纽约时报 | 中美对抗只会令世界更加混乱

What I Learned Most From My Trip to China




There were a lot of raised eyebrows and quiet chuckles this month when President-elect Donald Trump invited President Xi Jinping to Washington for his inauguration. Foreign leaders don’t attend our inaugurations, of course, but I think Trump’s idea was actually a good one. Having just returned from a trip to China, I can tell you that if I were drawing a picture of relations between our two countries today, it would be two elephants looking at each other through a straw.
候任总统特朗普曾在本月邀请中国国家主席习近平来华盛顿参加自己的就职典礼，引起了许多人挑起眉毛，暗自发笑。当然，外国领导人是不会来美国参加总统就职典礼的，但我觉得特朗普这个想法其实不错。我不久前刚从中国回来，我可以告诉大家，如果叫我用一张图来描绘这两个国家如今的关系，那将是两头大象透过一根吸管互相对视。
    
That is not good. Because suddenly the U.S. and China have a lot more to talk about than just trade and Taiwan — and who’s the undisputed heavyweight champion of the 21st century.
那可不是好事。因为突然之间，美国和中国有了更多要讨论的东西，不仅是贸易和台湾议题，还有谁在21世纪的世界拥有无可争议的影响力等问题。
    
The world today faces three epochal challenges right now: runaway artificial intelligence, climate change and spreading disorder from collapsing states. The U.S. and China are the world’s A.I. superpowers. They are the world’s two leading carbon emitters. And they have the world’s two biggest naval forces, capable of projecting power globally. America and China are the only two powers, in other words, that together can offer any hope of managing superintelligence, superstorms and superempowered small groups of angry men in failed states — not to mention superviruses — at a time when the world has become superfused.
世界此时此刻面临着三个划时代的挑战：失控的人工智能、气候变化，以及从崩溃国家蔓延出来的混乱。美国和中国是世界上的人工智能超级大国。是世界两大碳排放国。两国的海军也是世界上最大的，都有在全球投射力量的能力。换句话说，美国和中国是仅有的两个超级大国，在世界已变得超级融合的时代，它们的合作能在管理超级智能、超级风暴，对付失败国家里拥有超级权力的一小群愤怒男人——更不用说对付超级病毒上，给世界带来希望。
    
Which is why we need an updated Shanghai Communiqué, the document that set out parameters for normalizing U.S.-China relations when Richard Nixon went to China and met Mao Zedong in 1972. Right now, unfortunately, we are denormalizing. Our two countries are drifting farther and farther apart at all levels. In the three decades I have been visiting Beijing and Shanghai, I had never felt what I felt on this trip — as if I were the only American in China.
这就是我们为什么需要更新上海《联合公报》的原因。尼克松总统1972年访华与毛泽东见面后签署的这份公报为中美关系正常化制定了的规范。不幸的是，我们现在正在让两国关系走向非正常化。两国正在各个层面拉开越来越大的距离。我30年来多次访问北京和上海，以前从未有过我在最近这次旅行中的感觉——似乎我是在中国唯一的美国人。
    
Of course I wasn’t, but the American accents you would usually hear at a big Shanghai train station or Beijing hotel lobby were notably absent. Chinese parents say that many families no longer want their kids to go to the U.S. for schooling, because they fear it’s becoming dangerous — the F.B.I. might follow them while they are in America, and their own government might suspect them when they return home. The same is now true for U.S. students in China. A professor in China who works with foreign students told me that some Americans don’t want to study there anymore for semesters abroad, in part because they don’t relish competing against superintense Chinese undergraduates and in part because, these days, having studied or worked in China can raise security suspicions with future potential U.S. employers.
我当然不是，但以前通常会在上海主要的火车站或北京的酒店大堂里听到的美国口音明显缺失。中国的父母们说，许多家庭不再想让孩子去美国留学，因为他们担心美国正在变得危险——联邦调查局特工可能会在孩子留美期间跟踪他们，学成回国后，自己的政府可能会怀疑他们。对目前在中国留学的美国学生来说也如此。一名与外国留学生打交道的中国教授告诉我，一些美国人选择在海外学习一个学期时不再想来中国，部分原因是他们不喜欢与优秀的中国本科生竞争，部分原因是，如今，在中国学习或工作的经历可能会引起未来的美国潜在雇主在国家安全方面的怀疑。
    
