CHINA and America conduct a fourth round of talks on their strategic relations in Washington, DC, today and tomorrow: maybe they can work out whether they are friends or enemies, and whether they plan to change that any time soon.

America finds itself in the difficult position of wanting to signal peace-and-friendship towards China, at least on the strategic level (a trade war remains a possibility), while China (like America) arms itself to the teeth and the Taiwan question defies solution.

The Council on Foreign Relations has a fine backgrounder on the talks, pointing out that China is

North Korea’s biggest trading partner and primary source of food, arms, and fuel

... but for that same reason, not so much an adversary of America as an "essential diplomatic go-between".

The basic problem for America is surely one of deciding whether it can bring itself to approve of the sort of authoritarian-yet-prospering (and seemingly stable) state that Chinese communism has produced. John Tcacik of the Heritage Foundation puts the hostile case well:

We now have a “strong and united” China which supports tyranny, nuclear proliferation, and lawless mercantilism. This undemocratic China is a greater challenge than a weak, disunited China. Because the vast majority of Chinese now acquiesce in the regime’s domestic repression at the price of economic prosperity and national power (as was true in 1930s Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—though without the prosperity) there is no possibility that China can democratize by itself. American leaders therefore must not legitimise the regime.

But equating this Chinese state with Nazi Germany seems absurd, and with the Soviet Unon not much less so: it is not openly warlike, and it has ceased to actively impoverish its citizens in the name of ideology. Mr Tcacik's claim that a weak and disunited China would be less problematic is certainly open to debate: China happens to be driving the world economy right now. As for America "legitimising" China (or not), that seems an empty conceit: the "legitimacy" of China's government is not within America's control.

These US-China talks are likely to be crowded out of the headlines by the sterile constitutional arguments sure to dominate the EU summit on Thursday and Friday. But the question of whether the US and China can strike a happy balance matters far more for global peace and prosperity than whether European governments can sign a meaningless piece of paper.

Update: A paper just published by NEBR speculates about the long-term implications of China's rise, for the relationship between capitalism and democracy.