Opinion | Is U.S.-China Conflict Inevitable?
For starters we need to ask: What aspects of our competition/conflict with China are inevitable between a rising power and a status quo power, and what can be dampened by smart policy?
Let’s start with the inevitable. For roughly the first 30 of the 40 years of economic integration, China sold us what I call “shallow goods’’ — shirts we wore on our backs, tennis shoes we wore on our feet and solar panels we affixed to our roofs. America, in contrast, sold China “deep goods’’ — software and computers that went deep into its system, which it needed and could buy only from us.
Well, today, China can now make more and more of those “deep goods” — like Huawei 5G telecom systems — but we don’t have the shared trust between us to install its deep technologies in our homes, bedrooms and businesses, or even to sell our deepest goods to China, like advanced logic chips, anymore. When China sold us “shallow…