True, underneath all the talk of the new China-U.S. cold war, there are still over 270,000 Chinese students studying in America, according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, but there are now only about 1,100 American college students studying in China. That is down from around 15,000 a decade ago — but up from a few hundred in 2022, not long after Covid peaked. If these trends continue, where will the next generation of Chinese-speaking American scholars and diplomats come from and, similarly, Chinese who will understand America?
没错，尽管有许多关于中美新冷战的说法，但据美国驻华大使馆的数据，现在仍有逾27万名中国留学生在美国读书，但目前在中国学习的美国大学生只有约1100人，低于十年前的约1.5万人，但高于2022年的几百人，那是在新冠病毒大流行达到顶峰后不久。如果这种趋势持续下去的话，下一代会说中文的美国学者和外交官将从哪里来，同样，了解美国的中国人又将从哪里来？
“We must compete with China — as it is our strongest rival for global military, technology and economic power — but the complicated reality is we also need to work with China on climate change, fentanyl and other issues to create a more stable world,” the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, told me in Beijing. Therefore, “we need a cohort of young Americans who speak Mandarin and have friendships with young Chinese. We have to create room for people from both countries to connect. They are the ballast in the relationship. We used to have five million tourists going back and forth, and today it’s a fraction of that.”
“我们需要与中国竞争，因为中国是我们在全球军事、技术和经济实力方面最强有力的竞争对手——但复杂的现实是，我们也需要在气候变化、芬太尼和其他问题上与中国合作，以创造一个更加稳定的世界，”美国驻华大使尼古拉斯·伯恩斯在北京对我说。所以，“我们需要一批会说普通话、与中国年轻人交朋友的年轻美国人。我们需要为两国人民创造交流的空间。人民是两国关系的基础。两国之间以前曾有500万游客来往，现在只是这个数字的零头。”
Burns’s point is critical. It was the business communities, tourists and students who softened the steadily sharpening elbows between China and America as China overtook Russia as America’s chief global rival and the U.S.-China relationship tilted more toward outright confrontation than a balance between competition and collaboration. As that ballast steadily shrinks, the relationship is now increasingly being defined by just raw confrontation, leaving little room for collaboration.
伯恩斯的看法至关重要。随着中国取代俄罗斯成为美国在全球的主要竞争对手，美中关系更多倾向于直接对抗，而不是在竞争与合作之间寻找平衡，商业团体、游客和留学生是在这种时候缓和中美之间日益尖锐对抗的群体。随着这些交流变得越来越少，两国关系现已越来越多地由赤裸裸的对抗定义，合作空间所剩无几。
    
For his ambassador to China, Trump has picked David Perdue, who was a senator from Georgia from 2015 to 2021. Perdue is a competent guy who did business in East Asia before going to the Senate. But in a September 2024 essay in The Washington Examiner, he wrote of the Chinese Communist Party, “Through all my activity in China and the region, one thing became painfully clear: The C.C.P. firmly believes its rightful destiny is to reclaim its historical position as the hegemon of the world order — and convert the world to Marxism.”
特朗普提名戴维·珀杜为下任美国驻华大使，他曾在2015至2021年间担任佐治亚州的联邦参议员。珀杜是有能力的人，进入参议院之前曾在东亚做生意。但他于2024年9月发表在《华盛顿观察家报》的文章中这样写道：“通过我在中国和该地区的所有活动，一件事情已变得清晰无比：中国共产党坚信自己的正确使命是回归其世界秩序霸主的历史地位，让世界信奉马克思主义。”
Hmmm. I would not dispute the hegemon stuff, but “convert the world to Marxism”? Before he takes up his post, I hope Perdue will get briefed to understand that China today has a lot more Muskists — young people who want to be like Elon Musk — than Marxists. The Chinese are trying to beat us at our game, capitalism, not convert us to Marxism.
嗯。我对霸主的说法没有异议，但“让世界信奉马克思主义”？在珀杜上任前，我希望有人能向他介绍一下情况，让他了解如今的中国有更多马斯克主义者——那些想成为埃隆·马斯克的年轻人——而不是马克思主义者。中国人正试图在我们的游戏——搞资本主义上打败我们，而不是让我们信奉马克思主义。
    
