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中美关系究竟哪里出了问题

(2023-06-05 00:07:47) 下一个

中美关系究竟哪里出了问题?

托马斯·弗里德曼 2023年4月18日
DAMIR SAGOLJ/REUTERS
台湾台北——我刚刚结束了自新冠疫情以来的首次中国之行。重回北京让我想起了自己作为媒体人的首要原则:耳听为虚,眼见为实。美中关系的恶化程度如此严重、速度如此之快,双方的接触点变得如此之少(美国驻华记者所剩无几,双方领导人也几乎不再交流),以至于我们现在只能以管中窥豹的方式观察彼此。这样下去不会有好结果。
台湾总统蔡英文最近访美,导致中国在台湾沿海举行实弹演习并再次发出警告,台湾走向正式独立的任何举动都将破坏台海和平与稳定,而这只是对当下局势紧张到何种程度的最新提醒。任何一方哪怕是最微不足道的失误都可能引发美中战争,那会让乌克兰问题看起来不过是一场邻里纷争。
对我来说,这就是回到北京,用比管中窥豹更大的视角观察中国会有所助益的原因之一。参加中国高层发展论坛——这是北京邀请中外商业领袖、中国高级官员、退休外交官以及少数中西方记者参加的重要年度聚会——让我想起了一些古老的真知灼见,也令我大开眼界,看到了一些关于究竟是什么在侵蚀美中关系的新现实。
提示:最新的状况与信任——以及信任缺失——在国际关系中扮演越来越重要的角色有很大关系,现在美中向彼此出售的许多商品和服务都是数字化的,因此具有双重用途,即它们既可以是武器,也可以是工具。而就在美中互信变得比以往任何时候都重要之际,这种信任也比以往任何时候都稀缺。这是非常糟糕的趋势。

在更为私人的层面上,回到北京也让我发现,在过去30年的报道访问中,我结识并喜欢上了那里的许多人——但请不要把这话传到华盛顿。民主党和共和党如今仿佛正在较劲,看谁的对华姿态更为强硬。说实话,美中两国如今都把对方过于妖魔化,以至于轻易就能忘记作为人民,我们有多少共同点。除了美国,我想不出还有哪个大国在埋头苦干精神和资本主义的天性上比得了中国。

回到中国,也让我再次感受到自上世纪70年代改革开放以来——甚至是自2019年新冠疫情暴发以来——中国建立的巨大影响力和国力。中国的共产党政府对社会的控制比以往任何时候都要牢固,这要归功于警察国家监控和数字追踪系统:面部识别摄像头无处不在。中共粉碎了对其统治或对习近平主席的任何挑战。现在,一名来访的外国专栏作家要想让任何人——不管是高级官员还是星巴克的咖啡师——公开发表评论都难于登天。十年前还不是这样的。
近年来,北京已经变成一座更加宜居的城市。
近年来,北京已经变成一座更加宜居的城市。 MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
话虽如此,我们也不能被错觉蒙蔽:中共的统治根基也是中国人民勤俭节约的结果,这使得党和国家得以建造世界一流的基础设施和公共财产,让中国中下层民众的生活不断改善。
北京和上海已尤其变得相当宜居,空气污染基本消除,还多了大量适合步行的绿色空间。正如我在时报的同事柏凯斯(Keith Bradsher)在2021年所报道,上海最近新建了55个公园,全市公园总数达到406个,而且计划再建近600个。
作为少数几个在中国大陆经历近三年严格“新冠清零”政策的美国记者,柏凯斯还告诉我,中国目前约有900个城镇通了高铁,即便是前往相当偏远的地区也十分便宜、轻松和舒适。而在过去23年,美国只修了一条类似高速铁路的线路——连接华盛顿特区和波士顿之间的阿西乐快线,沿途设有15个站点。想想吧:900比15。
我在这里不是想证明高铁比自由更好。之所以提这些是为了说明,当你身处北京才能明白,中国的稳定不只靠警察国家愈发无孔不入的监视,也是因为政府在稳步提高生活水平。这个政权既要掌握绝对控制,也在孜孜不倦地进行国家建设。
今时今日,对于一个从纽约肯尼迪机场飞抵北京首都机场的美国人来说,这种体验就像从拥挤的公交总站飞入迪士尼的明日世界。想到过去八年我们在那个名叫唐纳德·特朗普的冒牌国家建设者身上浪费了那么多时间,我就心酸不已。
中国的高铁连结数百座城市,帮助政府赢得了人民的支持。
中国的高铁连结数百座城市,帮助政府赢得了人民的支持。 HUANG ZONGZHI/XINHUA, VIA GETTY IMAGES
到北京的第一天,我与一位年轻的中国女大学生进行了一番交谈。她的第一个问题就提到了我写过的一本书:“弗里德曼先生,世界还是平的吗?”
我向她解释了为什么我认为按照自己的定义,世界比以往任何时候都更平——因为互联及数字化的稳步发展,与以往相比,更多地方的更多人得以用更少的成本在更多事情上竞争、联结与合作。在北京的时候,我惊讶地发现中国知识阶层的连通性似乎超出以往,他们也更擅长绕过数字防火墙。
 
