From ‘love and hate’ to nationalism, can Xi and Trump rebalance ties?

As US President Donald Trump prepares for his first China trip in nearly a decade, Chinese scholars see an opportunity to steer ties away from confrontation and towards a managed coexistence.Speakers at a seminar hosted by the University of Hong Kong’s Centre on Contemporary China and the World last week were cautiously optimistic about prospects for the relationship.That was despite Washington’s strategic pullback, heightened sensitivities over the Taiwan Strait, and intensifying conflict in the Middle East.Da Wei, director of the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, argued that the “relative stability” in today’s US‑China relations was fundamentally different from the cycles of crisis and summit diplomacy seen under previous administrations.“I think the nature of the relationship has changed,” he said at the event on Friday.Da attributed that shift to the Trump administration’s “strategic retrenchment” which he said “basically ended the international liberalism which [Washington] had honoured for 80 years after World War II”.He said the world’s largest developed country and largest developing country had moved on from the “love and hate” partnership of the post-Cold War era, anchored by hyper-globalisation.