【2010.04.08时代周刊】Hu's Visit: Finding a Way Forward on U.S.-China Relations

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【2010.04.08TIME】Hu's Visit: Finding a Way Forward on U.S.-China Relations

Photo-illustration by D.W. Pine



http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1978640,00.html

       One afternoon last fall, on an unusually humid day in Beijing, the center of the city was buzzing as teams of designers, soldiers and Communist Party officials finalized preparations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The event would be broadcast nationwide to one of those billion-person audiences only China can deliver. The party had planned a parade with fighter-jet flyovers, missiles that would roll along Eternal Peace Street and the once-a-decade ritual in which the top leader dons a Mao suit, stands in the open sunroof of a 1950s-style limousine and is driven past the Forbidden City — a moment that can seem quixotic to Westerners, as if the American President crossed the Delaware River wearing a tricorn hat every 10th anniversary of the winter of 1776. But the Chinese know that such symbols matter. Amid the uncertainty of reform, they sketch a confident line: Look where we came from. Look where we are going.

Party officials working on one element of the program, the nighttime fireworks display, had a particular request of the designers. China, they worried, is like many other nations — a place where the line between healthy patriotism and nationalism isn't apparent until you've stepped over it. They fretted that after a day of military adrenaline, a night of explosive percussion might be too much. So they asked, Would it be possible to arrange for a big, beautiful, calming fireworks display? (See pictures of U.S. Presidents in China.)

         Calming fireworks. It was the sort of request that tells a great deal about the charm and dangers of life in China. This is a country that runs on contradictions, whether it is the market socialism that now produces record economic growth or the plans for giant green cities, an idea that seems as likely as healthy cheeseburgers. This is a nation where party élites who have done well during the era of reform now complain ever more loudly about the ruling Communist Party. Split, ambitious, miraculous at times, but stretched on that line between past and future — this is China today, hoping for more explosive change without, well, an explosion.
As the past few months of unnerving tension between Beijing and Washington have reminded us, all this matters a great deal because of another of those mind-twisting ambitions China has: to rise to a position of great power without causing the international system to crumble. This seems unlikely. Few nations in history have managed such a feat. And to try it now, in our age of risk and surprise, where everything from financial markets to national security seems packed with the potential for detonation? It's hard to imagine such an adventure has much chance of success.

  So it is worth asking: Who, exactly, will President Barack Obama be looking at in Washington as he sits down with China's President Hu Jintao during the coming nuclear-security summit? A friend? An enemy? The fact is that China is changing so fast, we don't really know yet. What Obama will really be looking at is something far more important: the chance to use dynamic, creative statesmanship to remake a relationship that will define the next 50 years of global power. No problem of international politics can be solved without a coherent China strategy. So the more interesting question is not what is in Hu's mind but what is in Obama's. Does Obama have a clear sense of the man he is dealing with and how to shape the tense landscape of our relations? Does he understand the rules of power that might make real friendship with China possible — or lead to catastrophic deadlock? (See pictures of the mysterious life of Hu Jintao.)

       More than anything, Obama needs to replace our outdated ideas for dealing with China. Beijing can't, as many cold-warrior views of it might wish, be "contained"; it's far too interwoven into the global system for that. But it is also true that the fantasy some had of "engagement" — the hope that as China became richer, it would become more supportive of American interests — isn't working out either. What the U.S. needs is a new strategy. It should be one that takes a ruthless defense of American interests as a starting point, since without that, no strategy is sustainable. It must reflect a real understanding of the levers of power in Beijing and the psychology of the Communist Party leadership. And it has to unite us with our allies, both as a way of blunting China's instinct to play us off one another and because much of China's beef is with the West, not just with the U.S. This is a moment and a problem that demand an ambitious and confident solution. But they also demand something that may be harder for the U.S.: while China needs to change, so, in the face of a changing world, does America.
        What Obama will face as he sits with Hu is a choice between old ways of looking at the world and a new way of thinking about power. Nowhere will this emerging dynamic be clearer than in the links between the U.S. and China, the other great power of the age. We can think of what we face as a choice between polite stasis and co-evolution, between stalemate and a commitment to a mutually assured stability that can mark our future with China as clearly as mutually assured destruction once marked our ties to the Soviet Union.

