- While Beijing and Washington were inching closer on tariffs, they were swiftly moving apart over Xinjiang and Hong Kong
- The developments suggest the two countries are entering a dangerous period, with some moves reminiscent of the cold war, observers say
For a moment the focus was on progress. Top Chinese and US trade officials ended their meetings in Washington just over a week ago with an interim agreement to postpone increases in US tariffs on Chinese goods.
But despite the progress on trade war negotiations, US-China relations are rapidly unravelling and entering an intense and dangerous period, with escalating disputes in relation to human rights concerns over Hong Kong and Muslims in Xinjiang.
Observers from both countries have warned that bilateral ties are set on a collision course over a variety of conflicted fronts that go far beyond trade frictions.
Over the past two weeks, the US government and lawmakers have repeatedly used human rights issues to take aim at China.
On October 8, the US State and Commerce departments imposed visa restrictions on Chinese officials, a day after they blacklisted eight technology giants over their involvement in Beijing's "brutal suppression" of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
Then on Tuesday, as mass anti-government protests in Hong Kong stretch into a fifth month, the US House of Representatives threw its weight behind the protesters, approving unanimously the landmark Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.
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And while US President Donald Trump and Beijing have hailed progress in the on-and-off negotiations that had been held for more than a year, the US State Department took another unusual step on Wednesday, requiring US-based Chinese diplomats to give advance notice of meetings with American government officials and academics and think tanks.
Beijing-based international affairs expert Pang Zhongying said the manoeuvring was significant and similar to a previous era of hostility.
"The spiralling tensions and many measures recently adopted by both sides, such as the latest move on Chinese diplomats, are reminiscent in some ways of the cold war era," Pang said.
"Whether you like it or not, decoupling is already under way and Beijing is clearly aware of it. Top Chinese leaders and diplomats have often reiterated that the changes we are encountering in the world are unseen in a century, which apparently refers to the worst downturn spiral in the US-China relations in decades."
Orville Schell, Arthur Ross director of the Centre on US-China Relations at the New York-based Asia Society, also said bilateral ties were at a tipping point, with disagreements making the leap from trade and investment to infecting almost every aspect of the relationship.
"The Trump administration seems to be seeking to work with China on trade, but to oppose it on other questions where it sees inequities and a lack or reciprocity," Schell said.
"There is little doubt that Beijing views such a posture as duplicitous, but in fact the logic of the current relationship is that we will have to agree on some issues, compete on others, and be adversaries on still others. This is our new bilateral state of grace."
The timing of the visa ban and the trade blacklist also raised questions over whether it was part of a deliberate bid by the White House to pile pressure on and exact greater concessions from Beijing in the trade talks.
But Gal Luft, co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, said the two might not be related directly.
"The Trump administration is not known for its harmony and coordinated approach to policy so I don't think the events had much to do with the trade talks. That said, the administration has become obsessed with China bashing and hitting, and all of its organs are seeking ways to target China on any possible front," Luft said.
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That apparent lack of coordination was also noted by Zhu Feng, an American affairs specialist at Nanjing University, who said the series of measures targeting China on the eve of talks signalled that the various US government arms and agencies were not working in concert.
Zhu said the chaos in Trump's China policy reflected the broader state of China-US relations, which had entered the most dangerous period.
"With the bipartisan backing in the US for the extremely sensitive and inflammatory human rights and democracy bill, I don't think we have ever seen such an unprecedented hardline approach on Hong Kong," he said.
Gu Su, a political scientist at Nanjing University, said human rights had long been a irritant in bilateral ties, especially since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, and it was not the first time Washington had weaponised China's human rights record in its love-hate relations with Beijing.
In 1993, then-president Bill Clinton linked China's human rights violations with an annual review of Beijing's "most favoured nation" status, creating repeated diplomatic frictions between the two countries.
And while the Trump administration might consider rights-related issues an obstacle to advancing US foreign policy goals, it might be in a position to deny them.
"Although Trump may have little interest in rights issues, he will not stand in the way of bipartisan actions given the strong consensus across the US on human rights and China," Gu said.
Human rights diplomacy expert Katrin Kinzelbach, from the Friedrich Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, said the moves on Xinjiang were largely a belated response to very serious deteriorations in China's human rights situation.
"The most important explanation for these assertive steps is, in my view, the escalation of human rights abuse by the Chinese party-state," she said.
Kinzelbach said the escalation of abuse alone could not trigger such an assertive response in Washington without the human rights and democracy advocates and American politicians who lobbied for these decisions during a volatile and tense period in the US-China relationship.
But most observers said human rights was unlikely to become a consistent theme in White House policy towards China considering the Trump administration's uneven record in promoting the values internationally.
"The obsession with China's human rights while ignoring the misdeeds of worse violators makes one wonder if US concern for human rights is genuine," Luft said.
Chinese analysts said the US moves on human rights were not expected to make much difference to Beijing's domestic policies.
Additional reporting by Mimi Lau
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