Lasting peaceful trade between China and the West will take patience, perseverance
 When China's Belt and Road infrastructure scheme was hatched in 2013, we all wished it well as the Chinese appeared to approach their final ascent into global normality and middle class life.
The shipping world had no quarrel with Belt and Road because what was good for trade was all that mattered. And if nothing else, Belt and Road was good for trade.
While its global reach was eye catching, and most intriguing to ocean carriers, that was not the focus of Belt and Road itself. It chiefly sought to install infrastructure, heavy infrastructure at that.
The idea seemed sound. By 2013, China's cash reserves were looking for something useful and remunerative to do. They knew how to build infrastructure and would lend money to sovereign borrowers to see that it was built.
Thus, the building of Kenya's Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) commenced in 2014, with construction led by China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC).
Taking the train from Wuhan to Shenzhen through the mountainous terrain in between one could not be but impressed with truly magnificent Chinese engineering.
If one was not barrelling through a mountain tunnel, one was soaring over a trestle bridge only to shoot through another tunnel. That rail line was built in 1997.
What the Chinese discovered along the Marco Polo overland route, which Chinese president Xi Jinping first thought of mimicking with his Belt and Road scheme, was that often a single tunnel or a bridge was all that was needed to get goods to market.
Yes, world markets made up the big picture, but there were many small markets to be exploited in between. This soon extended to microwave towers in the jungle, where wiring was hard to lay and harder to maintain where drone delivery became an increasingly available option as ecommerce took hold.
The world lives in the here and now and not in the there and when. Attitudes have changed. China has engaged in bullying the Philippines, flouting the Hague Court ruling denying its right to seize the Spratly and Paracel Islands as it did in 2014 in attempt to cast its own Monroe Doctrine over the South China Sea if not the entire eastern Pacific.
In short, Belt and Road no longer seems as benign as it once did. There has been talk of Chinese laying "debt traps" and both Malaysia and Pakistan and have scaled back on their Belt and Road involvement.
The game now, and for the next year or two, is one of "face-saving" rather than substantive concessions in trade. Or how one could camouflage whatever was given up or taken away in ways that did not seem hurtful to one's political base or to one's opponent's. Duplicity is part of the art of the deal.
It could be solved, or go a good distance to being solved, with a change in political leadership in the US and China - though equally that might cause even more trouble depending on who took over. But at least it would provide the opportunity for the new incumbent to blame his predecessor for the present state of affairs.
Perhaps, if both sides made it plain that their mission was to work, in the spirit of reciprocity, towards balanced trade, getting as close as one could making the process as open and as public as possible with televised panels to discuss important issues.
One difficulty is that China is addicted to secrecy, with as little messy public discussion as possible. Communism is essentially feminine in that it seeks order above all else and is no friend of free speech if it involves hearing an opposing point of view. All that should emerge in public is the settled view.
The United States, and related parliamentary democracies, resound with the great babble of debate, ranging from good sense to rank nonsense. But all must be heard in this masculine maelstrom of clashing viewpoints.
Moving from one to another is like moving from a yelping, yapping republic of dogs to a silent kingdom of cats. Barring a change in leadership at the top, the task will bring these two into equilibrium, or at least the appearance of having done so. This is difficult with Americans who demand the truth; the Chinese never had it and don't expect it.
Yet, entre nous, the Chinese need to export more than the Americans - indeed, the West as a whole - needs to import from China. China has re-established factories in Vietnam and undoubtedly elsewhere, so that the goods appear to come from a non-Chinese source to escape US punitive tariffs that amount to a de facto blockade.
American tariffs are designed to do several things. The highest hope is that they will induce US companies established overseas to come home and set up in the States providing much needed jobs.
The other purpose is to pull out by the roots the surviving features of the Marshall Plan, that post-war recovery scheme to put war-torn Europe of its feet again after the devastation of defeating of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But that plan morphed into an instrument of the Cold War in the 1950s and continued ever since, expanding well past the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But all remained in place. NATO did not rust away as many hoped and foreign aid dollars were still spent for strategic reasons when there was no longer a communist threat to strategize against. The real threat was that cost cutters would cut off the aid givers funds and someone might look askance at funding such things as lesbian dance classes in Burundi.
To restore equilibrium to trade China has to give up of much of its authority, not to mention its authoritarian nature, and which is at the heart and soul of Marxist principles.
It can no longer insist to have a Communist Party member on the board of every major foreign concern. It must ease data transmission rules so foreign concerns do not fear what they divulge to a foreign corporate headquarters as jailable espionage. China must respect private intellectual property rights. Nothing need be said publicly about such new arrangements, but breaches must be understood to come with an actionable poison pill reaction.
It won't be easy, but with perseverance and patience such outcomes are possible that may well to produce a win-win trade peace for all. The spirit of reciprocity is key.
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