Chinese President Hu Jintao will be in Washington next week for an official state visit. In advance of his meeting with President Obama, Douglas Paal details the expectations for the trip and the challenges ahead in U.S.-China relations.
Paal explains that the visit should allow both sides to move past a turbulent year in the relationship. While the conventional narrative holds that China has become more aggressive, Paal contends almost every incident in the last year was actually a Chinese overreaction to developing circumstances, rather than a proactive maneuver. Beijing seems to recognize the downsides of these strong responses—which reflected public opinion more than China’s long-term interests—and is sending reassuring signals that will hopefully set the tone for the summit.
- What are the major issues on the agenda for President Hu’s trip to Washington?
- What do both sides hope to take home from the meetings?
- Is there a growing rivalry between the United States and China?
- Will the leaders be able to reduce economic tensions on currency and trade?
- What is Washington doing to help resolve disputes between China and its neighbors in the South and East China Seas?
- How effectively have Beijing and Washington worked together to restrain North Korea’s provocative behavior?
- Is China's military modernization threatening U.S. power in Asia?
- Is China’s policy on the export of rare earth metals misunderstood?
- How is Chinese nationalism influencing Beijing's actions abroad?
- What actions do both countries need to take to maintain and improve bilateral relations?
What are the major issues on the agenda for President Hu’s trip to Washington?
This meeting comes after a rough year in U.S.-China relations. We’ve had tensions in the South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea; with North Korea; and over other issues including economics. This is a chance to pull things back together again and we’ve seen this opportunity developing over the last few months since the notion of a state visit was put on the agenda in September.
There have been visits back and forth to try to manage hot spots like North Korea. Progress has been made there as there is a cessation of the escalation in threats and counter threats on the peninsula—at least for the time being. There was a resumption of military-to-military dialogue and that will be completed and re-normalized with Secretary Gates’ visit to China this week. And China’s foreign minister was here last week to pave the way for the two presidents to talk.
The trip has symbolic importance as it will put to an end a period of disturbance in the relationship over the past year. But it has greater importance going forward. We are going into a key election year—not just for the United States, but also for Taiwan, Korea, and even in its own way for China, which has a selection process for its new political leadership in 2012. It’s going to be a difficult period to get through because every country has its own domestic political pressures and economic concerns.
The two presidents have a chance to set the main contours of the relationship going forward and to establish action-forcing events and exchanges of other high level officials. We pretty much know who the next Chinese president will be—Xi Jinping. But he is not very well known in the United States. It would be good for him to visit Washington for 10 days to let him have a look and get a measure of each other to get him somewhat invested in the relationship as well.
Also, Vice President Biden could go to China. And others in the successor generation of China’s leaders should come here over the next 18 months and take a little bit of skin in this game of U.S.-China relations and have a bit of ownership. That too will help us weather the natural tensions that arise in a big relationship between two very different countries like the United States and China.
What do both sides hope to take home from the meetings?
In the case of President Hu Jintao, it is his farewell visit to the United States. It will be a capstone of 10 years in office as president of China and general secretary of the party. For him, it’s a way of showing that he’s the master of the game; he’s set the future; he’s given guidance to his successor on how to proceed.
For President Obama, there is a lot of domestic play going on in the United States as the overreach of the first two years has now been offset by big Republican gains in the House and Senate. Obama has to work in a narrower set of constraints than before. I think he is going to discover that it’s a lot more fun being the foreign policy president than the domestic policy president.
Getting China right in his first term in office will be important for his re-election bid. Republicans will certainly beat him up if he seems to be weak on China, but they will also beat him up if he doesn’t handle China right. For him it’s a matter of finding the right elements to reinforce the positives in our relationship with China. By that I mean get them to help us on North Korea, Cambodia, South China Sea, Iran, etc.
And we’ve had some progress in a number of these areas. We also have a common interest in the global financial crisis and its aftermath and how to get both of our societies prospering again. The two presidents can reinforce their domestic messages with their international cooperation both bilaterally and within the G8 and the G20.
Is there a growing rivalry between the United States and China?
There are twin fears—Chinese fears of American containment and American fears that China is trying to knock the United States off its number one position. In both cases, these are journalistic or media frenzies and they get a lot of public support. And trips like this by President Hu are opportunities to send a contrary message about those fears.
