So, how does it not make sense for the American and Chinese presidents to meet face-to-face, one-on-one, once a year, for a couple of days set aside for just that? The risk-reward calculation for such a weekend retreat does not require an MBA. The downside would be that during difficult times the individuals would suppress their ire, and their aides would scramble to find sufficient common ground to announce a happy outcome.
The upside is that year after year, the two politicians who possess the most outsized influence on world peace and prosperity would sit together as humans and discuss their shared responsibilities and compare the array of burdens and rush of emergencies that disrupt their sleep.
People-to-people is what works best now in the U.S. China relationship. Chinese and American students are developing deep friendships as they study on each other's campuses. Business ties between American and Chinese companies -- and among employees who work together day to day -- are much more friendly and trusting than the headline disputes would lead you to believe.
Long gone are the days when elder statesmen and business luminaries could back-channel messages between the top leaders of each government when the relationship got off track. We already have some five dozen bilateral dialogues through which battalions of American and Chinese bureaucrats talk to each other about everything from climate change to industrial standards to intellectual property rights and human rights. The truth is that these meetings are increasingly serving as forums for people to talk past each other.
Since becoming Communist Party leader last fall, and China's president this spring, Xi Jinping has been increasingly talking about the U.S. and China forging a new kind of big power relationship. What that means has yet to be defined. But the broad strokes involve treating each other as equals. At the same time, some senior Chinese officials have been indicating to foreign visitors that China believes that current international institutions that stem from the post World War II Bretton Woods agreements, such as the World Bank and World Trade Organization, are considered so biased in favor of the West that China believes it may have to spearhead the creation of alternatives.
This is likely the motivation behind the announcement in March in South Africa when the BRICS nations -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- agreed to begin planning the establishment of a new development bank with each country putting $10 billion into the kitty. Some say this is an impossible endeavor given the size disparities, political differences and economic competition that exists between these countries. China is not one of the naysayers. A month later, the man who built the China Development Bank into a powerhouse, Chen Yuan, was assigned to lead China's effort to establish the BRICS bank.