Yes, the Chinese Communist Party is as tightly in control in China now as at any other time since the late 1980s. But it is communist in name only. The ideology it promotes is a combination of state-directed capitalism and wild cowboy capitalism, where scores of private and state-owned companies slug it out in survival-of-the-fittest contests across a range of high-tech industries to grow China’s middle class.
是的，中国共产党现在对中国的控制与20世纪80年代末以来的任何时候一样严密。但它的共产主义只是名义上的。中共推崇的意识形态是国家主导的资本主义与放荡牛仔的资本主义的结合，让数十家民营和国有企业在各种高技术行业进行适者生存的竞争，以壮大中国的中产阶级。
    

 
Even though Trump is often depicted in China as a China basher and “Tariff man,” I was struck by how many Chinese economic experts I spoke to suggested that China preferred dealing with him over Democrats. As David Daokui Li, the director of the Center for China in the World Economy at Tsinghua University and the author of “China’s World View,” pointed out to me: “Many people in China feel they understand Trump. They see him as Deng Xiaoping. Chinese relate to Trump because he thinks that economics is everything.”
尽管特朗普在中国经常被描绘成一个抨击中国的人和“关税人”，但给我留下深刻印象的是，我采访的许多中国经济专家都暗示，中国更愿意与他，而不是与民主党人打交道。正如清华大学中国与世界经济研究中心主任、《中国的世界观》一书的作者李稻葵向我指出的那样：“许多中国人觉得他们懂特朗普。他们把他看作邓小平。中国人懂特朗普是因为他认为经济是一切。”
Deng was the famously pragmatic, transactional, deal-making Chinese leader who forced open the Chinese economy to the world with the very un-Marxist motto about how China should leave behind Communist central planning and just opt for whatever works to create growth — or as he famously put it: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
邓小平是以务实、做买卖、做交易闻名的中国领导人，他强迫中国向世界开放了经济，为了让中国摆脱共产主义的计划经济，改为使用任何方法创造经济增长，他提出了非常不马克思主义的名言：“不管黑猫白猫，能抓老鼠就是好猫。”
None of this precludes great-power strategic competition between the U.S. and China — from cyberhacking to shadowing each other’s aircraft and naval ships. Whatever China is doing to us in those realms, I hope we are doing to them. But two great powers like the U.S. and China — which still rack up almost $600 billion in two-way trade annually (the U.S. imports about $430 billion from China and exports close to $150 billion) — also have a mutual self-interest to do other things. That brings me back to why it was right for Trump to try to break the mold and invite Xi to Washington.
所有这些都不排除中美之间的大国战略竞争——从网络黑客到监视对方的飞机和海军舰艇。我希望我们正在这些方面用中国对付我们的方式对付他们。但像美中这样的大国也有做其他事情的共同利益，这两个国家之间每年仍有近6000亿美元的双向贸易（美国从中国进口约4300亿美元的产品，出口近1500亿美元的产品）。这让我回到为什么特朗普试图打破常规，邀请习近平来华盛顿是正确的上来。
    
