Jake Werner
Marcus Stanley
Susan Helper
Jonas Nahm
Quincy Institute Highlights US-China Relations
By Elaine Pasquini
Washington, DC: The complicated issue of the US-China relationship was the subject of an August 27, 2026, webinar hosted by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Moderated by Marcus Stanley, director of studies at the Quincy Institute, the questions tackled included whether closer China-US investment would be a security threat or an opportunity to reform the economic relationship between the two global powers.
With respect to closer economic ties with China, Susan Helper, former chief economist of the US Commerce Department, expressed concern about US dependence on a country that had a 90 percent market share in certain industries along with China’s record of workers’ rights violations.
“There needs to be pressure on the Chinese government to have more of a domestic focus strategy,” she said. “They have built an amazing industrial machine and should let their own people benefit from it. But I do not think US interaction with China should be zero.”
Jonas Nahm, associate professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, pointed out that while some Congressmembers are against the US being open to China, there is a way of being strategically open that would be an opportunity for learning. “You can structure engagement so that knowledge spills over to us,” he said.
“We should have debates as to how to set up good policy with China and how to do this correctly,” Nahm stressed. “If the China-US relationship continues to be so acrimonious as it has been, I think the window for learning might be closing at some point. In addition to thinking about what policies we do need and how we can restructure that engagement, we need to think about how do we convince the Chinese government – not Chinese firms, I think they are ready to be engaged – I think it’s the government that has concerns about whether it wants to help us build a competitive industry in these sectors that they are good at.”
China is doing well because of its scale, he said. “The question is how do we build scale to compete with China’s scale and I think this would require the US to coordinate with some other countries to do this. We need some sort of allied industrial strategy. The Canadian trade war, at the moment, is not a great demonstration of how to build scale across borders.”
Jake Werner, director of the East Asia program at the Quincy Institute, argued that to build better relations between the United States and China, the US needs to stop scapegoating China for the problems we have in our society as a substitute for dealing with them. The problems we have in our manufacturing sector and America’s declining global position should be the subject of healthy discussion here in the US.
China is not the weak country it was in the 1990s when there were similar sorts of politics around blaming China for this and that, he noted. It is powerful enough to defend its own interests. It has accumulated the institutional basis for doing so in response to the American economic attacks of the last decade. “China will fight back and that will create an escalatory spiral on both the economic and security sides,” he said.
The United States should recognize that China sees us as a threat because the United States also has similar forms of systemic domination that it has weaponized. “It would be a very fruitful path if we simply talked about these things with China,” he suggested.
“I think China is overly paranoid about the United States and the United States is overly paranoid about China,” he opined. But China has figured out a way to incorporate American business and technology in its advanced sectors, and we should be doing the same.
The United States needs to have a conversation with China about a global reform agenda, and the two countries need to accept each other as being successful on the global economy.
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
