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SEOUL, South Korea — When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday declared America’s solidarity with South Korea in its mounting confrontation with North Korea, she had more than a domestic audience in mind: she was also speaking to the Chinese.
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When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday declared America’s solidarity with South Korea in its mounting confrontation with North Korea, she had more than a domestic audience in mind: She was also speaking to the Chinese.
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SHANGHAI (AP) Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is heading to Beijing for high-level economic and strategic talks with Chinese leaders that will be dominated by efforts to win China’s …
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March 20 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. and Russia are close to finishing months of negotiations on a new agreement to cut their nuclear arsenals and may sign the accord next month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday in Moscow.
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US and China, locked in equal embrace | John Gittings: “

Obama’s trip comes at a time when the US needs China as much as China needs it – and neither nation can afford to let go

When President Obama arrives in Shanghai tomorrow he will be carrying the baggage of a relationship between communist China and capitalist America that dates back more than 60 years.

‘There is no such thing as America not intervening in China,’ Mao Zedong told a US diplomat in 1945 – and offered to fly to Washington to talk about the future with President Roosevelt. Mao’s proposal, made a year before the Chinese civil war in which the US backed Chiang Kai-shek’s rule, never reached Roosevelt. What might have happened if they had met is a fascinating counter-factual question of history.

After the communist victory in 1949, two decades of hostility ended with Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 when China became a useful ally for Washington against the Soviet Union. Since then the relationship has fluctuated but has always been seen on the Chinese side as essential – less consistently so by the US.

What is different today, and what takes the Obama administration into new territory, is that it is at last a relationship of equals: the US now needs China as much as China needs the US.

The contrast with the last presidential state visit to China, by Bill Clinton in 1998, is striking. That event was more show than substance, carefully choreographed to give the president a much-needed boost after the Monica Lewinsky affair. Clinton urged the virtues of democracy upon President Jiang Zemin and offered to act as a go-between for him and the Dalai Lama. It looked good at the time but the Tibetan offer came predictably to nothing and six months later Jiang launched a crackdown on the Chinese democracy movement.

Within another six months, the US air force bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, provoking a wave of genuine anger across China. George Bush, in his presidential campaign, would label China as a potential strategic threat, not as a partner.

It was the shock of 9/11 that gave China a grim golden chance to make itself more useful to the US (and target its own Muslim dissidents in Xinjiang province) by signing up to the war on terror. Yet in spite of Chinese entry into the World Trade Organisation, Beijing knew that the relationship remained less than equal: in the wry expression of a senior Chinese diplomat ‘we think it is better to remain number two’.

Today’s relationship occupies a completely different world in which there is talk of a Sino-US G2, and even suggestions that China might become No 1. The past rhetoric of both sides – ‘empty cannons’ as Chairman Mao once called them – seems dated. China is not going to make too much fuss about continued US arms sales to Taiwan (when was that island last in the headlines?). Human rights in China – never a huge concern to Washington (only a month after the Beijing massacre in 1989, a secret US envoy was sent to Beijing to maintain relations) – will be mentioned for form’s sake by Obama. But the priorities identified by Obama earlier this week are the only ones that really matter: ‘climate change, economic recovery, nuclear non-proliferation’.

The US says it seeks a ‘comprehensive partnership’ with China in what Jon Huntsman, new US ambassador to Beijing, calls ‘the most important bilateral relationship in the world’. This is music to the ears of Chinese foreign policy advisers in Beijing who have often worried about the underlying ‘inequality’ in US-China relations.

The presidents whom they advised, Jiang and now Hu Jintao, can privately tell internal critics that their long-term strategic policy of putting the relationship with the US first has paid off.

More openly, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has warned the US military establishment that China should be regarded as a partner, not an adversary.

Does China perhaps have the upper hand in this relationship, as it measures another 8% growth in GDP against the limping US economy? Hardly so, if we consider the real implication of the familiar statistic that China now holds $800bn in US Treasury bonds.

Obama may ask Beijing to revalue the Renminbi; Hu may ask Washington to ‘focus on its own financial deficit’, but the Chinese surplus rides on the American debt as if on the back of the Old Man of the Sea: neither can let go of the other.

And China’s extensive growth over almost two decades is not only unhealthily dependent on foreign markets, but has been bought at the expense of a deteriorating environment and a worsening rich-poor divide.

US presidential visits to China have always had a showbiz element – ever since Richard Nixon stood on the Great Wall and declared that it was truly a great wall. We may expect a wave of Obama-fever in the Chinese media: every tabloid paper – and there are a lot of them now – will want to have Michelle on the front page. Yet the widely read Huanqiu Bao (Global Times) says that the Obama visit ‘won’t shake the world’ and that most Chinese people have ‘neither strong concerns nor high expectations’. In a more equal Sino-US partnership, fewer heads may actually turn for the presidential motorcade.

Is China Ready to Be a Global Power? Or Headed Toward Collapse?: ”

For Global Times, David Shambaugh writes a piece asking, “Is China ready to be a global power?”:

President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, and US Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman have all made speeches this year calling on China to be a greater global partner of the US. More could be done by China in some of the aforementioned areas. With respect to the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, Beijing could use more of its influence and leverage behind the scenes to halt these programs.

Of course, Beijing is chronically adverse to using sanctions and other coercive measures, but it could still more clearly make the case to the governments in Pyongyang and Tehran that they will face ever-increasing international isolation unless they opt to trade their nuclear ambitions for normalizing their positions in regional and international affairs.

Then there is Afghanistan and Pakistan – two countries where China’s national security interests are directly affected and where the international community has a common mission to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban and bring stability and security to Afghanistan and the Pakistani border region. Yet where is China?

[...] The issue of China’s role in the global climate change negotiations is also an important opportunity for Beijing to show it is part of the solution and not just part to the problem.

Specific numbers on emissions caps need to be added to Hu Jintao’s positive speech to the UN in September, prior to the UN Climate Change Conference Copenhagen in December.

This is likely to be an issue high on the agenda in Obama’s discussions with Hu.

While Politico ponders, “Is China headed toward collapse?”:

But there’s a growing group of market professionals who see a different picture altogether. These self-styled China bears take the less popular view: that the much-vaunted Chinese economic miracle is nothing but a paper dragon. In fact, they argue that the Chinese have dangerously overheated their economy, building malls, luxury stores and infrastructure for which there is almost no demand, and that the entire system is teetering toward collapse.

A Chinese collapse, of course, would have profound effects on the United States, limiting China’s ability to buy U.S. debt and provoking unknown political changes inside the Chinese regime.

The China bears could be dismissed as a bunch of cranks and grumps except for one member of the group: hedge fund investor Jim Chanos.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009.