From Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 to Barack Obama’s presidency in 2008–2016, relations between China and the United States were largely cordial, despite a few aberrations, like NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)’s bombardment of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the US-China Hainan plane collision incident in 2001. However, since 2018, US-China relations have deteriorated, and tensions have escalated due to trade, technology, and currency wars. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed bills supporting the Hong Kong protests and Taiwan, further exacerbating bilateral relations. As if tensions were not high enough, the sudden eruption of the Covid-19 pandemic in China and its spread to the US deepened the fissure between the two powers. In March 2019, China and the US fought tit-for-tat over journalists (Smith, 2020). In July, after China promulgated the Hong Kong Security Law, Trump ended Hong Kong’s special status. Diplomatic enmity reached a new high when both countries closed one of their consulates. On July 23, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, after repeated attacks and lambasting by Chinese state media as the ‘Common Human Enemy’ announced that the engagement policy started by Nixon had failed. In another speech, Pompeo called China the biggest threat to the US (Shesgreen 2020). Like Pompeo, Trump floated the idea of ‘decoupling’ the Chinese and American economies, a far cry from his stance just a few years earlier.

In 2020, Beijing launched a new, aggressive diplomatic campaign against the US, described by Western media as ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy. On March 21, 2021, top Chinese diplomats cited the US’s own human rights problems when they denounced the United States, at high-level China-US talks in Alaska, as ‘not qualified’ to lecture China on human rights. Washington also saw a sharp increase in 2021 of hostile responses to the Taiwan question from Beijing. The increased hostility in those statements included warnings that ‘China will “take all necessary measures” to safeguard its sovereignty and security’ (Dai and Luqiu 2021).