A first step for policy makers to find the middle way that so many business owners desire is to realize that radical uncoupling is not desirable or even feasible.

People walk under cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., the United States, on March 23, 2023. (Photo/Liu Jie, Xinhua)

New York - As relations between the United States and China sour, there is one important constituency keen on maintaining close trade ties -- small American companies across all 50 states, many of which have done business with China for decades and hope to be doing so decades from now, reported The Wire on Sunday.

"Owners and managers of such businesses -- none of them Fortune 500, or even 50,000 -- fret that no one in authority is trying to resolve the many areas of disagreement between the two countries, from the trade war, to the origins of COVID-19, to the future of TikTok," said the report.

"They seek reassurance that the bilateral relationship they've spent decades helping to build really is the world's most important, not the most threatened," it noted. "Such reassurance does not appear imminent."

These bosses overwhelmingly oppose decoupling, or even significantly reducing trade between the world's largest economies, according to the report. Their solution to the fraying relationship is instead to increase trade with due respect to matters of national security; and to keep working on their trade channels and people-to-people exchanges, while governments work harder on other, broader problems bedeviling the relationship.

"A first step for policy makers to find the middle way that so many business owners desire is to realize that radical uncoupling is not desirable or even feasible," it added.