President Barack Obama meets with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in the Oval Office on March 12, 2009. Photo credit: White House

As China and the US continue to squabble over various and sundry issues, observers are still trying to read the tea leaves and figure out exactly what the future may hold for the two world superpowers: Is it another Cold War? Is it growing pains? Is it bi-polar disorder?

Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, wrote in The New York Times yesterday that the US and China are embarking on an entirely new relationship – but what that relationship might look like has yet to be determined. From the Chinese side, little beyond more self-confidence and assertion has changed their approach to the US. “But what of the United States?” he asked. “The fact that America has only just begun to wake up to the fact that it is in decline is a cause for serious concern. The United States is completely unprepared for what this might mean: that it can no longer assume a relationship of superiority with China, and that it has to seek a new understanding of China rather than expect the Chinese to continue to play second fiddle.”

Jacques also noted that China’s power is not military – it’s economic. And right now, that means it holds a good number of the cards.

Unlike Jacques, Minxin Pei, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, writing in The New York Times yesterday, does not see the recent back-and-forth between the two nations as evidence of America’s decline and China’s ascendency. Fears that the squabbling will erupt into a full-fledged rivalry are also unfounded, a point that both Jacques and Pei, agreed on, but Pei added that the two countries financial interdependence is what will keep them from locking horns in a more substantive way.

Fred Teng, Chief Executive Officer of NewsChina magazine and President of the Chinese Community Relations Council, wrote on The Huffington Post yesterday that President Barack Obama should be spending this time figuring out how to forge a constructive relationship with China – and that means not chancing a politically risky meeting with the Dalai Lama. Teng wrote that much of the US news media has focused on China’s increasingly aggressive stance toward America. “This perception,” he wrote, “is in many ways style over substance.” Beijing’s actual policy positions toward the US have not changed, but if the US’s “blundering” attempts to stand up to China continue, it might. And that would be less than helpful, for both nations.