In an era marked by trust deficits at the national level, individual businesses have emerged as key vehicles for pragmatic coexistence. Their fundamental rationality may make them, under certain conditions, the only entities capable of maintaining equilibrium.
Five rounds of high-level economic and trade consultations have taken place between China and the United States, reflecting a cautious ongoing effort to stabilize their economic dialogue. At the APEC Summit in South Korea, the leaders of both nations offered renewed strategic guidance for the evolution of bilateral relations.
Amid these developments, the U.S.-China relationship has entered a stage of managed competition — a delicate equilibrium defined by the simultaneous presence of competition and engagement. The two powers are at the same time competitors and interlocutors, balancing confrontation with cooperation. While structural divergences in trade, technology and security continue to exist, both sides have come to recognize that full-scale confrontation is prohibitively costly, and that strategic competition does not equate to systemic rupture.
The central challenge now lies in finding a new equilibrium somewhere between risk prevention and pragmatic collaboration — a task that demands patience, strategic restraint and institutional imagination from both sides.
In this evolving great-power landscape, governments remain the principal architects of grand strategy, yet businesses continue to serve as vital agents of insight, adaptation and connectivity. Even at moments of high bilateral tension, enterprises have proved to be resilient and dynamic actors that sustain economic engagement.
Recent industry surveys paint a nuanced picture. The U.S.-China Business Council Member Survey 2025 found that a large majority of American companies (more than 80 percent) invest in China to serve its domestic market and regard their China operations as critical to global competitiveness. This reflects China’s density of supply-chain linkages, innovation clusters and sizable consumer base. Yet the USCBC also documented a drop in short-term investment intentions and growing mitigation strategies — such as supply-chain diversification — underscoring the fact strategic attachment to the Chinese market coexists with tactical retrenchment. For a cross-check from the corporate perspective, AmCham China’s 2025 Business Climate Survey yields similar findings of market importance amid rising caution.
For businesses, global competitiveness ultimately depends on access to markets and technology. China’s rapid expansion in green energy, artificial intelligence applications and digital consumption has rendered “decoupling” both costly and impractical. In this sense, corporations have become both buffers and bridges in U.S.-China relations, preserving a baseline of economic rationality and cooperation amid strategic rivalry and mutual dependence.
Yet, as the logic of national security increasingly permeates economic governance, the operating environment for multinational enterprises has narrowed considerably. Security has evolved from a political principle into a structural variable shaping investment and trade decisions. Whether in AI algorithms, advanced semiconductors or cross-border data flows, commercial activity is now infused with strategic sensitivity. The U.S., invoking national security, has tightened export controls, expanded investment screening and broadened the scope of “de-risking.” China is accelerating efforts to bolster indigenous innovation, strengthen supply chain resilience and build a more robust domestic circulation system.
This dual securitization dynamic is redefining the global industrial order. It has also created an unprecedented policy dilemma for transnational corporations, which must navigate a complex web of non-market constraints while maintaining competitiveness and compliance.
Under these conditions, the role of business contributions has not vanished, but it requires redefinition. Such contributions are not about transcending state policy but about finding balance within the constraints and creating cooperative spaces in a competitive environment. From a corporate vantage point, this structural contribution can manifest in three interrelated ways.
First, businesses can take the lead in low-sensitivity domains where cooperation remains feasible and mutually beneficial. Areas such as climate change mitigation, green finance, renewable energy and public health retain strong complementarities. Notably, the proposals of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China — released on Oct. 28 — for formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for national economic and social development prioritizes high-quality growth through green transition and technological innovation. This orientation provides a policy window for renewed U.S.-China collaboration in clean industries, digital infrastructure, low-carbon technologies and public health.
Second, companies can pursue risk redistribution through diversified supply chains. Strategies such as U.S.+ and China+, regionalized production networks, and the dual circulation framework represent adaptive, resilience-oriented responses to policy uncertainty. These approaches do not signify decoupling. Rather, they mark a pragmatic rebalancing between efficiency and security, allowing businesses to sustain cooperation with the U.S. and China while managing systemic risks exposure.
Third, at the institutional level, multinational businesses can foster greater alignment in governance standards and security norms. Through transparency, internal compliance and improved information disclosure, corporations can help governments establish a shared understanding of security boundaries. Such bottom-up institutional coordination is essential for rebuilding trust and predictability in the bilateral relationship.
As the global order continues to fragment, businesses may no longer be the sole engines of globalization, but their rationality, resilience and institutional innovation remain indispensable to the stability of U.S.-China relations. Their role is evolving from drivers of globalization to buffers of risk sustaining a minimal yet crucial level of mutual confidence between competition and cooperation.
For governments, businesses are not seen merely as economic entities but also as bridging assets that connect different systems and markets. Their role is not that of passive ballast in the bilateral relationship but that of an active architect in shaping constructive U.S.-China engagement. The path forward requires a framework of bounded openness, built on three pillars:
• Regulatory clarity and dialogue. Governments should define transparent security thresholds and establish predictable regulatory standards while maintaining institutionalized channels of communication.
• Multilateral and regional cooperation. Platforms such as APEC, the G20, and regional trade mechanisms should be leveraged to provide institutional support and risk coordination frameworks for businesses.
• Business-led innovation within safe boundaries. On the basis of transparency and compliance, businesses should be encouraged to explore new cooperative models within manageable risk thresholds.
The next phase of U.S.-China engagement will hinge more on the cumulative logic of enterprise-level adaptation. Businesses — through rationality, patience and innovation — can help preserve a measure of order within strategic competition.
Ultimately, in an era marked by a deficit of trust, businesses have emerged as key and credible architects of pragmatic coexistence in U.S.-China relations, and under certain conditions perhaps the only remaining peaceful forces capable of maintaining equilibrium.