我可以看出那位女士对我的说法并不完全信服,所以我们转向了其他话题。然后她告诉我:“我刚用过ChatGPT。”
我说,“你都在北京用上了ChatGPT,还来问我世界还是不是平的?”
事实上,在北京流传的一个说法是,许多中国人都开始利用ChatGPT给基层党组织写思想汇报,这样他们就不必在这上面浪费时间了。
不过很有意思的是,就在你开始担忧肯尼迪机场的状况,以及近年来关于中国将在人工智能竞赛中将我们淘汰的那些传言时,OpenAI这个来自美国的团队推出了世界领先的自然语言处理工具,让用户能使用每一种主要语言——包括汉语——进行拟人对话,提出任何问题,并获得深刻的见解。
 中国在面部识别技术和健康记录这两个人工智能领域上领先一步,这是因为对于政府为机器学习算法构建庞大数据集以寻找模式的能力,这里几乎不存在任何隐私方面的限制。
但像ChatGPT这样的生成式人工智能可以让所有人——无论是贫困农民还是大学教授——用自己的语言就任何主题发问。这对中国来说可能是个问题,因为它必然会在国产生成式人工智能中设置许多禁区,对中国公民可以问什么和计算机能答什么进行限制。如果不能随心所欲发问(比如1989年6月4日的天安门发生了什么),如果人工智能系统一直要厘清对何事、何处、何人展开审查,它的效率就不会高。
 
“ChatGPT促使一些人发问,美国是否会像上世纪90年代那样再次崛起,”中国政治学者陈定定对我和柏凯斯表示。
出于这种种原因,讨论美中权力关系转变已成为两国精英阶层的流行消遣。比如在社交媒体上,许多中国人都看到了3月23日国会山听证会的部分内容,国会议员对TikTok首席执行官周受资进行了质询(其实更像是斥责、滔滔不绝的训话和不停的打断),称TikTok视频损害了美国儿童的心理健康。
胡锡进是中国最受欢迎的博主之一,在微博上拥有2500万粉丝,他向我解释了这场听证会在中国人看来是多么严重的冒犯。它在中国互联网上引来了大量冷嘲热讽。
(尽管如此,YouTube自2009年以来一直被中国封禁,所以被热门的应用程序吓坏的不只是我们。干脆做个交易:如果中国允许YouTube进入,我们也接受TikTok。)
“我能理解你们的心情:一个世纪以来你们都是世界第一,现在中国正在崛起,具备了成为世界第一的潜力,你们肯定很难接受,”胡锡进对我说。但“你们不应该阻止中国的发展。你们是没办法遏制中国的。我们很聪明,也很勤勉。我们在非常努力地工作。我们还有14亿人口。”
他还说,在特朗普担任总统前,“我们从未想过中美关系会变得如此糟糕。现在我们渐渐接受了现实,大部分中国人也认为没有好转的可能了。我们认为两国关系会越来越糟,只能希望不会爆发战争了。”
THOMAS PETER/REUTERS
正是因为这样的交谈反复出现,我才开始向美国、中国以及台湾的投资人、分析人士和官员们提出了一个困扰我许久的问题:美国和中国到底在争什么?
听到我这样问,很多人都陷入迟疑。事实上,很多人都给出了“我也不确定,但我只知道都是他们的错”之类的回答。
 
我很确定,在华盛顿也会得到同样的答案。
我这次来中国最大的收获就是揭开了这一问题,以及它为何会难倒这么多人的真相。这是因为真正的答案往往比通常几个字的回答(比如“台湾”或“专制与民主的对抗”)要深刻复杂得多。
请让我试着剥茧抽丝。导致美中关系恶化的原因由来已久、显而易见,这是一个老牌强国(我们)与新兴强国(中国)之间的传统大国竞争,但其中也有许多新的转变,是常人并不总能察觉的。
由来已久、显而易见之处在于,中美正在竞相获取最大的经济和军事影响力,以最有利于自身经济和政治体制的方式塑造21世纪的规则。其中一项存在争议的规则就是中国主张台湾属于“一个中国”,美国承认但不支持。
由于该“规则”仍存争议,我们也将继续武装台湾,以阻止中国夺取该岛屿,摧毁它的民主制度,并以此作为统治东亚其他地区的起点;而中国则将继续推动统一——无论以何种方式。
但其中一个转变在于,这场标准大国竞争的主角是两个经济像DNA分子链一样绞在一起的国家。因此,无论中国还是美国都从未遇到过像对方一样的对手。
 
