US foolish to frame China rivalry as a clash of civilisations

America will not get support for pitting itself against ‘non-Caucasians’, but will for protecting international order, says Minxin Pei.

Late last month, at a security forum in Washington, Kiron Skinner, director of policy planning for the US Department of State, described today’s US-China conflict as “a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before”.

As a trial balloon, this apparent attempt to define the Donald Trump administration’s confrontation with China did not fly.