It’s a simple thing for President Obama, during the course of this visit, to reiterate that the United States has no intention of containing China. Moreover, if you think China is being contained by the United States—where is the evidence? The United States has 130,000 Chinese students in America’s best universities. There is a trade imbalance that it would never permit to happen with an adversary like the Soviet Union or a wartime adversary. We have technology transfers, investment flows, and personnel flows. These are incompatible with the concept of containment. Moreover, if we ask the other countries around China to contain China, they would run for the exits.
On the other side of this, Americans need some reassurance that China understands that the international system within which China is now prospering is one that is worth preserving. China should not try to upset the apple cart because it feels that it is finally back on the world stage with a strong economy and an improving military position. The Chinese officially give the United States reassurances, but they do not do a lot of it in public.
In the last few years, China’s domestic media have multiplied without control from the top—except on very sensitive issues like Tibet, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. People have felt free to take swipes at the United States and say all sorts of things in that new and open media market. It is important for the Chinese leadership to provide counterbalance by saying some of the more sensible things that need to be said.
Will the leaders be able to reduce economic tensions on currency and trade?
Currency is part of the debate even though it is the wrong part of the debate to be had. It is like measuring your health by your toenail growth. We ought to be looking at the health of the whole patient.
China has an imbalance in its domestic growth strategy. It puts investment way ahead of any country in history. This, by its nature, forces other trading relationships into deficits. China needs to reduce the size of the delta of investment over consumption and eventually reverse it. But there is still a lot of the country to develop so it may be another ten or fifteen years before their investment and consumption lines cross over.
In the case of the United States, it has been on a spending and debt binge for too long and that needs to get under control. I am more optimistic that China, with its undemocratic system, will get to the point of changing their policy direction faster than the United States will with its democratic system.
We usually need three or four elections to get a big change in direction and China has the luxury of making a decision on a dime. This mismatch will be a source of tensions. And as the United States has had each election cycle, there will be people who want to blame China. Whether it’s the currency, or the investment pattern, or unfair market access practices—these will all be part of the debate. Again, this is something where leaders can do a lot to put this issue into context during the course of the coming summit.
What is Washington doing to help resolve disputes between China and its neighbors in the South and East China Seas?
The standard narrative is that China is more aggressive and assertive in recent times. But looking back over the year it occurs to me that actually almost every incident was something that happened to the Chinese to which they responded strongly. So it’s not really the case, in fact, that China is being assertive provocatively, but rather that China is reacting too strongly and too much in accord with public opinion as opposed to in accord with China’s long-term interests.
Toward the end of 2010, we saw some important indications from foreign policy officials in China that they recognize that the last year left a bad impression—not just on the United States but also on many of China’s neighbors—and it was caused by China’s failure to move quickly to cap the provocative behavior of North Korea. Plus there were other incidences that have occurred that caused the United States, its allies, and other friends in the region to grow closer—and that was not necessarily a Chinese objective.
So Chinese officials seem to be reconsidering now and trying to send more reassuring signals. And the summit should be a chance for them to make further reassurances and try to set the tone for the coming couple of years where both countries will be on tightly wound political springs and quick to respond to anything that happens. We need calm at the center of these two governments in order to deal with these negative impulses.
How effectively have Beijing and Washington worked together to restrain North Korea’s provocative behavior?
We had very poor cooperation in the first part of the year on North Korea. At the G20 summit in Toronto in June, President Obama used a press conference after his meeting with President Hu to say that the Chinese were willfully blind to the provocations that were coming out of North Korea.
More recently this past fall, North Korea—with its demonstration of enriched uranium facilities and its shelling of the Yeonpyeong Island south of the dividing line between North and South Korea—really went too far and even the Chinese couldn’t hide the trouble that was coming. I think the Obama administration used deft diplomacy, direct communication, and envoys to go to the Chinese and say, “Look, this is getting dangerous, seriously dangerous and it’s time to pull back.”
Now the Chinese haven’t told the American government that they pulled North Korea back, but the evidence to me is pretty clear that China has finally exercised the necessary influence. Will it last forever? Probably not, but we can use this period between now, the summit, and then thereafter to try to restart inter-Korean diplomacy to find a more constructive path to deal with North Korea’s threats and potential threats.
But that’s not a guarantee because the North has had many years of doing well by being bad, and we want to try to get them off that path.
Is China's military modernization threatening U.S. power in Asia?
