On a cold Friday morning in late November, a group of nearly 30 academics, officials, and analysts — each of whom had spent their entire career working on the U.S.-China relationship — gathered in a nondescript conference room on the campus of Harvard University to discuss two big questions: how did everything go so wrong and how can it be fixed?

As Orville Schell — one of the event’s organizers and a kind of dean of the ‘China-watching’ community — said from the podium, “We are all feeling a little triste at the situation in which we find ourselves, because we all, almost everyone in this room it would be fair to say, are children of engagement.” 

Schell’s tone of melancholy hung over the day. Engagement, with its sense of freshness and optimism, once characterized U.S. and China relations; now the aim, as described by the title of the Harvard-hosted conference, is mere ‘Coexistence.’ (Watch the conference here.) 

For anyone hoping for a relationship reset, the day opened less than auspiciously. The event’s only speakers from China — two university professors — were due to join via Zoom at 8 AM, only for connection issues to cause a considerable delay. One audience member joked that the Chinese guests were probably laughing at the Americans’ “inability to get it together with technology.”

Those problems didn’t end when the Zoom started working. The two professors’ faces loomed strangely over the room, with one of them — Zha Daojiong, a political economy expert from Peking University — immediately challenging the conference’s framing: “I am a little concerned about what you mean by coexistence,” he said, arguing it harkened back to the Cold War with the Soviet Union. 

What would it be like if you had a president that you really didn’t like in the United States who was going to be there and you couldn’t get rid of him ever. What would you do?

Elizabeth Economy, senior advisor for China in the Commerce Department

After these hiccups, the morning’s agenda progressed with discussions of Xi Jinping’s move to install a roster of allies at the conclusion some weeks earlier at the 20th Party Congress, as well as President Biden’s recent meeting with the Chinese leader in Bali — an encounter that hinted at a slight improvement in relations between the two nations. 

The panelists analyzed everything from internal Chinese politics — described variously as “neo-totalitarian” and “schizophrenic” — to other Asian countries’ responses to China’s rise. Congressman Ed Case, the Hawaii Democrat, FaceTimed in from the floor of an airport to explain his work engaging with Pacific nations in response to a “ruthlessly practical” Chinese presence in the region. 

Such criticisms can often be heard at equivalent gatherings in Washington, D.C, where a more hawkish tone is common. But in Cambridge, many of the speakers and audience members seemed to be searching for an alternative route, one that acknowledges the complexities within the U.S.-China relationship and the value in trying to maintain ties. “Ninety-five percent of the China talk in this country, coming off the Hill and everywhere, frankly, is bonkers,” commented Daniel Rosen, the co-founder of Rhodium Group.

During one panel, Graham Allison, the former dean of Harvard Kennedy School of Government and whose book Destined for War predicts conflict between the world’s two largest economies, asked members of his panel whether they believed China wanted to be the foremost power in Asia (all four said yes). Allison’s follow-up question — inspired by a recent piece by one of the panelists, the Cornell scholar Jessica Chen Weiss — asked whether U.S. policy has become so caught up in competing with China that it fails to put forward an affirmative view (three largely agreed, one disagreed). The lone dissenter, Andrew Erickson, who teaches at the U.S. Naval War College, acknowledged it was a “sad state of affairs” but said he sees no real basis for cooperation between the two nations.

During lunch, the crowd chatted in a combination of Chinese and English about everything from mining investments in Latin America to decoupling — “it’s impossible!” one audience member declared with a chuckle, arguing the two economies were simply too interwoven. Afterwards, discussion turned to how wealthy Chinese people would respond to the increasingly authoritarian turn in Chinese politics. The conference took place before last week’s protests against Beijing’s zero-Covid policies took place across Chinese cities.

Elizabeth Economy, a longtime China scholar and now a senior advisor for China in the U.S. Commerce Department, predicted that some would decide to live a less public life, or perhaps more likely, move elsewhere. “What would it be like if you had a president that you really didn’t like in the United States who was going to be there and you couldn’t get rid of him ever,” she asked. “What would you do?”

One Chinese audience member, a Shanghai resident and retired businessman who was carrying around a library book titled Why Nations Fail, had a clear answer. He said that Shanghai’s brutal lockdown earlier this year was a turning point, and that he was now trying to find a way to move to the U.S.. In Boston to visit his daughter, who had just graduated from MIT, he said he was attending the conference to understand what experts were saying about Chinese politics.

In today’s PRC under Xi, I don’t think there is any equivalent to a high profile conference like ours today with a concluding panel on the subject of ‘Towards Coexistence 2.0: What Should China do?’

Andrew Erickson, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College

Throughout the day, there was a fair amount of nostalgia, both for a past time in the U.S.-China relationship and Chinese politics. Susan Shirk, a China scholar at University of California, San Diego and former U.S. government official, called Deng Xiaoping her “hero.” Melanie Hart, a U.S. State Department official, said: “A lot of us, myself included, have spent decades traveling to China, building relationships there, really investing in the U.S.-China relationship, and so it is really hard to see that relationship take a difficult turn.” 

On the sidelines, people asked each other when they had last been in China (for many, it was pre-Covid), and talked about the daunting task of getting back given the travel restrictions and quarantine now in place. Many worried about the impact, both on their own careers and the broader relationship, of not making those trips. 

“The ball keeps bouncing off the same walls now,” said Meg Rithmire, a Harvard Business School professor. “I keep saying the same things over and over again, because I don’t get access to anything new.” 

As the sun set and the event wound down, talk was supposed to turn to solutions, with a panel called “Towards Coexistence 2.0: What Should the U.S. Do?” But while many agreed that engagement, as it once existed, is no longer viable, how ‘coexistence’ works in practice remains, like the conference logo — two hands poised to clasp but still inches apart — just out of reach.

Perhaps the logo itself was misleading: Some at the Harvard gathering doubted whether China’s hand is really outstretched. As Erickson, from the U.S. Naval War College, put it, “In today’s PRC under Xi, I don’t think there is any equivalent to a high profile conference like ours today with a concluding panel on the subject of ‘Towards Coexistence 2.0: What Should China do?’”

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