Vox: 9 questions about China you were too embarrassed to ask

The last major area where Washington and Beijing generally see eye to eye is on climate policy. In 2014, after years of stalemate and more than nine months of negotiations, China and the US agreed to work together to tackle climate change. As the two largest carbon emitters in the world — responsible collectively for about 40 percent of emissions — their breakthrough helped set the framework for the landmark 2015 Paris agreement and helped convince other countries to join the global treaty to lower carbon emissions. (Trump has insisted that he will pull the US out of the Paris accord, but it’s unclear if he really will.)

In some spheres, differences between the US and China are a source of discomfort and criticism, but they aren’t grounds for considering each other enemies. The most obvious example of that is their sharply contrasting notions of political liberty; the US is a liberal democracy, while China has a one-party authoritarian state. “Our fundamental political values don’t align, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily a foe of ours. It means there may be limitations on our ability to trust each other,” says Julian Gewirtz, a Rhodes scholar studying Chinese history at Oxford University and the author of a new book on the history of China’s economy. Beijing does not take kindly to the way Washington criticizes it for its approach to human rights. [...]

China seems to have dialed back its cyberattacks recently. After the Justice Department’s indictment of five Chinese military hackers for stealing trade secrets in 2014 and a 2015 agreement between the US and China to refrain from hacking each other’s private sectors, the government and experts have said that China’s hacking operations appear to have declined. But analysts say they could pick up again at any point — something that seems entirely plausible if Trump keeps up his hawkish rhetoric on China. [...]

But China isn’t remotely close to achieving America’s standard of living. In 2014, GDP per capita in the US was around $55,000; in China, it was around $8,000. The US’s GDP per capita is seven times that in China, and that gap isn’t going to close any time soon.

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