criticises others: in particular, the fact that, following its rise, it has not been granted an adequate say in multilateral institutions, along with other developing countries. A criticism that I find very well-founded. But do they really want to take control of these institutions? I believe there is very little evidence to support this claim. They are trying to reform them, not to subvert them. They are not looking to completely replace the United States in its hegemonic role. China has no real interest in this; it recognises its lack of experience in these areas and does not wish to take on this sort of responsibility.
What Chinese leaders are interested in is ensuring that the world has the public goods they consider important: sea routes, transport corridors, communication networks and railway lines. This is what the Belt and Road Initiative set out to achieve. They genuinely believe that integrating the Global South into global trade networks is beneficial for all parties involved. They hope that these countries will adopt some of the practices that helped China rapidly climb the development ladder: investment in infrastructure, rail and road networks, so that people, goods and data can move freely. They genuinely believe this. That this appears threatening to the dominant powers – Europeans and Americans who, even after colonialism, have enjoyed privileged positions in Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa – is understandable. But it is truly tragic that it has been interpreted in this way.
Giorgia: So, do you think there really exists a Chinese model to imitate? I don’t know about the US, but here in Europe, in certain environments, there has been talk of a “Chinese model” like it is something desirable. Does China really want to “export” its model? What kind of influence and soft power does it want to spread?
Kaiser: I believe that China is not particularly interested in actively exporting its model. Its form of exceptionalism consists in affirming that its experience is unique, the result of specific historical processes. Whatever has worked for China is in line with its national conditions, and these conditions vary enormously from country to country. The Chinese do not believe that there is a one-size-fits-all model.
So, while rejecting the American idea that market liberalisation and political democracy are a sure-fire path to progress for every nation, they do not think that a “Chinese model” should take its place. After all, if they wanted to export one, they would probably give it a sexier name than “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”!
Nevertheless, while there is very little push, there is certainly a lot of pull: many countries are turning to China to discover some of the secrets of its development, and China is more than happy to share what it considers to be best practices – the importance of infrastructure, the role of the state as a coordinator of development priorities and an element of market liberalisation. But they are not seeking to export a model in its entirety.
Giorgia: One last question. Could there be a scenario in which China and the US will find a stable way to coexist? And which role could Europe have in it?
I believe there is ultimately a way forward, but it requires a fundamental rethinking, particularly on the part of the US. The United States must be able to answer a simple question: what do we want from China? So far, it has failed to articulate a constructive vision. From their behaviour, one can deduce what they seem to want: namely, for China to remain forever behind, a producer of low-tech goods for the world, a sink for polluting industries. However, China will not accept this in the long term.
The United States must also recognise that there are other paths to modernity that do not have a Western face, that there are other legitimate ways of prioritising values. Americans firmly believe that civil and political rights must come first and that others will follow from these.
Much of the rest of the world disagrees: it considers it entirely reasonable that only once people have food, clothing and a roof over their heads – when their basic economic needs are met – can they realistically aspire to more advanced rights. If the United States were more open to a plurality of priorities, genuine and peaceful coexistence might become possible.
At present, the United States is struggling to psychologically accept its own decline. It is difficult to witness the rise of a China that has challenged so many long-held assumptions on how countries should develop. It will take time to overcome this psychological hurdle. In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of Spain in the first half of the 17th century, during the Thirty Years’ War. The United States will have to adapt. It is difficult and often results in major disruptions. But if we can avoid war, I believe we can manage it.
As for Europe, we are beginning to glimpse the outlines of a more significant strategic autonomy, and, in a somewhat perverse way, Trump has contributed to this process. Medium-sized powers, including the major EU member states, are seeking to protect themselves. They have issues with both China and the United States, which is a very difficult balance to strike. However, I believe Europe can play a crucial role in guiding the world towards a truly multilateral and multipolar order, where institutions are reformed rather than abandoned. And a more multipolar world, I believe, could lead to a more stable configuration.