U.S.-China relations have never been easy. No problem in the world can be solved without the pair working together, but working together is hard. The relationship is set for more uncertainty with the election of Donald Trump. On Dec. 2, Trump took a call from the democratically elected president of Taiwan, breaking decades of precedent. The call raised fears that Trump would take a hard line on China. But then, unpredictable as ever, the president-elect announced Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad as his pick for ambassador to Beijing. Branstad reportedly has a close personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. A little good cop, bad cop, perhaps? Anyway, a whole mythology has emerged about the most consequential relationship in the world. Here are a few myths that could use busting.

Myth No. 1

Trade and engagement will set China free.

This idea has been a foundational myth of America’s engagement with China almost since President Richard Nixon went there in 1972; it’s been used to justify decades of interaction. On the day China was granted most-favored-nation trading status in Washington in 1980, Rep. Bill Alexander (Ark.), a supporter of President Jimmy Carter, told the House, “Seeds of democracy are growing in China.” Flash forward to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, and Robert Rubin, former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, assuring Congress that the move would “sow the seeds of freedom for China’s 1.2 billion citizens.”

So far, this epochal bet has been a bust. China’s economy has become more open over the past few decades, and personal freedom for average citizens has expanded. But China’s one-party state represses dissent even more severely than it did 30 years ago in the run-up to the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square. A slew of internal Communist Party documents indicates that the level of paranoia about American values encroaching on China is at a crescendo. Meanwhile, Western businesses remain banned from investing in a wide swath of China’s economy, while Chinese firms can often invest in those sectors, including energy and telecommunications, overseas.

Myth No. 2

Trump’s Taiwan phone call threatened the status quo.

When Trump took Taiwan’s call, the U.S. foreign policy establishment had a minor nervous breakdown. Vox warned of “disarray ” in U.S.-China relations. New York magazine raised the specter of a “diplomatic disaster.”

Let’s take a deep breath and realize that the “status quo” between Taiwan and the United States has been evolving for decades. In exchange for Chinese promises to help ease the United States out of Vietnam and counter the Soviet Union, officials from the Nixon and Carter administrations promised China that America would walk away from Taiwan, allowing China to absorb the island of 23 million people, which Beijing views as a renegade province.

Since then, however, especially as U.S. presidents have come to understand that China’s political system has not moved in a positive direction, successive administrations have worked to better ties with Taiwan. Weapons sales to the island remain robust despite a promise to China in 1982 to slow them. Diplomatic contact has been upgraded. Washington now supports granting Taiwan observer status at a variety of international organizations. Most Taiwanese can come to the United States without a visa. In that sense, Trump’s call was a logical continuation of a slowly evolving process of improved relations. The big concern, however, is that China will use the call as an excuse to further bully Taiwan and that Trump will stand by.

Myth No. 3

The United States has tried to contain China’s rise.

This is China’s version of Myth 1, and it undergirds Beijing’s official view of the United States. It appears in Chinese history textbooks, is repeated ad nauseam on state-run media and is used as a throwaway line in everyday interaction between Chinese and Americans. One recent headline on the Chinese government’s news website read, “Containing China: America Has 5 Trump Cards.”

Enough already. Any clearheaded look at the history between the two countries reveals that throughout their interaction, save for a short interregnum during the Cold War, the United States has been, if anything, the prime foreign enabler of China’s rise. America’s open wallets, open society and open universities have been key factors in China’s ascent from a Third World backwater to a global economic power. In 2001, the United States ushered China into the World Trade Organization, contributing to a massive boom in Chinese exports. American-trained scientists man Chinese research institutions, and American-trained technocrats populate its central bank.

Sure, Americans have done stupid things to justify Chinese misgivings, such as the wrongheaded push against China’s establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015. But that is small beer. Of course, the Chinese Communist Party, given its paranoia about American values, cannot publicly recognize this fact. But privately, every party leader since Deng Xiaoping has sent his child to be educated in the United States — an acknowledgment that America holds some of the answers to China’s quest to become strong and rich.

Myth No. 4

China is killing the U.S. economy.

The notion that China is destined to take over the world was a major theme of this election. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” Trump told a crowd in May, claiming that the country is “killing” the United States on trade and dominating us on the international market. Trump and many, many others have also argued that China’s holding of about $1 trillion in U.S. debt gives it leverage over everything we do.

None of this is really true. First, the U.S. Treasurys market is enormous, totaling about $11 trillion, and highly liquid. China holds about as much in Treasury bonds as Japan does. And if China dumped its holdings, it would hurt China as much as the United States, because a price drop in Treasurys would lower the value of China’s investments.

On trade, years of studies have shown that automation is more of a factor than outsourcing to China in the hollowing-out of U.S. manufacturing jobs. That said, certain sectors of the economy, such as furniture-making and textiles, have been hammered by China. As for total competition with the United States, Americans tend to overestimate our problems and underestimate those of our competitors. China is facing a series of looming predicaments: Its corporate debt to GDP ratio is one of the highest in the world; if it’s not dealt with soon, it could cause a financial crisis. Its environmental issues are so extreme that some cities, such as Beijing, which is routinely cloaked in a cocktail of dust and smog, have stopped publishing life expectancy statistics. And finally, China’s demographics, born of its former one-child policy , are resulting in a rapidly aging population and higher labor costs. If productivity does not increase substantially, China’s gross domestic product will slow even more.

The Washington Post’s Jia Lynn Yang explains the back story on relations between the U.S., China and Taiwan and the ramifications of Friday's telephone call between President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. (Alice Li,Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)

Myth No. 5

China’s anti-American propaganda doesn’t matter.

When Henry Kissinger went to China on his historic 1971 trip, he complained to Premier Zhou Enlai about a surge in anti-American propaganda. In a tactic that his successors would repeat, Zhou said the state-run media was just “firing empty cannons” and assured Kissinger that it did not matter.

Wrong. Attacking America did matter to the communists; it was a centerpiece of their ideology. Four decades later, this remains the case. The occasional official has worried about the U.S. tendency to ignore the avalanche of anti-American claptrap in China’s media or our willingness to allow Chinese officials to operate in the United States in ways that run counter to our values. When George H.W. Bush was the head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing in late 1974, the People’s Republic sent its first exhibit of archaeological treasures to the United States. The Chinese informed State Department officials that they would not allow reporters from nations that did not have relations with China to attend a news conference planned for the National Gallery of Art. Instead of ignoring the Chinese demand, the State Department canceled the briefing. Bush was shocked. “We must not capitulate on matters this fundamental,” he wrote. “. . . We must not permit them to flaunt their way in the United States.” State ignored his entreaties.

America’s unwillingness to demand reciprocity from China on such fronts has harmed the relationship by effectively rewarding Chinese bad behavior, which encourages more. An example would be America’s openness in granting visas to Chinese journalists, and in giving them significant freedom to operate in the United States, while tolerating the deep restrictions China places on American reporters working there.

China’s leaders have also become comfortable with publicly lambasting the United States. In October 2014, President Jinping praised ultra-nationalist blogger Zhou Xiaoping for spreading what he called “positive energy.” In a particularly notorious essay titled “Nine Knockout Blows in America’s Cold War Against China,” Zhou had savaged the tendency of young Chinese to worship the West and declared that America was treating China and the Chinese in the same way Hitler had treated the Jews.

Twitter: @JEPomfret

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