Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
Even small words matter in diplomacy. And with a brief true social post, the President donald trump He may have revealed his attitude towards America-China Relationship – To the happiness of prestige conscious people Beijing But China’s rising global power worries US allies.
“G2 will be held soon!” Trump wrote moments before heading into a widely watched summit with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping On October 30, in South Korea, a phrase was revived that dates back to the early 2000s but which had been rejected Washington At least for the past decade – including Trump’s first term.
The G2, or Group of Two, was first proposed by American economist C. Fred Bergsten in 2005 to reflect the need for the two major economies to talk to each other. This implies a balance of power between the two countries – something Beijing has long wanted as it has grown from a regional powerhouse to a significant global player.
But that balance, and how China might reach it, has raised fears among US allies and partners.
“The G2 concept implies that China and the United States are counterparts on the global stage and that their positions should be given equal importance,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow in China politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Trump’s use of the once-rejected term comes at a time when observers and analysts, including those advising Beijing, are beginning to understand his administration’s China policy, which has not yet been made clear by the more assertive Chinese government.
it is spreading
To understand the importance of this term beyond diplomatic circles, it is important to look at China’s past.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, even before its Communist government took power, China had objected to Western efforts to “contain” it. After World War II, “containment policy” became a common way to describe a strategy that the Chinese government felt was an institutionalized way to disarm and keep it in place.
Much of Chinese diplomacy in the early 2000s was critical of upending this pillar of the world order. Even today, China’s vaunted “Belt and Road” initiative is designed to combat the spread of Chinese influence and, to some extent, what is called containment.
In a weekend post, Trump described his “G2 meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping” as a great meeting for both countries, and wrote: “This meeting will lead to lasting peace and success. God bless both China and the United States!” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth repeated the words in an X-post after speaking to Chinese Defense Minister Dong Jun.
Mira Rapp-Hooper, a former Biden administration official, warned that Trump’s use of the term “could raise significant concerns in allied capitals, where allies fear the Trump administration will cut deals with China that could hurt them.”
The new emergence of the term has pleased Bergsten, who said he never intended the G2 to replace other multilateral groups or international organizations – such as the G7 or G20 – but rather to provide “necessary cooperation between the two major superpowers”.
“This doesn’t mean that the US and China are telling the rest of the world what to do, or trying to dictate to the rest of the world,” he said.
“I think (Trump) was using it as shorthand for the two largest, most important economies coming together to talk about the whole range of global economic issues,” Bergsten told The Associated Press on Friday. “So this is really, this is the vision I had 20 years ago when I proposed this concept.”
China reacts to the new G2
Chinese commentators immediately accepted Trump’s use of the G2 – and somewhat triumphantly.
Haosha Youguang, a blog account known for its nationalist leanings, commented, “Trump’s G2, to some extent, is that the US has accepted the reality that it no longer has a unipolar status quo, but wants to build a bipolar world with China.” “It means Europe is no longer important, let alone Japan or India.”
The day after Trump posted the comments, an Indian News Service journalist asked at the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s daily briefing whether the two countries were working to create a G2 grouping, which the journalist said could change the world order.
Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said the two countries “can jointly shoulder our responsibilities as major countries.” Guo followed Beijing’s statement that the country will “continue to practice true multilateralism” and “work for an equitable and orderly multipolar world.”
Zhao Minghao, a Chinese scholar on China-US relations, said that the new G2 “does not mean China and the US ruling the world together”, nor does it mean that cooperation will replace competition in bilateral relations.
“This means that the two countries will again examine the importance of China-US relations and be willing to do more communication and coordination,” Zhao wrote in an article published on Hong Kong news site hk01.com.
Washington has rejected the term in the past
Bergsten said he proposed the concept 20 years ago when China was rapidly emerging as an economic power and he believed it was necessary for the two countries – he predicted there would soon be only two economic superpowers – to come together “to get any kind of progress on international economic issues”.
The term was discussed and followed for a few years, but faded when China and the United States parted ways following the financial crisis.
Rapp-Hooper, who served as senior director for East Asia and Oceania at the National Security Council in the Biden administration, is now a partner at The Asia Group. He said the term became popular in the early years of the Obama administration. This, he said, came from some senior officials who thought that the two countries should define their relations through cooperation to solve global problems.
While China embraced the term, Washington denigrated it because it implied that the United States and China would make major global decisions without the presence of other American partners, especially its allies, he said.
“It’s a word that gets played very poorly in countries like Japan, Australia and India,” Rapp-Hooper said. “They have heard that the United States is deferring to Chinese priorities in Asia, possibly at the expense of their own interests.”
“There were real concerns in Asia about the way the actual G2 unfolded,” said Kurt Campbell, deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration.
Campbell, who now chairs the Asia group, said it was just not the perception that countries were making decisions that would affect the region. “This way China used this concept or idea to make other countries around them feel insecure.”
It’s a concept, he said, that has been “powerfully delegitimized.”