The US and China are increasingly decoupling, even as they try to maintain a fragile trade truce.
The world’s two biggest economies have lowered tariffs from levels which would have imposed de facto embargoes on each others’ economies, but in other respects, they are moving farther apart. Beijing has stopped approving requests by Chinese companies to invest or expand in the US, Nikkei reported, while significantly fewer American companies plan to invest in China this year compared to 2024.
Educational exchanges are rarer, too: The US National Science Foundation has in recent years issued far fewer grants related to China, a Princeton researcher noted. “Simply put, scientific decoupling between the United States and China is already here,” he wrote.