New China-US ties promising_美文_趣味英语-查字典英语网

New China-US ties promising

I fully agree with Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng who said that "investment is an important area of China-US economic cooperation. It is a mutual concern of both parties, and both parties need to have creative thinking in order to create convenient conditions for the mutually beneficial cooperation between businesses of the two countries."

We will indeed need lots of creative thinking! Professor Graham Allison of Harvard has written about the historical pattern that he calls the Thucydides trap that rarely can a rising nation avoid war with the dominant power. He traces this back to ancient Greece when the historian Thucydides noted that Athens' rise stoked Sparta's fear that its dominance was threatened. The resulting 30-year war destroyed both civilizations in the process. And closer to our own time, since 1500 in 11 of 15 similar cases, war was also the result.

As the world's two most important countries, it is critical that both sides find as many ways as possible to keep lines of communication between them open. Why? Knowledge brings understanding. The lack of mutual understanding breeds suspicion, miscalculation, and both hot and cold wars.

I don't much care for the inapt description of our bilateral relations as a marriage (straight or otherwise). I think that we are more like Siamese twins joined together sharing common organs who cannot be separated without both perishing. In fact, we are in this together, and for the long-run at that.