New US envoy should see more opportunities than challenges

After being nominated by US President Joe Biden as the next US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns tweeted that he felt honored for being chosen for the job. "If confirmed by the Senate, I look forward to returning to public service to work on the difficult and complex challenges we face with China," he said in a tweet on Aug 21.

But if Burns assumes his job description covers only working "on the difficult and complex challenges", then he will end up doing only a fraction of his duty. China-US relations have hit their lowest point in decades, chiefly because previous US president Donald Trump reversed Washington's decades-old engagement policy toward Beijing, a stance that the Joe Biden administration has also adopted.

It is no secret that the two countries don't see eye-to-eye on some issues for as long as one can remember. Yet that didn't prevent them from working in cooperation in a wide range of areas while trying to manage their differences.

Since Burns has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, he should know how to mend Sino-US relations. Trump's toxic policy needs to be reversed, which means ending the trade war and the tech war, and stopping moves that can trigger a new Cold War, all of which are harmful for not only China and the US, but the rest of the world.

Burns, who is considered an expert on Europe, should spend time like his predecessors traveling across China, which is as large as the US but has four times its population, to try to understand the country.

I believe many of his views on China, formed either at Foggy Bottom or Cambridge, will change. For example, Burns will be surprised by the Chinese people's high approval for their government despite Washington's relentless efforts to demonize it. And he may realize how deeply intertwined the world's two largest economies are when he talks with the large US business community in China. GM, for example, sells more cars in China than in the United States.

A Harvard professor at present, Burns should appreciate the academic exchange and other people-to-people exchanges between the two countries that have grown since the late 1970s. Unfortunately, such exchanges have taken a big hit in recent years thanks to the resurgence of McCarthyism in the US.

If the Senate confirms his nomination, Burns may also come to know that his predecessors have passionately promoted such people-to-people exchanges, which incidentally have played a vital role in the development of overall bilateral ties.

I was a bit worried listening to Burns' talks over the past year, especially when he said that compared with Afghanistan, "we have bigger strategic interest trying to limit China and compete with China as our strongest adversary", and that the "Chinese are contesting America really across the board", citing China's growing influence in the fields of military, trade and governance. He also said Washington should more strongly promote Quad, a loose security partnership and dialogue mechanism among the US, Japan, Australia and India, in order to contain China.

But Burns also said China and the US should work together on global issues such as climate change, human trafficking, drug trafficking and pandemics, stressing that "we can't do much without China".

These are certainly far more important issues than defending US hegemony in an increasingly multi-polar world. But to address these issues, the US administration has to reverse its current hostile policy toward China, which has made it difficult for the two sides to cooperate on so many critical global issues.

The role that the US ambassador to China plays in bilateral relations has become less important over the past two decades thanks to the many higher-level exchange mechanisms that have been established over the years. But many of those mechanisms were scrapped or suspended by Trump.

So Burns will have a daunting task to help mend the relationship between the two countries.

The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.