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http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1978640-2,00.html
       Seeing China Clearly
       It would be comforting to think, as some of Obama's advisers do, that the tensions between China and the U.S. in recent months — the falling-out at the Copenhagen climate-change summit, angry words over Tibet, disagreement about the right way to handle Iran, the woes of U.S. companies in China and a rumbling unhappiness over China's mercantilism — can be passed over as normal strains. But no serious student of history would believe this. As China grows, as it scrapes against international norms and habits of a different era, the sparks won't stop coming from Beijing. Chinese cyberattacks, trade games, asymmetric-war experiments — all these are part of our future. They won't stop just because the Chinese are being friendlier this week. Nor will the fact that our actions, even ones intended to reassure China, will often unnerve it. We have to accept that tension with China is unavoidable and that removing tension is not a strategy. To be sure, a vision that aims for a concept of co-evolution with China will be harder in the short run. But it accepts that China is, like it or not, a defining power of our time and that the day has come for the U.S. to think in fresh ways about our global system. U.S.-China friendship sounds as impossible at the moment as calming fireworks. But decisions we make now, the way Obama and his team handle China as early as when they meet in Washington, may yet make it possible.

       It will be very difficult to make much progress with China if we don't see it more clearly. It has been tempting to look at China's process of reform and think that Deng Xiaoping's famous line "To get rich is glorious" might also mean "To get rich means to help America." This has happened in some areas, not least on Beijing's balance sheet, where to get rich has meant, frankly, to lend to an indebted U.S. But what is playing out with China is an expression of a debate that has been gathering force in Beijing: What sort of model should China follow? How should it construe its national interest? Can it trust the U.S.? This debate is electric, and it is inevitable in a nation facing such huge problems. The mood in Beijing isn't what you might expect from a nation that grew at some 9% in 2009. There is some arrogant chest slapping, to be sure, but it is mixed with plenty of exhausted eye rubbing. To sit with China's leaders as they ponder the enormous challenges facing them in financial markets, corruption, civilian-military relations, Tibet, Xinjiang and a dozen other areas is a reminder of the luxury Americans have to consider one problem like health care for a year. (See pictures of the making of modern China.)

      To many in Beijing, the U.S. looks weak. Chinese intellectuals often pair 9/11 with what they call 9/14 — the day news broke of Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse — as mileposts of Western decline. There is a sense of American haziness that is reinforced by the fact that our leaders have often shown only a rudimentary understanding of what we might call Real China — the harsh, smashmouth China familiar to anyone who works in its streets and corridors of power. This is the China that has grown for 30 years at an average rate of some 10% a year with no rule of law. It is a very different place from the polite, harmony-seeking Middle Kingdom many Westerners expect. Real China can baffle Westerners and confound them as easily in political negotiations as in the sort of commercial nightmares that are only too commonplace. This is part of the reason our diplomacy toward Beijing often falters, as if Alice in Wonderland were dropped into a Roller Derby match.

       Yet China's leaders aren't really spoiling for a fight with the U.S. They want good relations for now and generally feel that what China needs is time to face the challenges of development. You could spot this in the candid remarks made by Vice President Xi Jinping — front runner to become President in 2012 — during a trip to Mexico last year. "It seems there are some foreigners who've stuffed their bellies and don't have anything else to do but point fingers," he said. "First, China does not export revolution. Second, we're not exporting hunger or poverty. And third, we aren't making trouble for you. What else is there to say?" So leave us alone, he might have added. (See "China and the U.S.: Too Big to Fail.")

