A NEW LOW IN USA-CHINA RELATIONSHIP

Relations between the U.S. and China, strained for years, have deteriorated at a rapid clip in recent months, leaving the two nations with fewer shared interests and a growing list of conflicts.

The Trump administration has moved to involve much of the U.S. government in a campaign that includes investigations, prosecutions and export restrictions. Nearly every cabinet and cabinet-level official either has adopted adversarial positions or jettisoned past cooperative programs with Beijing, an analysis of their policies showed.

Chinese officials, for their part, are following through on President Xi Jinping’s call last fall to resist anything they perceive as standing in the way of China’s rise. They have stepped up military activities in the contested in South China Sea and intimidation of Taiwan, a U.S. ally, and state media has issued extraordinary public denunciations of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The coronavirus pandemic has deepened the rancor, bringing relations between the two to a modern-day nadir. Both governments are forgoing cooperation and trying to outmaneuver each other to shape events in the post-pandemic world order.The general feeling in China is that the United States does not want China to stand up as a global power,” said Wang Jisi, president of Peking University’s Institute of International and Strategic Studies, in an online forum of U.S. and Chinese experts last month.

About two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of China, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 1,000 Americans conducted in March. That is the most negative assessment since Pew began asking the question in 2005, and a nearly 20 percentage point increase since the Trump administration began. Positive views of China’s Mr. Xi also are at new lows.Members of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign want to make his tough China policy a central issue. They believe it appeals to working-class supporters and ties his presumed Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, to what many in Washington characterize as the Obama administration’s more accommodating posture to Beijing.Mr. Trump has yet to fully endorse the tactic and withheld approval of an attack ad on Mr. Biden and China, according to people familiar with the matter. But the pandemic and its toll have hardened his thinking on China, these people said.  Mr. Trump said he is furious with China over the pandemic and the death it has brought. “It could have been stopped,” he said about the contagion. What he wants Mr. Xi to do, he said, “is what we’re doing—looking into the origins of it.”

Last month, U.S. intelligence officials said they are trying to determine whether the coronavirus may have escaped from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic began. Early this year, several of Mr. Trump’s political advisers inside and outside the campaign urged him to take on China more directly, which they argued would have bipartisan appeal. One idea they suggested was a special commission to investigate the origins of the virus and whether Beijing responded sufficiently to control the outbreak.

Mr. Trump twice declined suggestions from his team in January to press Mr. Xi for more transparency about the virus’s causes and symptoms, in one case saying that the criticism could cause Beijing to be less helpful, said White House officials.

Domestic pressures in both the U.S. and China are likely to aggravate the already strained relations. Supporters of Mr. Biden also have produced attack ads focused on China.

Mr. Xi, too, has faced criticism at home over the coronavirus, and his administration has sought to project a sense of strength in dealing with the U.S. as he tries to revitalize an economy stalled by the pandemic, manage high unemployment and quash persistent antigovernment unrest in Hong Kong.

U.S.-China relations have been in an uneasy state for more than a decade, with longstanding tensions over trade, allegations of Chinese technology theft and China’s more assertive military and foreign policy. Beijing has sought more aggressively to extend its global influence at the expense of a U.S., seen as weakened by the global financial crisis. After coming to power in late 2012, Mr. Xi accelerated the push, using China’s growing military capabilities and commercial might to persuade other nations to heed China’s interests. Weeks after taking office, Mr. Xi gave a closed-door speech to leading Communist Party members in the government, military and other bodies. Using the Soviet Union as an object lesson, he warned that the party must maintain ideological sway over society or risk collapsing and succumbing to the West.

While only a summary of the speech was published at the time, its views were elaborated in later talks and party documents and set China on a course to rival, rather than integrate with, the U.S.-led global order. Mr. Xi put tighter controls on speech, instituted new regulations on technology security and stepped up use of antimonopoly and other investigations.

Those moves alienated American business, a constituency which long provided a ballast to bilateral ties. While many U.S. business leaders had long favored a “grow together” policy with China, that optimism has turned to distrust, largely due to China’s aggressive focus on acquiring U.S. technology and its continued policies to limit foreigners’ access to its market.

When Mr. Trump won the election, he initially held back from some of his sharper campaign threats against Beijing to elicit its help in handling North Korea, which was accelerating its nuclear program, testing missiles and threatening war.

Around the one-year mark, the Trump administration became less compromising. Mr. Trump rejected market-access concessions from Beijing and began leveling tariffs, opening a trade war. A new National Security Strategy placed China, for the first time, beside Russia as disruptive rivals intent on challenging the U.S.-led order.

Views on China had hardened in the last years of the Obama administration as Mr. Xi consolidated his hold on power, but the White House sought to preserve areas of cooperation, chiefly on climate change and the global economy. By naming China as a threat, the Trump strategy marked a break with previous administrations. The State Department this year instructed all U.S. embassies around the world to form working groups to monitor China’s expanding influence and report back to help formulate counterstrategies, according to a person familiar with the effort.

The department appointed a special envoy early this year to counter what a spokeswoman called “the malign influences” of China and others at the United Nations and other international organizations. A first task for the envoy, along with other State and Commerce Department officials, was to thwart a China-backed candidate from becoming the head of the U.N. body that promotes protection of intellectual property.

China has responded in line with President Xi’s speech to up-and-coming Communist Party officials at its elite training academy last September. He called on the officials to “dare to struggle, and be good at fighting.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, Beijing has sent shipments of protective gear and other medical equipment to countries it is courting and mobilized its diplomatic corps to pressure recipients to make sure China receives praise. When the Trump administration accused the World Health Organization of covering up for China and froze funding that runs to hundreds of millions of dollars annually, Beijing stepped in with $30 million more. At home, party propaganda targeted Mr. Pompeo in unusually searing attacks directed at a senior U.S. political figure. In evening news bulletins, China Central Television called him a “public enemy of mankind” and “evil,” saying he smeared China over the coronavirus.