美国知道如何对付经济和军事实力与自己不相上下的纳粹德国,但美国与后者的经济联系并没那么密不可分。美国知道如何对付军事实力不相上下但经济远远落后于自己的苏联,而两国在经济上完全没有联系。
中国亦是如此。几千年来,中国自认地处世界中心(因此才有“中国”之称),四面受山峦、沙漠和海洋的保护,周围的国家往往臣服于它,同时,它又无比重视自身文化的赓续。直到19世纪,中国开始不断遭受更强大的外国势力的蹂躏:英国、法国、俄罗斯和日本。
但在现代,中国和美国一样从未遇到一个经济军事实力相当,同时还通过贸易及投资彻底融合在一起的对手。
有多密不可分呢?最受美国人欢迎的设备是主要在中国组装的iPhone,而直到最近,美国是中国留学生最青睐的留学目的地,如今在美留学生规模已达30万人。这就导致一些诡异的情况出现,比如就在2022年两国年度双边贸易额创下新高后不久,其中一国就将另一国的情报气球击落。
另一个新的转变,同时也是说不清我们到底在争什么的原因,与信任及信任缺失这个难以捉摸的问题为何突然在国际事务中变得更加重要有关。
这是我们新技术生态系统的衍生问题,在这个系统中,供我们使用和交易的设备越来越多地由微芯片和软件驱动,并通过云上及高速互联网的数据中心连接。当越来越多的产品或服务开始数字化和互联化,越来越多的事物也具备了“双重用途”。也就是说,那些技术可以很轻易就从民用工具变成军事武器,反之亦然。
在冷战时期,要辨认作为武器的战斗机和作为工具的电话是比较容易的。但从装载GPS的手机到你的汽车、烤面包机和最爱用的应用程序,当我们把感知、数字化、互联、处理、学习、分享和行动的能力赋予越来越多事物时,它们就具备了双重用途,是武器还是工具取决于谁控制了运行它们的软件,谁掌握了它们衍生的数据。
如今,自动驾驶汽车和自动武器之间只差了几行代码。而且,正如我们在乌克兰所见,老奶奶可以用智能手机给孙辈打电话,也可以呼叫乌克兰火箭炮部队,将她后院一辆俄罗斯坦克的GPS坐标告诉他们。
这也导致更多事物出现奇怪的新变化。我想到了美国军方一些部门禁止在政府的智能手机和电脑上使用TikTok。禁用一款以分享舞蹈动作而闻名的应用程序,这绝对是五角大楼历史上头一遭。但对于TikTok高沉迷性算法具备双重用途的担忧是真切的,这种算法可能会被中国情报部门用来积累我国年轻人的数据(该公司称有超过1.5亿美国人下载了这款应用),扰乱他们的思想,传播虚假信息,或收集有朝一日可能用于胁迫的信息。
而这样的新变化还在继续。中国在1978年至1979年前后开始与世界进行贸易,那之后大约30年间,中国对美国主要出售的是我称之为“浅层”的商品,也就是鞋袜衬衫和太阳能电池板等等。
而美国和西方出售给中国的更多是我所谓的“深层商品”,它们能够深入系统并具有双重用途,比如软件、微芯片、带宽、智能手机和机器人。中国不得不购买我们的深层商品,因为此前它自己生产不了多少这类产品。
只要中国向我们出售的大部分东西是浅层商品,我们就不会太在意它的政治体制,尤其是因为有段时间,中国似乎正在缓慢而稳步地与世界融合,开放度和透明度每年都能稍微增加一点。因此,我们顺理成章地抛开了对其政治体制阴暗面的部分担忧。
但在大约八年前,我们的国门被一位中国推销员敲开了。他说:“你们好,我的名字叫华为,我的5G电话设备比你们的都要好。我开始在全球各地安装它,也想给美国装上。”
美国对这位华为推销员以及其他正在崛起的中国高科技企业的回应基本是这样的:“当中国企业只卖给我们浅层商品时,我们不关心你们的政治体制是威权主义、自由主义还是素食主义;我们只是在购买你们的浅层商品。但当你们想卖给我们‘深层商品’,可以深入我们的家庭、卧室、工业、聊天机器人和城市基础设施的双重用途商品,那我们的信任还不够。因此,我们将禁用华为,转而从爱立信和诺基亚这些我们信任的北欧企业购买更昂贵的5G通信系统。”
中国向全世界出口的“深层商品”越来越多,这在一定程度上要归功于电信公司华为。
中国向全世界出口的“深层商品”越来越多,这在一定程度上要归功于电信公司华为。 QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG
信任在国际关系和商贸中愈发重要的另一个原因在于:随着越来越多的产品和服务实现数字化和电气化,微芯片取代石油成为了一切的动力来源。就像原油为19世纪和20世纪的经济提供动力一样,21世纪经济发展的驱动力是微芯片。