       But this is wishful thinking. China may not be exporting hunger or revolution. But making trouble? Nothing as big as China moves without pressing up against old ideas of power and stability. For most of the past 30 years, U.S. Presidents arrived in office bashing China and left praising it. Ties between the countries were cemented by a desire to balance the Soviet Union and, later, economic co-dependence. But these underlying forces have now been complicated. The growth of nationalism in China, American economic nervousness, China's changing economic model — all conspire against common interest.
Even if leaders on both sides want good ties, they may succumb to the acid test of any foreign policy: domestic support. To many in the U.S., Beijing's old line that China has never hurt the interests of the U.S. in the period since reform began no longer holds true. In the eyes of many, China is hurting America's interests every day: its mercantilism creates a sense of danger in the American economy, its antagonism to foreign firms damages U.S. investment, its lack of unqualified help on nuclear proliferation tests Washington's patience.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1978640-2,00.html#ixzz0l9P8KdlX

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To be fair, many Chinese feel the U.S. is mindfully hurting China's interests too: surrounding it with military bases, pressing for currency change, meddling in its internal affairs by selling arms to Taiwan and acknowledging the Dalai Lama. Even Western-oriented Chinese now aver that the U.S. wants to slow the country's rise. And many Chinese worry about what they see as the aimlessness of a weakened U.S. The Chinese want to like Obama, but they regard even his most prized initiatives, like the new U.S. posture on the use of nuclear arms, as a sign of weakness. (No Chinese leader would dial back the country's option for unlimited nuclear response in self-defense.) Mao's old line has become a trope in China: It's better to deal with Republicans.

But our problem with China isn't simply that we misunderstand each other. Mao used to say any problem could be divided into a "main problem" and "subsidiary problems." Our main problem is that China often feels only limited attachment to the power system that has evolved in the Western world. It has often been victimized by this system and has never felt the ownership over it that Western nations do. And of course China has centuries of native strategic culture that, overlaid with the neuralgia of Marxism, shapes its thinking. Calls for China to be a responsible stakeholder have failed not least because China is ambivalent about the international system as it's currently construed. Even if we could solve the laundry list of perplexities we confront — trade, currency, Tibet, Taiwan — the main problem would linger. So only a solution that functions at the strategic level offers any hope of a durable arrangement. (See five things the U.S. can learn from China.)

A mistake we often make in thinking about China is to ask, How does the West accommodate a rising China? This is sort of like asking, How do we fit a big and growing guy into the back of an already full car? It's a question to which any answer suggests expanding discomfort. And in the eyes of many in Beijing, the car isn't running so well anyway. Might it not be better, Chinese wonder, to redesign it? Some of the questions China has started asking about the world system are ones we should be asking too. This isn't to say we should give in to China's sometimes unreasonable demands. But we should admit that our real challenge isn't making room for China. It's thinking about the global system in a new way.

The Passive-Voice Era
It's probably not a surprise that China is a bit ambivalent about the Western world order. Its association with it, after all, began violently: the shock of the Opium Wars 170 years ago, a collision that led to what the Chinese think of as a century of humiliation during which nine foreign nations tromped through the country. Americans often ask why Chinese care so much about sovereignty. To which Chinese say, Come back and ask after you've been invaded by nine countries. (See "Could Obama Get Around China's 'Great Firewall'?")

Little wonder, then, to find most Chinese still very alive to sensations of weakness, whether inside or outside the country. This was surely the worry that the Chinese media fingered when they declared that the 2009 phrase of the year was beishidai, or "the passive-voice era." The phrase, state-run Xinhua news later explained, "is being employed by Chinese to express a sentiment deeper than just the passive voice: they are using it to convey a sense of helplessness in deciding one's own fate." There's a sharp edge to this phrase's popularity, since it was first used on Chinese blogs to describe court cases in which suspects were found to have committed suicide under unlikely conditions, probably killed by police or other inmates. Such a suspect was, police said, "suicided." And there are now many variations on the phrase, like bei hexie, which means "to be harmonized" (a critical take on Hu's vision of a harmonious society): "My website was harmonized" is a way of saying it was shut down.

Being done to. The phrase touches painfully on China's sense of worry on the global stage. And perhaps it also explains one of the most popular Internet stories of 2009 in China, about a young waitress who knifed a party official who tried to force himself on her. Here, Web surfers noted, was someone at least doing something back. China seems at times to have an instinctive need to stand up for itself that stretches beyond what cold reason might suggest. The term Chinese use to describe the desire to wash away a sense of national humiliation is xuechi, which suggests blotting out a stain as if you were covering it with falling snow. But it can also be translated as "avenge." It's an ambiguity that captures a question that no one really knows the answer to: What is China looking for, acceptance or revenge?

