Tom Barnett's weekly column poses the challenge. Too bad we do not have a generation with some of our leaders educated in China. The US needs to invest more in educating some of our citizen in China so that this most important bilateral relationship will work well. Here's part of Barnett's column:
Here's both the challenge and the opportunity presented by these fifth-generation leaders: starting in the 1980s, many of them were educated right here in the United States - birthplace of today's market-driven globalization. Simply put, we have never a faced a more sophisticated set of Chinese rulers, who may well understand globalization's governing dynamics better than we do, as their economy is far more immediately subject to its powerful forces.
How America engages China's emerging elite in coming years could well determine - for good or ill - the lasting contours of the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century. Bind America and China together, and globalization cannot be derailed, but set them persistently at odds, and a worldwide economic crash becomes entirely plausible.
The scariest aspect to this relationship right now is that America's economic interdependency with China vastly outweighs the two nations' political and - more importantly - military connectivity.
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