The US presidential election is an internal affair of the United States, and China has no interest to intervene and has never intervened. The problems in the US now cannot be resolved by shifting the contradictions. At present, US’ biggest enemy is itself.
The year 2020 is the election year in the US, and China-US relations have encountered major difficulties. International observers once sighed that in the US presidential campaigns every four years over the past 40 years, "China issue is the main issue of the two parties in the US, and newspaper commentators and various media all call themselves experts on the 'China issue'." Since the end of the Cold War, it has almost been a regular playbook in the US general election campaigns to hype up the so-called "China threat" to show US toughness of protecting its own interests. However, some people in the US also pointed out that they do not want to leave regrettable "sequelae" to the development of China-US relations due to the presidential campaign.
How could it be possible to bring about lasting unity in the US after creating a foreign enemy at the expense of America's own interests? How could it be possible to deceive the people for a long time with the dangerous game of misleading relations with China through lies? Everyone knows that extreme words and deeds thrown out for personal gains and attentions often cause the US to overdraft the future. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once made a unique observation that the US has had great domestic enthusiasm and bipartisan support every time the US entered a major war since 1945. However, as the war continued, "US domestic support will soon begin to collapse and everyone will start looking for an exit strategy." David M. Lampton, a senior researcher at Stanford University's Asia Pacific Research Center, pointed out honestly, "Under the current global pandemic, global economic recession, and the domestic crisis of racial discrimination and social injustice in the US, China is not the biggest problem for the US. The only problem that exists in the current US political show is, who has the courage to tell the truth?"
Some American politicians in power today have shockingly expressed their desire for conflicts. Their political performances that shift their attention and externalize contradictions will not help at all to solve the increasingly serious multiple systemic crises in American society. Instead, the considerable destructive power spills over into international relations. The world cannot help asking, whether the slogans of "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations", "peaceful policies being in our interests" and "refusing the ambition to take advantage of other continents", declared by previous leaders of the US, have all been forgotten by some of their successors?
It must be emphasized that the US presidential election is an internal affair of the US, and China has no interest to intervene and has never intervened. As an independent country, China has the right to safeguard its own sovereignty, security and development interests, and will not sacrifice its own principles to cooperate with the US presidential election play. Some American politicians should immediately stop the trick of drawing China into American domestic politics. All fortresses are breached from within. People in both China and the US have pointed out that for a large country like China and the US, no external force can cause it to collapse. What can really destroy it is the internal crisis. The problems in the US now cannot be resolved by shifting the contradictions. The biggest "enemy" of the US is itself.
The sound development of China-US relations is the common aspiration shared by the two peoples. The China-US "decoupling" and even conflicts do not meet the common interests of people of the two countries and the rest of the world. No matter how the US presidential campaign tries to take advantage of the so-called "China issue", it will not change the logic of history. The development of China-US relations requires a reflection on history, foresight, mutual respect and trust, mutual benefit and win-win results. This is an important enlightenment from the history of China-US exchanges. Cooperation, rather than confrontation, is good for the people and the world.
Disclaimer: This article is originally published on people.cn and is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