You can see the leadership trying to thread the passage between these extremes. Hu, for instance, has pivoted the nation's foreign policy away from older, slower-moving ideas like "Bide our time, get something done" and toward what are called the four strengths. China, Hu says, must deploy political influence, economic competitiveness, an attractive image and moral force in diplomacy. In so many words, Hu's strategy suggests, China must use what strength it can to make sure it isn't being done to again. It wouldn't let itself be done to at the climate-change summit in Copenhagen — and it's determined that it won't be done to in currency markets.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1978640-3,00.html#ixzz0l9StiO4N

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At least some of China's temptation to engage in conflict with the West comes from this sense of self-protection, from an intense debate about whether the West is really trying to welcome China or to do something to it yet again. One well-connected Chinese scholar wrote recently that even at the level of the Politburo, there had been intense fights about Hu's attending the Washington nuclear summit after what was seen as the U.S.'s "ruthless undermining of Chinese dignity." The West needs to remember that this excitability among internal forces emerges as a result of China's success and not always because of what we do or don't do. It's an instinct that won't disappear in the face of U.S. concessions or growing Chinese wealth. If the U.S. keeps waiting for China to get rich enough or developed enough to buy easily into the American model of the world, then it will wait forever.
A great deal of maturation still awaits China. We can't forget that it has only been really open to the world for 30 years under Communist rule. The country's basic tools of international affairs — like a robust national-security apparatus — are still under construction. And they have not yet been tested by crisis. China is ambitious, to be sure, but it is too insecure to be audacious yet. In the next 10 years, this will change. China will build a global-size foreign policy apparatus just as it has built stadiums and airports. But will this framework be crafted and staffed by people who understand the Western temperament and who see the virtue of cooperation? Or will it be handed to those who have won their positions by insisting that the West wants China to fail? And what about the West? What habits will guide us? (See five things the U.S. and China actually agree on.)
Co-Evolution: A Way Forward
In the winter of 1946, George Kennan, who was serving at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, found himself confined to bed with a brutal flu and confronted with another dense cable from Washington, proposing ideas that made no sense for the nation he saw around him. Summoning his energy, Kennan dictated an 8,000-word reply to Foggy Bottom, the Long Telegram that became the defining document of the Cold War. The Soviet Union, Kennan explained, looked at the world and sensed danger in every corner. Its reaction would be to seek expansion as a way to guarantee its security. And the solution he proposed became known as containment, the doctrine that dominated the next 50 years of policymaking.
China is not the Soviet Union. There's no Jade Curtain falling over Asia. And if Moscow sought security through expansion, China's leaders will take another path. Uneasy about collision and aware of their weakness, they are likely instead to manipulate and eventually reshape the international system. Such an indirect, slow route suits both the Chinese temperament and the nation's obsession with stability. It means trying to reshape the landscape around an opponent instead of colliding with it directly, to win battles before you need fight them. In terms of military strategy, this means that China will attempt to neutralize foreign technological advantage instead of matching it, attacking computers and satellites instead of ships and planes. And in terms of economics, it will mean using China's strengths to create an order that fits its needs rather than trying to dominate the order that stands now. (See pictures of President Obama visiting Asia.)
At first glance, this might look sinister. But the reality is that it is simply different and not yet necessarily good or bad. China could try to reshape the global order alongside the U.S., in ways that help by supporting American economic recovery, defining new norms on proliferation, cooperating on computer security. Or it could undermine the U.S. — and its allies — in each of these endeavors. Accepting this indeterminacy will be a real challenge. For it is possible to assemble the facts of what China is doing into different narratives. When a research institute in Sichuan publishes a piece on vulnerabilities in the U.S. electrical grid, for example, is it just academic curiosity or something darker? Is China's accumulation of U.S. debt a temporary quirk of the global economy or an expression of the ancient Chinese strategy of shangwu chouti — let your enemy get on the roof, then take the ladder away? It's very hard to know. Chance and the future and what we do now will determine whether China is with us or against us.
So working with China in a way that can protect our interests is less about direct confrontation of the sort we remember from the Cold War — when the U.S. knew it faced a very dangerous enemy — and more about what we might call co-evolution. The phrase comes from biology and describes how some species work together to become stronger over time. A textbook example is the hummingbird and certain flowers, which, scientists have found, have evolved together to serve each other's mutual needs. Think of the long beaks on the birds and the narrow funnels on the flowers.

