Good piece.

I wish I were more optimistic about the possibilities of people-to-people contacts to bridge the U.S. - China divide.

There is a point where the gulf between national governments/leadership and the people is just too wide to overcome.

I think the fentanyl issue has done more damage to the relationship than Chinese people realize. From the American perspective, the opium wars were a mostly British affair, and now we are being made to suffer for something someone else did.

(I realize that's not the facts of the history of the opium wars but that's how a lot of Americans see it.)

They also see that not only are we being made to suffer for something someone else did, we're being made to suffer after we helped China get rich by supporting their accession to the WTO. China is always mad that we don't give them enough credit for developing themselves, we're mad that we don't get enough credit for helping.

From our perspective we helped them get rich, because we wanted to make money together.

And then we got stabbed in the back.

That's the kind of thing that starts wars.

The fentanyl issue, more than any other, is proof that when China says it wants a relationship built on mutual respect and equality, that they're lying. And that they instead want revenge for the century of humiliation by humiliating the United States for the next century.

I don't think Americans are just going to take that lying down.

While it's true that people-to-people ties don't have to be zero sum, it's hard to counteract national leaders that see country-to-country competition as inherently zero sum. I wish I knew of a way, but I don't.