The China-US diplomatic and trade relations in the 21st century and the Cold War 2.0 fallacy

Alexandre Abdal () and Douglas Meira Ferreira ()

Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, 2025, vol. 45, issue 4, 658-680

Abstract: The present article assesses the Cold War 2.0 concept applied to the US-Chinarelations. Our main argument is that the Cold War analogy is a bad metaphor to analyze currentimpasses in the capitalistic world-system. To demonstrate that, a historical reconstructionof Sino-American diplomatic patterns is built. Trade data is also used to characterizecommercial relations between countries and other regions. Besides the increasing politicalanimosities growing in the last decade, what mainly characterizes the economic relationsamongst China and the US is a strong commercial integration with unequal trade patterns.Such strong commercial integration is a quite different scenario than that shown in the US--USSR relations during the Cold War Era. Current Sino-American relations were built upon50 years of diplomatic approximation since the Mao-Nixon encounter, named “Ping Pong”diplomacy, going through rough times after Tiananmen incidents, many Taiwan Strait crises,and the bombardment of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. After the consolidation of China’sincorporation in the global order, mainly distinguished by its acceptance in the WTO,China rose to an economic superpower status with a subsequent trade surplus with the USand other Western regions. JEL Classification: F55; F63; F68.

Keywords: Capitalistic world-economy; Cold War 2.0; US; China; Sino-American relations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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