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The struggles with China over the relative value of its currency capture this dynamic well. The renminbi — it means "the people's money" — is the place where China's control economy touches the free-market world. Just as tensions with the Soviet Union sharpened at places where systems collided, the same will be true of China: the renminbi is the new Berlin. It needs to be handled with appropriate sophistication by both sides, especially since it reveals a deeper tension. Chinese find it inconceivable that the dollar will be the only global reserve currency in 10 years; Americans find it inconceivable that it will not be.

Here's an example of where China wants to both secure its interests and avoid conflict. The real puzzle about China's currency isn't just the value of the renminbi. It is, rather, how open China will be to flows of money. China has three choices: it can remain unplugged from the global system, it can plug in gradually, or it can say, We're the largest developing country in the world and everyone wants to invest here, so we're going to make our own rules. This is the sort of challenge China will pose in many areas. It'll want to configure the system so it fits its needs — whether in relation to exchange rates, nuclear proliferation, how to handle North Korea or how to ensure that the benefits of information technology flow freely. In all these areas, we will need to find new global rules that don't isolate China. Beyond that, we need to ensure that real co-evolution gives China what it wants most: stability. (See pictures of Obama's diplomacy.)

It follows that any actions by China that threaten global stability have to be rebuked. The habit of trying to make China cooperate only by granting concessions has not worked. Co-evolution suggests a different approach. It acknowledges the importance of giving China a say in how the world develops but demands in exchange an absolute commitment to curtail activities that make it more dangerous. It's a case of saying to China, You're a partner in managing the global economy, but you can't then manipulate your currency to gain unfair trade advantages. Or: We'll respect your interests as we work together to reduce global tensions, but you've got to be with us when we try to confront those who foster instability.

Part of the reason co-evolution could work is that it puts China alongside the U.S. in thinking about these new rules. That won't be easy. The U.S. is used to telling the rest of the world what to do. It will require energetic diplomacy. Practically, one item on Obama's agenda this week should be starting to retire the forum we now use for engaging China — something called the Strategic and Economic Dialogue — which is sort of like an annual parent-teacher conference with China. The slow-moving dialogue drives issues at a pace largely irrelevant to what they demand and removes the chance for spontaneity. The U.S.-China joint reaction to the financial crisis is a better model: it was and is informal and constant, based on working groups that evolve and move at adjustable paces. Keeping this organized will demand a single figure in Washington who can handle every element of the discourse, and Obama should be considering this too. He needs someone who can play chess like the Chinese. (See "Why the China-U.S. Trade Dispute Is Heating Up.")

Our relations with China now offer a chance to do something enduring, historic and essential. But there's some urgency: Chinese who are friendly to the West are quick to point out that the leaders arriving in 2012 may be less inclined to cooperate with the U.S. and will sit atop a system packed with younger officials who are suspicious of America. Still, it is possible to imagine a way forward that balances U.S. interests against the need to change in the face of a changing world. It's a path that should be informed by remembering that our biggest risk with China isn't out-and-out war but rather a failure to cooperate on issues of a global scale — though that could be a tragedy almost as great as any war. China is not sure we're capable of this sort of transcendence. So with the patience of thousands of years of history and the urgency of a rising power, it is gathering the tools to protect itself.

And the U.S.? Will Obama sit with Hu prepared to develop fresh ways to defend what Americans care about? We have to hope so. If not, it's likely that the U.S. will soon discover that China is not the only nation in the world that needs to worry that it is about to be done to.

Ramo is the managing director of Kissinger Associates and author of The Age of the Unthinkable.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1978640-5,00.html#ixzz0l9XFjJSQ

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Crealm

Perfect ..