For 40 years the U.S. worked to smoothly integrate China into the world. Today America has apparently given up on this plan and in any case at the end of the 90 days of truce agreed in the summit between American and Chinese presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, there will be no way back to the past “normality” of U.S.-China ties. The paradigm of the U.S. approach to China has radically changed.

This is the last step of something that begun long ago, possibly on April 1st 2001 (see here) when a U.S. surveillance plane crash landed on the Chinese Hainan island after an incident with a Chinese fighter. The truce presently agreed by U.S. and China will end exactly 18 years after that incident, and it is unclear whether the date was choice or a coincidence.

This is the deep result of the summit and a great blow the Chinese have suffered without even understanding it, as the Washington Post reports here and as we also had seen.

It is also gone forever the old lingering idea that China had been somehow lost to communism by U.S. mistakes and a new paradigm of perception is emerging that China is major distortion in the global economic and political system.

«Even if the tariff war recedes, the broader economic and political environment has shifted against giving China the benefit of the doubt as it develops, and there is no turning back the clock», reportedly said Claire Reade, a former U.S. trade negotiator now with Arnold & Porter, via email. «The major global issues created by China’s size combined with its distortive industrial policies are now out in the open».

Then either China radically changes in a little time, or many pieces will fall into a new place. Meanwhile, many foreign businesses are moving out of China and Beijing encourages Chinese industries to be more self-reliant.

Then whatever peace will be found in the future between America and China it will be on different basis than those of the past 40 years of engagement.