U.S.-China rivalry dangers ‘over-securitization of just about every part,’ says Chinese strategist
The U.S.-China rivalry has produced an “over-securitization of just about every part,” a number one Chinese strategist mentioned Tuesday, including that the present second echoes the interval main as much as the Second World War.
“In technological innovation, the U.S. has many alternatives and must be extra assured in competing [with China],” Yu Tiejun, president of Peking University’s Institute of International and Strategic Studies, mentioned on the Asia New Vision Forum in Singapore on Sept. 29.
Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China warmed barely after Chinese President Xi’s visit to Washington final week, the place the 2 leaders inked a two-month extension to their bilateral commerce truce.
The delicate thaw is a welcome shift from a usually tense relationship between the globe’s two largest economies. Relations between Beijing and Washington have steadily worsened over the previous decade, with more and more harsh rhetoric and rising worries that one is making an attempt to suppress the opposite.
“Nowadays, there’s an over-securitization of just about every part: it feels just like the Thirties, with rising nationalism and populism between the completely different powers,” Yu mentioned.
Washington has little purpose to be concerned, he argued, due to the U.S.’s deep capital exchanges.
The high U.S. tech companies spent greater than $400 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, in contrast with simply $63 billion for Chinese tech companies, according to the Boston Consulting Group. Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s valuations additionally considerably outstrip these of DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and others.
Yu echoed Xi’s imaginative and prescient for an equal and orderly multipolar globe. “China needs to be a stabilizing pressure, [especially as] the U.S. and Russia—two of the globe’s greatest nations—are concerned in regional conflicts.”
Joseph Liow, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) and Yu’s fellow panelist, famous that each powers ought to discover alternatives to collaborate. “There are areas in expertise the place the U.S. and China can cooperate for the betterment of humanity,” he mentioned, pointing to AI governance and biotechnology as potential factors of collaboration. “The drawback is politics, mainly.”
‘A transferring goal’
Smaller nations, like these in Southeast Asia, are more and more compelled to choose between the U.S. and China. According to Liow, the hot button is to pursue strategic autonomy.
“Countries must have the house to pursue their very own pursuits in the way in which they see match,” he mentioned. “This isn’t about being unbiased from the remainder of the globe… however about managing their dependence on exterior powers such that these dependencies don’t turn into vulnerabilities.”
Southeast Asia’s financial system can be rising steadily. On Sept. 23, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) raised its growth forecasts for the area to 4.7% in 2026 and 4.9% in 2027. Yet, development throughout nations is uneven and regional integration stays tough, as every Southeast Asian nation has completely different nationwide pursuits.
ASEAN integration remains to be a “transferring goal,” Liow defined. “We can by no means [seem to] discover an endpoint.” (Singapore, which is ready to chair the bloc in 2027, has pledged to strengthen Southeast Asia’s centrality and unity.)
Southeast Asia may faucet broader regional coalitions just like the ASEAN+3 framework, which hyperlinks member states with China, Japan and South Korea, mentioned Yasuto Watanabe, director of the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO).
“The ASEAN+3 area has been utilizing a development mannequin which relies on openness and integration,” Watanabe concluded. “This is a strong development mannequin that will not be threatened by a single shock.”
