Simone Pieranni

Excited to publish a @nytimes guest essay with my @AsiaPolicy colleague Jing Qian arguing that more U.S. officials should visit China. Seeing the country’s industrial strength up close would sharpen Washington’s sense of just how formidable a competitor it is and, ideally, spur more lawmakers to take restoring American competitiveness at home seriously. "Washington needs to restore regular travel by American policymakers to China, which dropped sharply in recent years, just as the economic and geopolitical competition between the two countries has intensified. No American president has set foot in China since Mr. Trump did in 2017, during his first term. That absence highlights a simple but troubling truth: Americans talk incessantly about the need to compete with their country’s greatest rival and how to do it. Yet many U.S. policymakers have never been to China. U.S. officials are left grappling with an abstraction. This can lead to serious misjudgments, such as the escalating tariffs Mr. Trump imposed last year, expecting they would bring China to its knees. In the end, he retreated after Beijing showed it had the tools and capacity to push back. Seeing China up close — its manufacturing juggernaut, technological and innovative capacities, state-of-the-art infrastructure and state-fostered industrial ecosystems — would help prevent such miscalculations and hopefully lead to U.S. policy that is less complacent, less theatrical and more focused on what’s actually needed to revitalize American industry. ... Restoring regular travel to China will be neither simple nor risk-free. But the greater strategic danger lies in American policies that are based on stale assumptions, secondhand impressions and an incomplete understanding of what China is building."