Heading to America to bridge the gap in US-China relations

Wang Xiangwei is a senior visiting scholar (2026-27) at the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, Harvard Kennedy School, and a former editor-in-chief of the China-morning-post" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="12558" data-entity-type="organization">South China Morning Post.Before boarding my flight to Boston late last month, I spent the better part of three days doing something I never imagined I would do in more than 30 years of covering China: scrubbing my phone. Old emails, screenshots, WeChat threads that might be read the wrong way, anything that could be misconstrued in an airport interview room – all deleted, just in case.I was not being paranoid. I was following advice now routinely passed among Chinese travellers to the United States: carry a clean phone, or better yet, a burner. American officials, academics and business travellers headed into China have long been told the same thing. Two sets of citizens, one shared instinct – that what is on your phone could get you into trouble on the other side.As it turned out, my entry into the US was swift and unremarkable. No locked room, no confiscated devices, none of the horror stories that have circulated among Chinese academics in recent years. The gap between what I feared and what happened was, in miniature, what I have spent 35 years writing about: the gap between perception and reality in China-relations" class="entity-link entity-event" data-entity-id="110704" data-entity-type="event">US-China relations. It is also the reason I am here.