When I was in Shanghai this month, my colleague Keith Bradsher, the Times Beijing bureau chief, suggested we visit the Jin Jiang Hotel, where, on the evening of Feb. 27, 1972, Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai signed the Shanghai Communiqué, guiding the renewal of U.S.-China relations. In it, the U.S. acknowledged the view that there was one China — which was a concession to Beijing on the Taiwan issue — but asserted that any resolution of Taiwan’s future had to be peaceful, and the two sides also set out their goals for economic and people-to-people relations. The hall where that signing took place was adorned with faded photographs of Nixon and Zhou warmly toasting their new relationship. Looking at them today, I could only wonder: “Did that really happen?”
本月在上海时，我的同事、《纽约时报》北京分社社长柏凯斯建议我们去锦江饭店看看，尼克松和中国总理周恩来于1972年2月27日晚在那里签署了上海《联合公报》，为美中恢复关系提供了方向。美国在公报中承认了一个中国的观点——这是在台湾问题上向中国政府做出的让步——但美国坚持未来台湾问题的任何解决方案都必须是和平的，双方还制定了经济关系，以及民间关系方面的目标。举行签署仪式的大厅里挂着尼克松和周恩来热情举杯庆祝新关系的褪色照片。今天看到这些照片，我不禁想问：“那真的发生过吗？”
A new Shanghai Communiqué could help govern the new realities that both countries and the world face. The first is that U.S. and Chinese tech firms are racing toward artificial general intelligence; theirs is more focused on enhancing industrial production and surveillance and ours on a broad array of uses, from writing movie scripts to designing new drugs. Even if artificial general intelligence — a sentient machine — is five or seven years away, Beijing and Washington need to be collaborating on a set of rules that we will both use to govern A.I. and that the rest of the world must follow.
一份新的《上海公报》可以帮助管理中美两国及全球面临的新现实。第一个新现实：美国和中国的科技企业正在竞相发展通用人工智能。中国更专注于加强工业生产和监控，而美国则将其应用于从编写电影剧本到设计新药等更广泛的领域。即便通用人工智能——一种具有感知能力的机器——还需要五到七年才能实现，北京和华盛顿也需要合作制定一套规则，这套规则将由双方共同使用并为全球所遵守。
    
That would be to embed into all A.I. systems algorithms that ensure that the system cannot be used for destructive purposes by bad actors and cannot go off on its own to destroy the humans who built it.
这些规则应嵌入所有人工智能系统的算法中，以确保系统不会被恶意行为者用于破坏性目的，也不会自行行动，摧毁构建它的开发者。
    
In a little-noticed event, President Biden and Xi took the first steps toward building such a regime when they agreed at their recent Peru summit on a declaration stating that “the two leaders affirmed the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.” That means no decision to fire a nuclear weapon can be made by an A.I. bot alone. There always has to be a human in the loop.
美国总统拜登和中国国家主席习近平在最近的秘鲁峰会上迈出了建立这种机制的第一步，而这并未引起广泛关注。他们在宣言中表示，“在使用核武器的决策权方面，双方领导人确认需要对其保持人类控制权”。这意味着发射核武器不能由人工智能单独作出决定，必须有人类的参与。
    
U.S. officials told me that those 17 words took months to negotiate. They must not be the last when it comes to erecting guardrails around the use of A.I.
美国官员告诉我，这17个英文单词花了几个月的时间才谈妥。围绕人工智能的使用建立护栏，这一定不会是是最后一次相关讨论。
    
On managing climate change, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon and the U.S., the second largest, need to agree on a set of strategies to get the world to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 — to reduce the ruinous health, economic and extreme weather challenges wrought by climate change, which are going to create increasing disorder in failing states.
在气候变化管理方面，作为全球最大的两个碳排放国，中美需要就一系列策略达成一致，以确保到2050年全球实现净零碳排放，从而减少气候变化带来的毁灭性健康、经济和极端天气问题，这些挑战将导致越来越多的失败国家陷入越来越多的混乱。
    