时至今日,能造出速度最快、功能最强、运行最节能微芯片的国家,就能造出最厉害的人工智能计算机,并在经济和军事上占据主导地位。
但问题在于:由于制造高级逻辑芯片原理已经极其复杂——人的头发厚度约为9万纳米,而全球最先进高级芯片的大规模生产商目前可以造出3纳米晶体管——没有哪个国家或企业能独占整个供应链。你得用上来自全球各地的尖端产品,而这条供应链是如此紧密地交织在一起,以至于各家企业都必须给予彼此极大信任。
这个道理就在中国眼皮子底下。台湾积体电路制造公司——也就是众所周知的台积电——是全球最先进的芯片制造商,它就在台湾海峡的对岸。
离开北京后,我来到台湾,在位于首府台北以南90分钟车程的新竹科学园台积电总部与该公司的高管共度了一个下午。当我问他们是什么秘诀让台积电能造出全球90%的最先进逻辑芯片,而说同一种语言、共享同一段近代文化史的中国却毫无建树时,他们的答案很简单:“信任。”
台积电是一家半导体代工厂,这意味着它采用了苹果、高通、英伟达和AMD等全球最先进计算机企业的设计,再将设计转化为执行各种处理功能的芯片。在此过程中,台积电向客户做出了两大庄严承诺:台积电绝不会自行设计竞品芯片,也绝不会向客户分享其他客户的设计。
“我们的业务是为许多实力强大的客户服务,”台积电业务发展高级副总裁张晓强告诉我。“我们承诺不与他们中的任何一家竞争,并且在我们内部,为客户A服务的员工绝不会将其信息泄露给客户C。”
但通过与如此多值得信赖的伙伴合作,台积电也利用对方越来越复杂的设计取得了进步——而进步越大,也就愈加能够为客户驾驭先进的设计。台积电不仅要与客户实现紧密无间的合作,也要与大约1000家本土和全球关键供应商保持同样的关系。
“我们的客户标准很高,”张晓强还说。“每家都有独特要求。”各家都会“告诉我们想要怎样做,然后我们再一起规划设计台积电的生产过程”。随着芯片制造的原理越来越尖端,“客户给我们的投资也越来越多,这样一来,他们也必须跟我们合作更密切,以确保获得尽可能多的计算能力。他们必须给我们信任。”
中国也有一家芯片代工厂,那就是部分国资的中芯国际。但结果呢?由于没有一家全球芯片设计公司敢把最先进的设计交给中芯国际,导致它至少落后台积电十年。
正是由于这些原因,美中关系的恶化并不止于在台湾问题上日益尖锐的分歧。这种恶化根源于这样一个事实,即当信任及信任缺失在国际事务和商业中占据了更大权重,中国改变了自身方向。正当半导体这一21世纪最关键技术的生产需要前所未有的信任,越来越多的设备和服务具备了深层性质和双重用途之时,中国却让自己成了一个不太受到信赖的伙伴。
中国为何会失去我们的信任?
中国在毛泽东时代的孤立和内乱随着他在1976年去世而终结,继任者邓小平彻底逆转了毛主义。他加强了中国的集体领导制,对最高领导人的任期做出限制,并将以经济为纲的实用主义置于共产主义意识形态之上,同时采取韬光养晦的做法。
在上世纪80年代、90年代和21世纪初,邓小平及其继任者与美国建立了牢固的经济和教育联系,推动中国加入世界贸易组织,前提条件是中国要逐步废除为国有产业提供资金的重商主义政策,同时逐渐接纳更多外资及外资所有权,就像世界向中国出口敞开大门一样。
但在2012年习近平接任中国最高领导人之后,中国向世界的开放、领导层的集体决策方式,以及急于走上半资本主义道路而导致的党和军队内部腐败失控——这种腐败已经到了危及中共执政合法性的程度——似乎引起了他的警觉
因此,习近平将权力集中到自己手中,打破了不同政府部门和经济部门的领导人各自为政的情况,将党的权威重新施加于商业、学界和社会的每个角落,并布下监控的天罗地网。总而言之,这扭转了中国看似稳步实现更多开放——甚至在新闻自由上也有所改善——的进程。
习近平也完全不再像邓小平那样大胆激发民营部门的活力,而是集中力量打造国家级带头企业,以主导从人工智能到量子计算再到航空航天的21世纪所有关键行业,并在这些企业的管理层和职工队伍中融入党的领导。等到美国贸易官员说“嘿,你们该履行入世承诺,限制各行业的国资规模”时,中国的回应基本上是,“我们凭什么遵循你们对规则的解读?我们现在已经足够强大,可以自行解读规则了。我们太大了,而你们反应太迟了。”
另外,在许多问题上,中国都难以洗清责任。比如新冠病毒起源,对香港民主自由和新疆维吾尔穆斯林少数民族的镇压,在南中国海的主张上咄咄逼人,对台湾愈发张牙舞爪,拉拢普京(虽然他对乌克兰惨无人道),以及习近平让自己成为终身主席的做法、严厉对待中国的科技企业家、对言论更加严格的限制,还有偶尔绑架一名知名商人——所有这些最终只能证明一个非常重要的事实:那就是在这个由软件、互联和微芯片所驱动,属于深层双重用途产品的世界里,在信任和共识的重要性堪称前所未有的时刻,自上世纪70年代后期以来中国与西方建立起的所有信任都消失殆尽了。
