Vaccines could be common ground

There exists ample room for the United States to move its relations with China forward, including working together to ramp up global inoculation against COVID-19 and cope with climate change, the president of the Brookings Institution said Monday.

In what appeared to be his first public comments on US-China relations in the new year, John Allen, the head of the Washington-based think tank, said he continued to believe the "most consequential" relationship the US has is with China, and "the future of the 21st century will be our relationship with China".

Allen said that what concerned him is that "we seem to have chosen an overall policy of confrontation with China".

"I know a little about going to war, and when your policy is confrontational across the board, the distance from confrontation to conflict is pretty short — it can be," said Allen, a retired US Marine Corps four-star general.

"And once blood is drawn, it is very hard to walk back from that," he said.

There are plenty of places where the US can find a way to move forward with China that can be cooperative or collaborative, Allen said in a podcast aired Monday. "For example, we have got to vaccinate the entire surface of the planet."

Both the US and China have approved emergency use of COVID-19 vaccines, with roughly the same number of populations inoculated so far in each country, according to media reports.

The US is using Pfizer and Germany's BioNTech's vaccine, and another made by Moderna, and as of Monday, nearly 4.6 million shots had been dispensed in the US, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

China approved the emergency use of COVID-19 vaccines in June, and by the end of November, more than 1.5 million doses had been distributed for people at high risk of infection.

The country granted conditional marketing authorization for the first COVID-19 vaccine in December, and by the end of the month, more than 3 million vaccine doses, developed by Chinese company Sinopharm, had been distributed among the key groups, according to China National Health Commission statistics.

While the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been largely welcomed in the West, the shots require storage at ultracold or freezer temperatures, meaning logistical constraints.

The Sinopharm vaccines can be stored and delivered via the current cold-chain system, making it easier and cheaper for countries around the world to handle.

"Here is an opportunity for the United States and China to exert leadership with our partners to find a way forward to vaccinate the planet and then to create a system of global medical surveillance that will preclude this from happening again," Allen said.

In October, China joined COVAX, a global initiative by the World Health Organization to ensure equitable global access to COVID-19 vaccines. The US hasn't yet joined the initiative.

US-China coordination is more likely to occur under the umbrella of multilateral or multinational organizations of which both are a member, according to Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings John L. Thornton China Center.

"If the United States and China both join the COVAX Facility to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to those in greatest need, that could provide a more frictionless platform to coordinate contributions to global efforts to deliver over 11 billion vaccine treatments to people on every continent than if the United States and China attempted to replicate COVAX's efforts on a bilateral basis," Hass wrote in a post Monday.

In addition to distributing COVID-19 vaccines, the US and China have opportunities to cooperate on climate change and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, according to Allen.

Allen said he had visited some of the Chinese cities, including an eco-city in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province. It is a modern city built completely in a climate-friendly environment.

"We are not doing that. We could probably collaborate in some ways to figure out where they have succeeded or failed and how we could, in fact, learn from that," he said.

In the podcast, Allen said the incoming Biden administration needs an "overarching grand strategy" with respect to China, embracing all the dimensions, including the economy, security, science and technology and the people.

"Chinese people and the American people are actually quite close, and there is real opportunity for us to capitalize on that," he said.

Allen said US President-elect Joe Biden has a "real opportunity to turn the page" on the relationship but cautioned that Biden would have to face a "skeptical" Congress.

"That does not mean they want a confrontational relationship with China, but they want China treated in their mind as the great strategic rival that it is and to hold them accountable," he said.

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi has said China hopes that the next US administration will return to a "sensible approach", restore normalcy to bilateral relations, resume dialogue and restart cooperation.

"China-US relations have come to a new crossroads, and a new window of hope is opening," Wang said in an interview with the Xinhua News Agency published Saturday.