Clockwise from top left; Daniel Rosen, Elizabeth Economy, Graham Allison, Susan Shirk, Andrew Erickson, and Jessica Chen Weiss. Illustrations by Lauren Crow and Kate Copeland.
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.)
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