Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
Good afternoon.
Welcome to the LSE Festival.
It's great to have all of you here with us.
My name's Peter Trubowitz.
I'm a professor of international relations and the director of the Phelan United States Center here at LSE that has organized tonight's roundtable discussion on the future of US-China relations.
So before I moved to LSE back in 2013, I taught at UT Austin.
where every summer I would take a group of about 25 UT students to Tsinghua University in Beijing for a crash course on US-China relations.
And those days today are wistfully referred to in Beijing as the golden years or the golden age in bilateral relations between the two countries.
for good reason,
because back then the prevailing view in both nations was that as their commitment to open markets and institutionalized cooperation deepened,
the bonds between them would grow stronger.
Now to be sure, there was no serious analyst on either side, I think,
that thought Sino-American relations would be free of...
competition and friction, I mean there was Taiwan's ambiguous status,
that remained an issue, there were disputes over currency,
international copyright, technology transfer,
that periodically disrupted what I think was kind of an era of more or less good feelings.
For the most part, Chinese scholars and analysts,