Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

With this year rapidly coming to a close, China, maintaining all strict precautionary measures to avoid a COVID-19 comeback, is seeing its economy gain reactivated impetus as 2021 approaches. Its state-of-the-art space technology has come to explosive fruition with the Chang'e-5 spacecraft bringing back two kilograms of Moon rocks and soil, which is precious to study the proponents of outer space and our living solar system. A lunar exploration base is expected to be built soon and more probes are set to fly to Mars and other planets.

Chinese advances in science and technology will not stop here, just as the country will keep solidifying and fortifying its unparalleled manufacturing capability and infrastructure investment level in the world - which together will ensure this nation will be always following a healthy and fast development path. 

The annual Central Economic Work Conference, which just concluded in Beijing over the weekend, set a new roadmap for China's growth, pivoting toward strategic breakthroughs in all fields of basic sciences and high technology, perfecting domestic supply lines and speeding up home market expansion, and at the same time, tilting the country's opening-up drive toward all countries that are friendly to China.

To add to the impending New Year's festivity, with just 10 days to go, Chinese people have lately been on shopping sprees, snapping up tropical fruits imported from Southeast Asia nations, olive oil and wines from Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal, French bags and perfumes, and big-item luxury cars imported from Germany and Japan. 

As early as May this year, China succeeded after taking decisive shutdown and quarantine moves which helped bring the sudden coronavirus outbreak under firm control. Since then, the country's trade volume with ASEAN, EU, South Korea, Japan, Russia, Persian Gulf, and many Latin American and African countries has boomed. 

As their biggest trading partner or second biggest, China's development in the coming 10 years will continue to provide solid a boost to their respective economies, creating job opportunities for their workers, and cushioning their people in a time of abrupt economic slowdown, a financial crisis or other distress. 

Our forefathers have taught us the philosophy that "kindness will be returned tenfold". China's massive Belt and Road Initiative is such an effort to assist friendly countries to first develop a launch pad of infrastructure which will help fellow economies to take off later.  

But there are still some politicians in this world that are determined to strike a discord note and want to pick up a fight.

After trumpeting the "America First" slogan over the past four long years and destroying the multilateral norms of trade, justice and country-to-country cooperation and respect, the outgoing Trump administration seems determined to create more troubles for its successor, the incoming administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Until today, after global leaders have all congratulated Biden's clear and decisive election victory, the world has not yet heard Trump concede to Biden.

Notorious for exiting international pacts and organizations, waging tariff wars and whipping up the other four smaller Five-Eye allies - Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand, to clash with China, Trump and his men obviously want the Biden team to follow the heels of his foul governance at home and abroad, and keep unchanged his confrontational domestic and foreign policy - a political legacy Trump aspires to rely on to get him to another "magic win" in 2024. 

On Friday, Trump's Commerce Department announced plans to place 60 more Chinese manufacturing firms, including top chip maker SMIC and drone maker DJI, on a trade blacklist, restricting US supplies to them, as seen when microchip supplies to Huawei, the world's top 5G technology innovator, were cut off earlier. Again citing the pretense of protecting US national security, Trump and other China hawks want to harass this country's technology progress and economic modernization. 

Last week, in an interview with Reuters, Trump's Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer advocated that the Biden administration shall keep high tariffs on $370 billion worth of imported Chinese goods as leverage on China - despite the trade war of the past two years having cost US importers and households $72 billion. Has the Trump administration's desire to drag down the US trade deficit materialized? No, it has actually shot up. 

Both Lighthizer and Trump's commerce secretary Wilbur Ross classified China as a "strategic adversary" of the US, like his secretary of state Mike Pompeo, another hardcore Chinese-hater who fanned xenophobic and racist hysteria against Chinese students studying in US colleges in a speech at Georgia Institute of Technology, earlier this month. To define the two countries as adversaries is very dangerous, making the world feel chilling, which also reflects the Trump team's vile character.

Apparently, Trump and his clan want to leave a highly confrontational mess of relationship for the Biden administration to clean up. Soon, it is up to Biden's team to decide what the next step will be in the interaction between the world's top economic powers. We hope the new Biden administration can sweep away the debris of the old ransacked house, and normalize the two countries' relations back to benign competition based on good-willed cooperation, while not cut-throat adversaries. The two powers should accommodate each other and bring good to the world. 

The author is an editor with the Global Times. bizopinion@globaltimes.com.cn