Deepening U.S. involvement with Taiwan represents a negative asset to U.S.-China relations, especially considering that in 1979, the Carter Administration acknowledged the P.R.C. as the sole legal Government of China. The U.S. should seize interference in the internal affairs of China and Taiwan, terminate arms sales to Taiwan and any form of official exchanges, and truly let people on both sides of the Strait settle their own political and military differences.

Compared with the 2010 National Security Strategy, the tone of U.S. policy toward China policy expressed more strategic concern on territorial disputes, military modernization, democracy and human rights, and cyber-security. Obama also has lambasted China for not “following the rules,” and China-U.S. relations could enter into a new stage of regular competition to define international rules.

It has been argued that China has benefitted from U.S. sanctions in Iran, and will lose out in the case of a U.S.-Iran détente. Yet hostility has already severely undermined China’s economic relations with Iran, and though China and the U.S. do share the same security concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, they have different ideas for solutions.

After years of fruitless efforts to prevent Iran from conducting any uranium enrichment, U.S. negotiators today join with their Chinese counterparts in seeking to contain, rather than eliminate, Iran’s nuclear weapons potential. However, while Chinese policy makers do not want Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, they oppose the use of military force or severe sanctions to prevent it. Richard Weitz highlights a China – U.S. competition for economic advantage in Iran, a dynamic that may define future talks.

Ramses Amer compares the diplomatic views and policies of the U.S. with those of China to shed light on the future their interaction. Wide differences exist in their justification for the use of force in inter-state relations; an unlikely but cooperative solution would be for the U.S. to conform more to the UN Charter and principle of non-interference, as China has.

The first Chinese space station outside of its territory will open in Argentina in 2016 – a logical place for a satellite communication station located on the opposite side of the globe as China. Notably, China and Argentina have strengthened bilateral relations over the past few years through increased trade and loans. While the U.S. has historically remained out of favor, this development has alerted some U.S. officials.

China’s controversial new anti-terrorism law would require foreign companies to install “backdoors” to give authorities remote access to computers and networks, and has been placed under review due to Western concerns. Since China still has to rely on foreign technology in the immediate future, the law might have been used to tell the United States government not to engage in what Beijing called “reckless behavior,” or to further expose U.S. hypocrisy in its own cyber espionage practices.

China’s new anti-terror laws are in response to changing transnational terrorist networks and are intended to designate agencies responsible for anti-terror activities while defining the obligations of the state, society, enterprises, and individual citizens. U.S. IT companies are concerned that increased security and oversight will affect business operations, but Fu Xiaoqiang reminds that this is not unseen in U.S. law either.

Much has been made about the explicit acknowledgement of cyber-warfare forces within the People’s Liberation Army. Yet these revelations are neither groundbreaking nor constitute a formal strategic doctrine for cyber or military applications of information technology in the event of war. More interesting is the insights it yields in what appears to be a comprehensive Chinese “whole nation” approach to conducting cyber war, something that experts have suspected for many years.

U.S. companies and leaders have criticized China’s new counter-terrorism law for its increased surveillance mechanisms. Yet, the U.S. government cannot claim the moral high ground when it blatantly violates the rights enshrined in its own constitution. A serious challenge to state surveillance will not come from other states; it must arise from China’s own citizenry.