China does have new naval capabilities that it has not had—by choice—for 600 years. They now have far-flung interests and investments and trading patterns and a reliance on overseas supply of commodities that they haven’t had for that time so China wants to protect those interests. So they’re building their navy up.
We have genuine differences over access by military vessels to exclusive economic zones. I think China’s wrong; China thinks the U.S. position is wrong, but we don’t have a mechanism for adjudicating this so diplomacy is needed to work our way through the conflicts over these issues.
The Chinese military is better, it’s more accurate, and its fire-power is larger, but it’s not up there with United States and won’t be for a long while to come.
The United States got into a bad position with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—I don’t think that’s a brilliant observation. But one of the good things about the last couple of years is that the Obama administration has conscientiously set out to rebalance our forces and to refocus attention on East Asia. We spent the decade of the 2000s really on counterterrorism and Iraq—a lot of money spent, a lot of time lost, a lot of inattention to other parts of the world. China walked all through Asia like a commanding presence because the United States wasn’t taking its share of responsibility for its own interests in that part of the world.
To its credit, the Obama’s administration—and I would have hoped a Republican administration would have as well—has rebalanced that and got its military forces back to the places they belong in East Asia. The United States has to upgrade some capabilities to match the changing military circumstances. These are not more expensive, these are less expensive. The rebalancing overall should not strain its ability to meet its military requirements to protect its interests. We’ve got other strains on our economy, but the military itself—with this kind of rebalancing—will get better effect for the money spent.
Is China’s policy on the export of rare earth metals misunderstood?
The rare earth issue has not been well understood in the public. I heard Ambassador Huntsman speak to this recently on a Charlie Rose interview, and I thought he handled it well. The public narrative isn’t quite right, but the fact is there is a rare earth shortage in the world and these are expensive products to produce, both in terms of money and in terms of environmental degradation.
China has given the United States a wake-up call. Much as we came to rely on the Chinese in the 1990s and, in a way, let go of our own productive capabilities because we could get it cheaper and faster from China, now there’s too big a demand for China to meet it. We need to reopen our facilities and that’s being done. Australian, Canadian, and other facilities need to be reopened as well to feed the world’s appetite for rare earths and all these new high-tech products.
How is Chinese nationalism influencing Beijing's actions abroad?
There’s an interesting debate going on in China about nationalism that isn’t yet reflected in the American media or even translated yet. Some very thoughtful people writing some very interesting articles about how China has let the anti-Tibetan feeling toward foreigners who protest about Tibet combine with pride over the Olympics, the Shanghai Exposition, and hosting the Asian Games. All of this triumphalism has sort of swelled up in China. And so now you have thoughtful Chinese now saying “this is getting out of hand, we’re getting too puffed up.”
There is also a legacy here. After the Tiananmen disaster in 1989, the Chinese embarked on a patriotic education campaign and kids who don’t remember 1989 do remember all those lessons they got about China’s humiliation at the hands of foreigners and how they should be more patriotic. And they’re now coming into adulthood, and so it’s to be expected that you see this kind of rise in China’s nationalism. The important question is now how do the leaders of China channel that energy?
What actions do both countries need to take to maintain and improve bilateral relations?
In government you look for action-forcing events. Bureaucracies don’t do things until they’re catalyzed to do so, and one of the best ways to move a bureaucracy, in either China or the United States, is to have leaders engaged in meeting with other leaders and wanting to come back with something to show for the meeting.
One alternative is to come back and say, “I sure showed them how tough I was.” But that’s not the prevailing mood and that would lead us in the wrong direction. So I think we’ll see a regular series of high-level visits between the two countries. That will do a lot to get the bureaucracies to grind toward outcomes that are more positive for each side’s interests.
China wants more technology transfer from the United States; it wants to be able to invest more in the United States. And the United States wants to have better market access in China, fewer technological constraints on our firms, and less loss in intellectual property. Some progress was made on that with the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade, which was more productive this time than ever before. This was undoubtedly because it came just before the summit and nobody wanted to have an unproductive Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade. So the idea is to get momentum going in the relationship through action-forcing events. There are also some big events coming up with the G20 meeting in France between the leaders, and they’ll meet again when the United States hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, notionally in Hawaii in November, with a whole gaggle of leaders from around the world coming together and trying to get the free trade agenda moving.