在此期间,对西方国家——尤其是美国——来说,这个我们正在向它出售或购买各种双重用途数字设备、应用的崛起大国是专制的,这一点开始变得愈发不容忽视。
当香港人民试图捍卫民主自由,中国政府选择镇压。
当香港人民试图捍卫民主自由,中国政府选择镇压。 VINCENT YU/ASSOCIATED PRESS
北京则认为,随着中国在华为5G等深层商品上成为美国更强大的全球竞争对手,美国根本无力招架,才决定利用对先进半导体制造,以及对美国及其盟友的其他高科技出口的控制来确保中国始终无法赶超自己。于是,北京提出了“双循环”的新战略。它说:我们将依靠国家主导的投资,尽可能在国内生产一切,从而独立于世界。我们还将依靠自身强大的制造实力,让全世界都依赖我们的出口。
中国官员还指出,许多美国政客——以特朗普为首,但许多国会议员也一样——似乎突然发现,可以顺水推舟地将美国中产阶级的经济困境归咎于中国对美国的出口,而非教育欠缺、职业道德不足、自动化或是2008年金融精英的掠夺。在北京看来,中国不仅成了美国最爱用来吓唬人的妖魔鬼怪,而在将一切问题推给中国的狂热情绪中,国会议员还开始更加肆无忌惮地支持台湾独立。
一名政府高官告诉我,去年11月习近平在巴厘岛峰会上对拜登总统的表态实际上就是:只要我还是国家主席,中国就不能失去台湾。如果你逼我,就会有战争。你不会明白这对中国人民有多么重要。你这是在玩火。
尽管如此,我还是发现,中国官员如今在某种程度上也明白了一件事,那就是由于他们近年来在我列举的所有问题上都采取了咄咄逼人的行动,导致他们恰巧在错误的时间把全世界和本土的创新者都吓跑了。
我之所以这么说,是因为见到了中国高级官员是多么不厌其烦地向他们今天遇到的每一位外国领导人和到访的西方企业高管表示,中国是“开放的”,中国渴望获得外资。现实情况是,中国必须接纳更多外国直接投资,因为国内各省迫切需要资金来弥补地方政府在疫情防控中的支出,同时,许多地方已经无地可卖,出售土地是为了帮助国有工厂筹集资金。
我也不认为阿里巴巴创始人、某种程度上可以谓之“中国乔布斯”的马云几周前登上官媒是偶然事件,他在2020年突然从公众视野中消失。马云消失的原因是与国家监管机构发生分歧,后者认为他的势力过于庞大和独立。他的失踪在中国创业界引发轩然大波,打击了投资增长。
我当然愿意生活在一个中国人民与全世界各国人民共同繁荣发展的世界。毕竟,这个国家的人口占到全球人口的六分之一以上。我不认同中美两国注定要打仗的说法。我相信,我们相互竞争是必然,相互合作是必然,找到二者之间的平衡也是必然。否则,我们都将在21世纪面临极其糟糕的前景。
但我不得不说,美国人和中国人有一点跟以色列人和巴勒斯坦人很相似:他们都非常擅长触动对方最深的不安全感。
现在的中共确信美国想要搞垮它,一些美国政客对此也不再羞于暗示。因此,只要能不让美国人如愿,北京宁愿与普京这个战犯同床共枕。
美国人则在担心,在通过利用由美国规则塑造的全球市场发家后,共产主义中国将凭借新获得的市场力量单方面改变这些规则,目的是仅利于其自身。因此,我们决定,将我们相对于北京逐渐减弱的力量集中于确保中国在微芯片上永远落后我们十年。
我不知道如何才能扭转这些趋势,但我想,我知道什么是必要之举。
如果美国外交政策的目标并非推翻中共政权,那就得澄清这一点,因为我发现在北京,对此持不同看法的人从来没有现在这样多。
顺带一提,在当今这个融合世界,认为中国经济崩溃而美国依然能繁荣的想法根本是天方夜谭。考虑到中国市场的规模,认为欧洲人会在这件事上一直支持我们大概也是异想天开。看看法国总统上周在北京点头哈腰的样子吧。
至于中国,它大可以装作近年来从来没有过180度大转弯的样子。但没有人会相信。除非它能明白,建立和维持信任是当前所有国家或企业所能拥有的最重要的竞争优势,否则在这个超互联、数字化、深层次、双用途、由半导体驱动的世界,中国将永远无法充分发挥其潜能。而北京在建立和维持信任这方面正在失败。
在为美国伟大政治家乔治·舒尔茨所著的精彩传记中,菲利普·陶布曼引用了舒尔茨对待外交事业与人生的一条基本原则:“信任才是王道。”
这话如今更是无比在理,而中国也从未像现在这样需要接受这一真理。

