Time for new win-win ideas between China and US

By Zhang Xin (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-13 08:07

America should develop a "win-win" partnership with China because the countries need each other, the head of an American think tank said.

"America should break its conventional thinking in its economic and foreign policies to avoid conflicts and sustain the peace and prosperity," John Milligan-Whyte, from the Center for America-China Partnership, said in Beijing on Friday.

The center is the first American think tank to combine "America-centric" and "China-centric" perspectives.

Milligan-Whyte said the blueprint of a new framework aligning China's and America's economic success and national security was essential to transcend gaps in American and Chinese perception and communication.

"Only through reciprocal respect, reciprocal globalization, reciprocal solutions and collaborative equilibrium will the US and China create the collaboration of the American and Chinese civilizations and dissolve geopolitical problems", Milligan-Whyte also wrote in his newly published White Paper for the Presidents of America and China.

New US-China relations will not only benefit the US, they will prove "beneficial" to the rest of the world, which is particularly significant amid the global financial crisis, a worse crisis than that experienced in the 1930s.

America and China should therefore build a new partnership to seek reciprocal solutions, he said, noting the new administration of President Barack Obama is providing "a golden opportunity" to implement a rational foreign policy during a time of financial crisis.

Milligan-Whyte lauded China's "win-win thinking" as represented in its principles of peaceful coexistence, which he labeled as "China exceptionalism", with its counterpart of "American exceptionalism" represented by America's audacity of dream.

"America and China are undoubtedly mutually needed in cooperation in many areas," Milligan-Whyte said.

He said the 'China Threat' in the thinking of US policymakers is ungrounded, and peace and harmony should be cultivated in both country's foreign policy.

"(The) 'China Threat' now still in the thinking of many American decision-makers should be eliminated in the new thinking as defined by the new era," he said.