Both countries have financial problems that feed into social problems. As a totalitarian autocracy China may have the advantage. (the ghost of ca. 2009 Tom Friedman stirs)
From Semafor, September 26:
Before this week, the last time a US president greeted a foreign leader at Joint Base Andrews was when John F. Kennedy welcomed British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1962.
But that’s not the reason the image of US President Donald Trump waiting at the foot of the stairs of an Air China Boeing-747 to personally greet Chinese leader Xi Jinping is historic. Macmillan led a close American ally; Xi leads America’s paramount adversary. In rolling out the red carpet, Trump underscored how rapidly the balance of power in the relationship has shifted.
The turning point came last year, when China made the ultimate power move, threatening to choke off rare earths — and turn US factories dark — after Trump ramped up tariffs on Chinese goods to more than 140%.
Trump backed down, and at the time, Rush Doshi, a Georgetown University professor and former Biden administration official, wrote that China had proved itself to be a “true peer” of the US, unafraid to push back. Doshi’s take on the arrival ceremony, which also included a 21-gun salute and a flyover by B-1B bombers — far exceeding courtesies extended to Trump in Beijing in May — has been that China believes “they’ve basically tamed the United States.”....
....MUCH MORE
If interested here is Friedman's 2009 op-ed via the Wayback machine. The NYT website has gone through so many iterations that the correct URL is actually a bit difficult to find, even at the Internet Archive (many of the links are re-directs into the void).