托马斯·L·弗里德曼(Thomas L. Friedman)是外交事务方面的专栏作者。他1981年加入时报,曾三次获得普利策奖。他著有七本书,包括赢得国家图书奖的《从贝鲁特到耶路撒冷》(From Beirut to Jerusalem)。欢迎在TwitterFacebook上关注他。

America, China and a Crisis of Trust

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/14/opinion/china-america-relationship.html?_ga=2.95848537.492841364.1685941503-1104406257.1683519853

TAIPEI, Taiwan — I just returned from visiting China for the first time since Covid struck. Being back in Beijing was a reminder of my first rule of journalism: If you don’t go, you don’t know. Relations between our two countries have soured so badly, so quickly, and have so reduced our points of contact — very few American reporters are left in China, and our leaders are barely talking — that we’re now like two giant gorillas looking at each other through a pinhole. Nothing good will come from this.

The recent visit by Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, to the United States — which prompted Beijing to hold live-fire drills off Taiwan’s coast and to warn anew that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait are incompatible with any move by Taiwan toward formal independence — was just the latest reminder of how overheated this atmosphere is. The smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.

That’s one of the many reasons I found it helpful to be back in Beijing and to be able to observe China again through a larger aperture than a pinhole. Attending the China Development Forum — Beijing’s very useful annual gathering of local and global business leaders, senior Chinese officials, retired diplomats and a few local and Western journalists — reminded me of some powerful old truths and exposed me to some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.

Hint: The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool. Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.

 

More personally, being back in Beijing was also a reminder of how many people I’ve come to know and like there over three decades of reporting visits — but please don’t tell anyone in Washington that I said that. There’s something of a competition today between Democrats and Republicans over who can speak most harshly about China. Truth be told, both countries have so demonized the other of late that it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.

Being back was also a reminder of the formidable weight and strength of what China has built since opening to the world in the 1970s, and even since Covid hit in 2019. China’s Communist Party government has a stronger grip than ever on its society, thanks to its police state surveillance and digital tracking systems: Facial recognition cameras are everywhere. The party crushes any challenge to its rule or to President Xi Jinping. These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.

 
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A photograph of a skyline at sunset. A busy road runs through the middle of the image. Commuters walk on a bridge over the road.

Beijing has become an increasingly livable city in recent years.Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

That said, one should have no illusions: The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.

Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces. As my Times colleague Keith Bradsher reported in 2021, Shanghai had recently built 55 new parks, bringing its total to 406, and had plans for nearly 600 more.

 

Bradsher, one of the handful of American reporters who lived in mainland China through nearly three years of stringent “zero Covid” policies, also pointed out to me that some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable. In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.

I say this not to argue that high-speed trains are better than freedom. I say this to explain that being in Beijing reminds you that China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.

For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland. It makes me weep for all the time we have wasted these past eight years talking about a faux nation builder named Donald Trump.

 
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China has connected hundreds of cities via high-speed rail, helping the government earn support from the people.Credit...Huang Zongzhi/Xinhua, via Getty Images

On my first day in Beijing, I had a conversation with a young Chinese woman, a college student. Her first question, alluding to a book I wrote, was: “Mr. Friedman, is the world still flat?”

