Where do U.S.-China Relations stand?

Source: Larisa Epatko, PBS.

Over the past few weeks there have been a number of headline grabbing dust-ups in U.S.-China relations: the cyber-attacks on Google; China’s reaction to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan; President Barack Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama; disagreements over Iran’s nuclear program; and the debates over the value of China’s currency and climate change.

Author and lawyer Gordon Chang and Susan Shirk, director of the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and a professor of China and Pacific relations, help put these differences in the broader context of U.S.-China relations.

Do the recent disagreements between China and the United States represent bumps in the road or more of a breakdown of U.S.-China relations?

GORDON CHANG: These disagreements represent deeper tensions in the U.S.-China relationship. One of most important things to take note of is there are changes going on in the senior levels of the Chinese Communist Party, in terms of the way they see themselves and the way they see the world. China has really turned a corner at the top reaches of Beijing. Why have there been such changes in China? A lot of people point to an increase in nationalism and a new belief in the terminal decline of the United States. And inside the senior levels of the Communist Party there are differing points of view in regard to accommodating the United States. The real problem for us is that it coincides with a number of other trends [that don't benefit the United States].