The Chinese leadership thus would be gravely mistaken to treat climate change as a subsidiary issue, much less as a problem imposed on developing countries like China to impede their economic progress. China should take up Clinton’s call for collaboration on climate change, which could possibly become a paradigm-shifting issue in Sino-US relations, much as the united front against the Soviet Union did in 1972, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger went to China to begin normalizing relations.