 

I explained why I thought it was flatter than ever by my definition — that because of steady advances in connectivity and digitization, more people can compete, connect and collaborate on more things for less money from more places than ever. During my time in Beijing, I was struck at how educated Chinese people seem to be more connected, and able to get around digital firewalls, than before.

I could see the woman wasn’t totally convinced by my explanation, so we moved on to other subjects. And then she dropped this: “I just used ChatGPT.”

I said, “You used ChatGPT from Beijing, and you’re asking me if the world is still flat?”

Indeed, a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time on it.

It’s funny, though — just when you start to worry about the state of J.F.K. Airport, and all the stories in recent years that China was going to bury us in the race to A.I., an American team, OpenAI, comes up with the world’s leading natural language processing tool, which enables any user to have humanlike conversations, ask any question and get deep insights in every major language, including Mandarin.

China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

 

But generative A.I., like ChatGPT, gives anyone, from a poor farmer to a college professor, the power to ask any question on any subject in his or her own language. This could be a real problem for China, because it will have to build many guardrails into its own generative A.I. systems to limit what Chinese citizens can ask and what the computer can answer. If you can’t ask whatever you want, including what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and if your A.I. system is always trying to figure out what to censor, where to censor and whom to censor, it will be less productive.

“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,” Dingding Chen, a Chinese political scientist, told me and Bradsher.

It’s for all of these reasons that weighing the shifting power relationship between America and China has become such a popular pastime among elites in both of our countries. For instance, through social media, many Chinese got to see parts of the March 23rd hearing on Capitol Hill where members of Congress questioned — or, actually, berated, harangued and constantly interrupted — TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, claiming TikTok’s videos were damaging American children’s mental health.

Hu Xijin, one of China’s most popular bloggers, with almost 25 million followers on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, explained to me just how insulting Chinese found that hearing. It was widely and derisively commented about online in China.

(All that said, YouTube has been banned from China since 2009, so we’re not the only ones frightened by popular apps. I say we trade: We’ll accept TikTok if Beijing will let in YouTube.)

 

“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”

Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”

 
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Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters

It was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?

A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”

 

I’m pretty sure I’d get the same answer in Washington.

The best part of this trip was uncovering the real answer to that question and why it stumps so many people. It’s because the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”

Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists that are not always visible to the naked eye.

The old and obvious aspect is that China and America are jostling to acquire the most economic and military clout to shape the rules of the 21st century in ways most advantageous to their respective economic and political systems. And one of those disputed rules, which America has acknowledged but not endorsed, is China’s claim to Taiwan as part of “One China.”

Because that “rule” remains in dispute, we will continue to arm Taiwan to deter Beijing from seizing the island, crushing its democracy and using it as a jumping off point to dominate the rest of East Asia, and China will keep pushing for reunification — one way or another.

One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

 

America knew how to deal with Nazi Germany, an economic and military peer, but a country with which we were not deeply economically intertwined. America knew how to deal with the Soviet Union, a military peer but nowhere near our economic peer, and a country with which we were not economically intertwined at all.

Ditto China. For several thousand years China saw itself as situated in the middle of the world — hence it referred to itself as Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom — protected by mountains, deserts and seas on all sides, and often dominating states around it, while fiercely preserving its own culture. That was until the 19th century, when it began to be repeatedly ravaged by stronger foreign powers: Britain, France, Russia and Japan.

But in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.

How intertwined? Americans’ favorite device is an iPhone assembled mostly in China, and until recently the favored foreign destination of Chinese college students — some 300,000 of them today — is America. That makes for some weird scenes, like watching one country shoot down another country’s intelligence balloon just after the two countries in 2022 set a record in annual bilateral trade.

Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

 

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet. When so many more products or services became digitized and connected, so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

In the Cold War it was relatively easy to say that this fighter jet is a weapon and that that phone is a tool. But when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

Today, it’s just a few lines of code that separate autonomous cars from autonomous weapons. And, as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.

This, too, leads to more weird twists. I am thinking of how a number of U.S. armed forces branches have banned TikTok from government-issued smartphones and computers. This is surely the first time that the Pentagon has banned an app that is known mostly for sharing dance moves. But there is a real fear that TikTok’s highly addictive algorithm is dual use and could be repurposed by the Chinese intelligence service to amass data on our youth — more than 150 million Americans have downloaded the app, the company says — to scramble their brains, spread disinformation or collect information that could one day be used for blackmail.

And the twists just keep on coming. For the first 30 or so years after Beijing opened up to trading with the world, starting around 1978-79, China largely sold America what I call “shallow” goods — shoes, socks, shirts and solar panels.

