[News] Collaboration, Not Confrontation: Xi Jinping’s Visit to the United States

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/14/collaboration-not-confrontation-xi-jinpings-visit-to-the-united-states/>
Collaboration, Not Confrontation: Xi Jinping’s Visit to the United States
Vijay Prashad
September 14, 2026
------------------------------

Photograph Source: Office of U.S. President – Public Domain

President Xi Jinping’s forthcoming visit to the United States must be
understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it
must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures.

In one future, the United States imposes a spiral of confrontation against
China. Trade disputes harden into economic warfare, then economic warfare
intensifies into technological blockades, technological blockades produce
military encirclement, and finally military encirclement creates incidents,
and incidents the danger of becoming an unimaginable war.

In the other future, the two countries accept that neither can destroy the
other without destroying much of humanity. They recognise that coexistence
is not an act of charity and collaboration is not a concession. Both are
necessities.

That is the significance of President Xi’s decision to travel to the United
States. China’s foreign ministry has described
<https://us.list-manage.com/16h7fbXgAPs?e=ab710e72ba&c2id=f321d43f53c84255b4c6e069654d6298>
head-of-state diplomacy as having an ‘irreplaceable’ role in guiding
relations between the two countries. The visit follows President Donald
Trump’s trip to China in May and continuing negotiations over tariffs,
trade, and investment. There are indications that President Xi will travel
with a substantial delegation of Chinese business leaders. These facts
suggest that Beijing wants to move the relationship away from permanent
crisis and towards practical engagement.

But diplomacy between China and the United States cannot merely be a photo
opportunity. Nor should it be understood as a negotiation in which one side
must surrender to the other. It must be based on a sober recognition of
reality. Or to be precise, four realities.

The *first reality* is that China cannot be contained. China is not a minor
country whose development can be suffocated by sanctions. It has a
population of more than 1.4 billion people, a vast industrial system, an
increasingly sophisticated scientific community, and deep commercial
relationships across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Whatever one
thinks of China, it is absurd to imagine that it can simply be excluded
from the world economy. The attempt to contain China has already produced
an extraordinary catalogue of restrictions: tariffs, semiconductor
controls, investment prohibitions, sanctions on Chinese companies, naval
patrols along China’s coastline, and the construction of new military
arrangements from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Each of these measures
is presented as defensive. Taken together, however, they form an
architecture of confrontation. There is a dangerous illusion in Washington
that pressure will force China to abandon its development. No Chinese
government could accept such a demand. After the century of humiliation
(from the Opium Wars to the Japanese invasion) the restoration of national
sovereignty and the improvement of living standards are not negotiable
matters for the Chinese people. The United States may slow certain aspects
of China’s development, but it cannot persuade China to return to poverty.

The *second reality* is that economic separation is neither simple nor
painless. The United States and China remain deeply connected through
trade, investment, supply chains, scientific knowledge, and consumer
markets. US farmers depend upon Chinese buyers. US companies depend upon
Chinese manufacturing and upon Chinese consumers. China, meanwhile,
benefits from access to US technology, agricultural products, and capital.
Negotiators are now discussing reciprocal tariff reductions and new
mechanisms for trade and investment. These are modest measures, but they
acknowledge an important truth: economic warfare injures both countries.
Tariffs are announced with nationalist speeches, but their costs appear
quietly in grocery bills, factory closures, disrupted supply chains, and
lost employment. Working people in the United States do not benefit when
China is weakened. Their difficulties are rooted principally in decisions
made by their own ruling class: decades of deindustrialisation, the power
of finance, attacks on trade unions, the privatisation of public services,
and the refusal to undertake serious social investment. China did not close
the factories of the US Midwest. US corporations closed them in search of
higher profits. The answer to inequality in either country is not economic
nationalism by the United States.

The *third reality* is that humanity faces problems that cannot be solved
by either country acting alone. The climate catastrophe does not carry a
passport. Carbon emitted in one country heats the atmosphere everywhere.
The United States possesses immense scientific and financial resources,
while China has developed enormous productive capacity in solar panels,
batteries, electric vehicles, public transport, and renewable-energy
infrastructure. Collaboration between them could accelerate a worldwide
energy transition. Confrontation will delay it precisely when delay has
become intolerable. The same is true of public health. The COVID-19
pandemic showed us the human cost of secrecy, competition, and vaccine
nationalism. Artificial intelligence creates another urgent area for
cooperation. These technologies cannot be governed adequately by rival
military doctrines or private corporations seeking maximum profit. The two
countries must develop common safeguards against autonomous weapons,
destabilising cyberattacks, mass surveillance, and the use of artificial
intelligence to intensify social inequality.

Finally, the *fourth reality* is the question of war. China and the United
States are nuclear-armed powers. Any direct military conflict between them
would have consequences beyond calculation. This is why Taiwan must not be
transformed into the trigger for a catastrophic confrontation. The
one-China framework and the existing diplomatic understandings must not be
hollowed out by provocations, arms sales, or gestures designed for domestic
political theatre.

Peace requires restraint from both sides, but restraint cannot mean that
the United States surrounds China with military bases and warships and then
demands that China alone remain calm. Security cannot be achieved through
the permanent insecurity of another country. There will, of course, be
disagreements. Collaboration does not require agreement on every political
question. Nor does coexistence require silence about differences. But
disagreement must be conducted through diplomacy, international law, and
the institutions of the United Nations, not through sanctions, threats, and
military exercises.

The countries of the Global South have a particular interest in the success
of this visit. They do not want to be instructed to choose between China
and the United States. They do not want their ports, minerals,
telecommunications systems, and political institutions turned into
battlefields in a new cold war. They want access to finance, technology,
medicine, and markets without political subordination. They want
development, not recruitment into rival military camps. Xi Jinping’s visit
therefore carries a responsibility that extends far beyond Washington and
Beijing. The world does not need an agreement merely to divide markets
between Chinese and US corporations. It needs a commitment to reduce the
danger of war, dismantle unilateral coercive measures, restore normal
economic relations, cooperate on climate and public health, and strengthen
the principles of the United Nations Charter.

The importance of the visit lies not in ceremony but in possibility. It
offers both countries an opportunity to step back from the cliff. The
United States must abandon the fantasy that it can preserve its primacy by
preventing China’s development. China, for its part, has repeatedly said
that it does not seek to replace the United States as a hegemonic power.
That principle must become the basis of a durable relationship: no
containment, no domination, no war.

There is an old habit among powerful states of treating compromise as
weakness. In the nuclear age, the opposite is true. It takes no courage to
order another warship into contested waters. It takes political courage to
recognise that one’s adversary also has legitimate interests, that
coexistence requires reciprocity, and that the survival of humanity is more
important than the vanity of supremacy.

This visit should therefore carry a simple message from Washington to the
world: collaboration is not surrender, diplomacy is not weakness, and peace
is not an abstraction.

Confrontation offers neither country a future.

Collaboration offers the world a chance.

*This article was produced by Globetrotter
<https://us.list-manage.com/J9Dsy1XEogI?e=ab710e72ba&c2id=f321d43f53c84255b4c6e069654d6298>.
*

*Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research. His most recent book (with Grieve Chelwa) is How the
International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (from Inkani Books).*
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