The US and China are both heading into a landmark summit in Beijing this week with fundamental misunderstandings of the other, analysts said.
Beijing is gripped by a “dangerous new overconfidence” stemming from an entrenched belief in American decline, one expert wrote, as Western scholarly frameworks have been purged from academia in China in favor of nationalist narratives.
On the US side, officials misread Beijing’s ability to absorb pressure and don’t realize that “high-level engagement… does not necessarily signal concession,” two analysts wrote in The Diplomat.
Washington is starting to run low on China experts, as fewer Americans study in China in part because they fear it could hurt them career-wise.
Diplomacy “risks being built on an incomplete picture,” a Harvard scholar wrote.