 

Meanwhile, America and the West tended to sell China what I call “deep goods” — goods that went deep into their systems and were dual use — namely software, microchips, bandwidth, smartphones and robots. China had to buy our deep goods because, until relatively recently, it could not make many itself.

As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.

But then, about eight years ago, we got a knock on our door and there was a Chinese salesman. He said: “Hi, my name is Mr. Huawei and I make 5G telephone equipment better than anything you have. I’m starting to install it all over the world, and I’d like to wire America.”

What America essentially told this Huawei salesman, as well as other rising Chinese high-tech firms, was this: “When Chinese companies were just selling us shallow goods, we didn’t care if your political system was authoritarian, libertarian or vegetarian; we were just buying your shallow goods. But when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”

 
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China is exporting more and more “deep goods” to the rest of the world, in part thanks to the telecom company Huawei.Credit...Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

The role of trust in international relations and commerce took one more great leap for another reason: As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

 

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.

But here’s the rub: Because the physics of making advanced logic chips has become so complex — a human hair is about 90,000 nanometers thick and the world’s best mass producer of advanced chips in the world is now making three-nanometer transistors — no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.

China doesn’t need to look far for that lesson. It is on display right across the Straits of Taiwan, at the world’s greatest chip-making company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.

After I left Beijing, I came to Taiwan, where I spent an afternoon with the leaders of TSMC at their headquarters in Hsinchu Science Park, a 90-minute drive south of Taipei, the capital. When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

 

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions. In doing so, TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.

“Our customers are very demanding,” added Zhang. “Their products each have unique requirements.” They each “tell us what they want to do, and together we figure out how TSMC will design the process to make it.” As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.

 

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.

Why did China lose our trust?

After the period of China’s isolation and internal turmoil under Mao Zedong ended with his death in 1976, a successor, Deng Xiaoping, made a 180-degree turn away from Maoism. Deng established a much more collective leadership for China and term limits for the top leaders, and he put pragmatism — whatever would drive economic growth — above Communist ideology, while hiding China’s growing strength.

In the era of Deng and his successors — in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s — Beijing forged strong economic and educational ties with the United States, which ushered China into the World Trade Organization, on the condition that China gradually phase out its mercantilist practice of funding state-owned industries and that it gradually open itself to more foreign investment and ownership, much as the world opened itself to China’s exports.

But after Xi Jinping took over as China’s paramount leader in 2012, he seemed to be alarmed at how China’s openness toward the world, its consensus approach to leadership and its rush down a semi-capitalist path had led to runaway corruption inside both the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army, to a degree that was hurting the party’s legitimacy.

So Xi centralized power into his own hands, crushed all the fiefs that had been created by different leaders of different government agencies and sectors of the economy, re-injected the authority of the Communist Party into every corner of business, academia and society and deployed pervasive surveillance technologies. All together, this reversed what seemed like China’s steady march toward more openness — and even a somewhat freer press.

 

Xi also basically shifted away from Deng’s unabashed unleashing of the private sector, focusing instead on building national economic champions that could dominate all the key industries of the 21st century — from A.I. to quantum computing to aerospace — and making sure Communist Party cells were in their management and in their work forces. And when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”

Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.

As that happened, it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.

 
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As the people of Hong Kong tried to defend their democratic freedoms, the Chinese government cracked down.Credit...Vincent Yu/Associated Press

Beijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror. So Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.

 

Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States. As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.

A senior administration official told me that Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.

Nevertheless, it’s clear to me that at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.

I say that because of how often senior Chinese officials tell every foreign leader and visiting Western business executive they meet today that China is “open” and eager for foreign investment. The reality is, it has to be more open to foreign direct investment because China’s provinces desperately need capital to compensate for all the money each local government spent controlling Covid and because many of them are running out of land to sell for state-owned factories to raise money.

I also don’t think it was an accident of timing that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and sort of the Steve Jobs of China, suddenly reappeared a few weeks ago in state-controlled media after having suddenly disappeared from public view in 2020. Ma had vanished after a disagreement with state regulators, who thought he was getting too big and independent. His disappearance sent shock waves through China’s start-up community and curbed investments.

 

Ihave no problem saying that I would like to live in a world where the Chinese people are thriving, alongside all others. After all, we are talking about more than one out of six people on the planet. I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.

I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.

China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.

Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.

I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.

If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.

 

And by the way, in today’s fused world, the notion that China can economically collapse and America still thrive is utter fantasy. And the notion that the Europeans will always be with us in such an endeavor, given the size of China’s market, may also be fanciful. Note French President Emmanuel Macron’s bowing and scraping in Beijing last week.

As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.

In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

Never has that been truer than today, and never has China been more in need of embracing that truth.

 

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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook

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