Currently, the strategic partnership between the United States and China has worsened over the years due to perceived threats which force the United States to reassess and possibly down grade connections with China. Factors reside in this shift policy and include;
Firstly, premble of threats to national security has increased especially in the areas of technology and theft of intellectual property. The US government has heighten awareness on chinese firms and organisations deemed to be involved in spying and hacking on Americans’ and the country’s interests and assets.
Free trade also has its effects such as trade deficits and competition between the economical strengths of the two countries. The US claims that this is one of the many types of unfair trade practices by China, and he listed some of them as subsidies for its domestic industries, manipulating their exchange rate, and restricting exports of American made goods.
Concerns in the field of human rights also contribute to tension, given that the US has accused China of authoritarian politics, abductions of religious communions, oppression of the Uighur population, and violation of freedoms in Hong Kong.
Other factors that contribute to the chang’e included geopolitical factors, especially in the APEC region forcing the US to reconsider its role vis-a-vis China. Orchard opined that due to the problems that were revolving in the South China sea and China’s asserting itself in the region has raised alarm among the US Allies.
Secondly, there exist divergent political beliefs about how each of the two nations should be governed, democracy, or basic tenets of human rights as some foundational frameworks for interaction and military schemes.
Nonetheless, both countries continue to have close economic relations and depending on how poorly those relations become, the two countries cannot total sever their ties. The process for managing and rebalancing the bilateral relationship persists and occurs through diplomatic demarches, trade talks, and multilateral diplomacy.
In the awakening world, the path of competing relations between America and China continues to exert definitive, decisive, and undeniable impacts on geopolitics and the world’s economy.