< Is China a threat or an opportunity? Depends which Americans you ask

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As President Biden works out a strategy for China, we're taking a look at how different parts of the U.S. view China. In many sectors, China is a huge business opportunity. That's where Apple makes its phones and Nike stitches its shoes. U.S. farmers sell soybeans to China, and Wall Street invests billions. But inside the Washington Beltway, China is seen as the No. 1 security threat. NPR's John Ruwitch and Greg Myre report on these contrasting views and whether these competing notions can coexist. And we'll begin with Greg.

GREG MYRE, BYLINE: The view from D.C. is virtually unanimous.

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WILLIAM BURNS: An adversarial, predatory Chinese leadership poses our biggest geopolitical test.

AVRIL HAINES: China is a challenge to our security, to our prosperity, to our values.

LLOYD AUSTIN: ...Is really focused on our efforts to counter the challenge presented by China.

MYRE: That's CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin all expressing the Washington consensus on China. Their boss, President Biden, speaks of a competitive relationship when it comes to military might, political influence and the race for next-generation technology.

JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: It's often a very different view outside Washington. In the small southwestern Alabama town of Thomasville, the China threat has been more of a China opportunity. Sheldon Day is the town's mayor.

SHELDON DAY: I think you do have to compartmentalize. I think that's something that I've learned over the years, that even if you disagree with someone, if you walk away from the table, you're defeating any potential resolution.

RUWITCH: For years, Day watched Thomasville cycle through economic ups and downs. The town of around 4,000 residents relied for the most part on a single industry - timber.

DAY: Unfortunately, over the years in rural areas without good job growth, et cetera, the No. 1 export has been our children.

RUWITCH: He wanted that to stop. So to jumpstart the economy and create jobs, he looked outside the United States. A few years ago, Thomasville beat out dozens of other cities to woo an investment by Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group. It's a Chinese company that makes metal tubes that go into air conditioners and other machines. In 2014, Golden Dragon built a $120 million plant in Wilcox County next to Thomasville.

DAY: There was, even at that time, some stigma associated with recruitment and/or inviting a Chinese industry to come to your community.

RUWITCH: But that didn't bother Day. He went out of his way to make Golden Dragon feel welcome.

DAY: We said, look; let's make them honorary citizens of Alabama. So we had these real nice proclamations done by the state Senate.

RUWITCH: The Chinese executives ate it up. There have been cultural differences over the years, but Day says Golden Dragon has made good on all its promises. And the company has continued to invest in the community, creating hundreds of jobs.

DAY: I'm definitely somebody who tries to bring people together, who tries to look for ways to do business rather than the way not to. I do think that we would be - the whole world will be a better place if we sit and talk to each other more and do business with each other, break bread with each other.

MYRE: So a Chinese company making air conditioning parts in rural Alabama may not set off alarm bells in the national security community. But many are troubled when it comes to high-tech - think 5G wireless, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

GILMAN LOUIE: My job is to introduce the grey between the black and the white.

MYRE: Gilman Louie has a foot in two distinct camps - the Silicon Valley tech scene and the national security establishment. Louie, an American of Chinese ancestry, runs a big venture capital firm in San Francisco. He made a fortune in video games. He brought the iconic game Tetris to the U.S. in the 1980s. China is a huge market for him, yet he's also deeply involved in national security and often visits Washington. He was the first head of In-Q-Tel, the innovation arm of the U.S. intelligence community.

Louie plays devil's advocate on both coasts. In Washington, he tells national security types they can't just see China as a threat. He cites Chinese students researching cutting-edge technology at U.S. universities.

LOUIE: I think Washington needs more tools. If you had better analytics, if you had better tools and identified those as individuals rather than just having, you know, broad strokes - you know, if you were born in China, you are a national security threat; if you're ethnically Chinese, you're a national security threat.

MYRE: But when he's in Silicon Valley, Gilman Louie warns entrepreneurs about how China may be using their technology.

LOUIE: You guys got to open up your eyes. You have to understand where your technology is ending up. I mean, if your technology is ending up in things like facial recognition that will allow - right? - an authoritarian regime to pick off ethnic minorities - right? - do you really want, even as a brand, to be associated with that?

MYRE: Louie sees a complicated balancing act but thinks the U.S. can protect its most advanced technology and still do business with China.

LOUIE: Let's not use a sledgehammer to solve all of our problems, right? Let's be very careful in what we recommend, what we choose to look at and make sure that we are still providing the level of protection that our companies and our economy and military actually needs.

RUWITCH: In other parts of the country where the conversation is less about high-tech competition, they're all for a cooperative approach to China.

KENNETH QUINN: I think a great part of the Midwest would be very happy to, you know, business-trade-wise, get back to the way things were.

RUWITCH: Kenneth Quinn is a former U.S. ambassador now working with the Missouri-based United States Heartland China Association. The group is trying to build bridges between Middle America and China, promoting cooperation in agriculture, education and culture.

QUINN: OK, there's, you know, issues of human rights. There's issues of military presence in the South China Sea. But let's treat those separately in a different channel. We'll give them all the importance they deserve. But let's, over here, get together.

RUWITCH: The U.S. Heartland China Association represents 20 states, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, farm states. Earlier this year, it held a four-part roundtable with business leaders in agriculture. Quinn says there was a lot of enthusiasm, and ag is a bright spot in the relationship, something to build on.

QUINN: We bring people together to demonstrate that there's a lot of interest in doing this and that agriculture is kind of a safer place in which to take these steps.

MYRE: Meanwhile, the Biden White House is so far keeping many of the hard-line policies of former President Donald Trump. The administration is maintaining trade sanctions, flexing U.S. military muscle in the Pacific, and is critical of Beijing's human rights abuses. But economic decoupling between the U.S. and China will be very difficult. Elizabeth Larus is a professor and the author of "Politics And Society In Contemporary China."

ELIZABETH LARUS: You can't just, you know, pick up your factory and move all your resources and have a consistent, reliable energy source and the shipping ports, you know, to get your stuff out at a decent price and the logistics. China has nailed that down.

MYRE: And China's leader, Xi Jinping, uses this as leverage.

LARUS: One of the goals of the Xi Jinping regime is to make the world really reliant on China for its supply chain, but not to have China reliant on the rest of the world. So that makes it difficult for the businesses.

RUWITCH: The problem is, even as the trade friction continues, the world's two largest economies have no real choice other than to keep dealing with each other.

MYRE: And on questions of national security, the trend lines point toward a rivalry that's only growing more competitive. I'm Greg Myre.

RUWITCH: And I'm John Ruwitch.

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