And the answer is: the US’ idealism, in hindsight, was unreasonable. The 40-year bilateral relationship was mostly a geopolitical game that China played brilliantly and won. And no one can take that victory away from Beijing without upsetting global peace and security.

Barshefsky even posited that embracing China and cutting the country some slack as it transformed its bloated and inefficient state-owned sector would also usher in the rule of law and greater respect for individual political rights.

But the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 was born of hatred of the US and all the Western countries that exploited China for more than a century. The Communist Party leveraged this hatred in extreme ways for more than two decades, and the China-US rapprochement didn’t completely stop it. China’s state-controlled media has since then only adjusted the flow of invective as a political tool.

This created an environment that was never going to welcome protection for Western companies or respect for Western values.

French thinker Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” – a set of dispositions that incline agents to act and react in certain ways – helps explain how the benefits of more trade and investment would not overcome resistance to the outcomes that Zoellick and Barshefsky thought they were engineering.

Bourdieu explicates in his landmark work Language and Symbolic Power how ideological inclinations become physiologically reflexive through linguistic tendencies and thought patterns. In particular, the idea of “political habitus”, which defines “the universe of what can be said and thought politically”, helps explain what compels an individual, and by extension an entire political culture, to cling to an ideology.

But China’s heavily censored media, on top of an educational system that ensures the teaching of what is in the Communist Party’s interests, strengthens the effect of the Chinese political habitus more than the US media and academia support the US political habitus.

This is not to say that bilateral accommodation is impossible or that a “hot war” between China and the US is inevitable. There are varying views within the highest levels of China’s government about whether it should broker a deal with the US.

It’s just that those advocating such a move can’t do so in public. And until they can, the 40th anniversary of Sino-US relations might coincide with their undoing.

Robert Delaney is the Post's US bureau chief