As I tried to explain to my Chinese interlocutors on this trip: You think we are each other’s enemy. We might be, but we also now have a big common enemy, just as we did in 1972. Only this time it is not Russia. It’s disorder. More and more nation-states are falling apart — into disorder — and hemorrhaging their people as migrants scrambling to get to zones of order.
在此次中国行中，我试图向我的中国对话者解释：你们认为我们是彼此的敌人。或许我们是敌人，但我们现在也有一个共同的重大敌人，就像1972年一样。这次它不是俄罗斯，而是混乱。越来越多的国家正在分崩离析，陷入无序，并且由于移民争相涌向有序地区，这些国家也在大量流失人口。
    
It’s not only Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and Somalia in the Middle East racked by disorder; it’s also some of China’s best friends in the global south, like Venezuela and Zimbabwe and Myanmar. And more than a few participants in China’s Belt and Road Initiative to which China has lent billions are struggling — including Sri Lanka, Argentina, Kenya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Montenegro and Tanzania. Beijing is now starting to demand its money back from them and has throttled down new lending. But that is just making the crises worse in some of these countries.
不仅是利比亚、也门、苏丹、黎巴嫩、叙利亚和索马里这些深陷无序的中东国家，中国在全球南方的一些最亲密的盟友，比如委内瑞拉、津巴布韦和缅甸，也面临类似困境。而且，中国“一带一路”倡议中的多个参与国，包括斯里兰卡、阿根廷、肯尼亚、马来西亚、巴基斯坦、黑山和坦桑尼亚也在挣扎。中国现在开始要求这些国家偿还贷款，并减少新的贷款发放，但这只会加剧这些国家的危机。
    
Only the U.S. and China working together with the I.M.F. and World Bank will have the resources, power and influence to stem some of this disorder, which is why I repeatedly challenged my Chinese interlocutors: Why are you hanging around with losers like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Iran? How could you be neutral between Hamas and Israel?
只有中美与国际货币基金组织和世界银行合作，才有资源、实力和影响力来遏制这些无序局面。这也是为什么我多次向我的中国对话者提出质询：你们为什么要与普京领导的俄罗斯和伊朗这样的失败者为伍？你们怎么能在哈马斯和以色列之间保持中立？
China went from an impoverished isolated country to an industrial giant with a rising middle class in a world in which the rules of the game — on trade and geopolitics — were largely set by the United States after World War II for the benefit and stability of all.
中国从一个贫困、孤立的国家成长为一个工业巨头，拥有不断壮大的中产阶级，这是在“二战”后主要由美国为全人类的利益和稳定制定的游戏规则下实现的。
    
The idea that China can thrive in a world shaped by the values of a murderous thief like Putin, who is an agent of disorder, or by fundamentalist Iran, another promoter of disorder and the next country likely to fracture, or by the global south — or by China alone — is crazy.
认为中国能在凶残的小偷普京这样的“混乱代理人”，或原教旨主义伊朗这样的“混乱推动者”（下一个很可能会分崩离析的国家）的价值观塑造的世界中发展，或者依靠全球南方，甚至仅靠自身独立生存，都是异想天开。
    
If I were Trump, I’d explore a “Nixon goes to China” move — a rapprochement between the U.S. and China that totally isolates Russia and Iran. That’s how you end the Ukraine war, shrink Iran’s influence in the Middle East and defuse tensions with Beijing in one move. Trump is unpredictable enough to try it.
如果我是特朗普，我会考虑采取类似“尼克松访华”的举措——推动中美之间的和解，完全孤立俄罗斯和伊朗。单这一招就能结束乌克兰战争、削弱伊朗在中东影响力并缓和与北京的紧张关系。特朗普难以预测，也许他会尝试这么做。
    
Either way, China and America are compelled to work together if there is going to be a stable 21st century. If competition and collaboration give way entirely to confrontation, a disorderly 21st century awaits us both.
无论如何，如果希望21世纪稳定发展，中美必须共同合作。如果竞争与合作完全让位于对抗，那么中美双方都将面临一个混乱的21世纪。