Since its founding, the country has charted its own path based on socialism’s best practices. It needs to keep learning and improving.

President Xi Jinping has pointed out that the world we live in is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century.

By all appearances, the goal of anti-China hawks is to suppress the country’s rise and gain flexibility to interfere around the globe. But decoupling will only create a political and economic crisis.

Over the last four decades, China has integrated into global networks in trade, finance, data, and culture (encompassing social values, religion, and political beliefs). But, as the United States embraces protectionism, continued progress on global integration will require China to adjust its approach.

Since the 1970s, China-U.S. relations have been largely guided by the principle of “coordination.” Over the past ten years however, U.S. policy has grown increasingly aggressive, based on its primary objective that it not cede power or space to China in the current international system. As a result, a discourse of “struggle” has come to embody China’s U.S. policy, setting the stage for a century-long competition between established and rising powers.

The celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 will be an exuberant affair, involving glitzy cultural events, an extravagant state dinner attended by Chinese and foreign luminaries, and a grand military parade in Tiananmen Square. And, at a time of high tensions with US President Donald Trump’s administration, it will be imbued with an extra dose of patriotic enthusiasm. But while China has much to celebrate, it also has much work to do.

In the nineteenth century, the world was Europeanized. In the twentieth century, it was Americanized. Now, it is being Asianized – and much faster than you may think.

In the here and now of climate change, it is easy to lose sight of important signs of progress. China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is a case in point. By changing its economic model, shifting its sources of fuel, developing new transportation systems, and embracing eco-friendly urbanization, China’s sustainability strategy is an example of global leadership that the rest of the world should consider very carefully. In the rush to demonize China over trade, the West has missed this point altogether.

The growing anti-China sentiment in the United States is counterproductive to the trade relationship between the two countries. Americans must understand that this bilateral trade relationship is, in fact, beneficial to both nations.

The latest round of tariffs against China may be the blow that eventually knocks down an already wobbly American economy.