【10.12.06 纽约时报】Delay in Korea Talks Is Sign of U.S.-China Tension

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BEIJING —President Obama and President Hu Jintao of China talked by telephone on Monday about North Korea, culminating 13 days of effort by the White House to persuade China’s leaders to discuss a crisis that many experts fear could escalate into military action.
Administration officials say they have no evidence Mr. Hu was ducking the call, which the Chinese knew would urge them to crack down on their unruly ally, a step Beijing clearly is highly reluctant to take amid a leadership succession in North Korea. White House officials insisted that the long delay was simply the result of scheduling problems.
But in Beijing, both Chinese and American officials and analysts have another explanation: the long silence epitomizes the speed with which relations between Washington and Beijing have plunged into a freeze. This year has witnessed the longest period of tension between the two capitals in a decade. And if anything, both sides appear to be hardening their positions.
“The issues that used to be on the positive side of the ledger are increasingly on the negative side of the ledger, starting with North Korea,” Bonnie Glaser, a China scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview last week. “I don’t think this is easily repairable, and I think we’re going to have a fairly cold relationship over the next two years, and potentially longer.”
Mr. Obama came into office seeking just the opposite: a new rapprochement with a rising power whose deep economic ties with the United States all but demand closer diplomatic ones. But the days when the White House spoke of a “G-2” that would manage the world economy and more, a phrase that preceded the first meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu in the depths of the financial crisis in early 2009, are long over.
Instead, he faces a problem very similar to the one Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described in March 2009 during a lunch with Kevin Rudd, a China expert who was then Australia’s prime minister, according to a cable recounting their conversation that was in a newly released trove of WikiLeaks documents.
Mrs. Clinton was said to have asked Mr. Rudd, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”‘
The latest bad sign is that cooperation on managing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, which began with considerable promise in 2009, appears to have disintegrated.
On Monday, Mrs. Clinton was scheduled to convene an emergency meeting in Washington with her Japanese and South Korean counterparts about both the North’s shelling of a South Korean island last month, and its recent disclosure of a new nuclear facility that potentially expands its nuclear arsenal. China, the only nation with real sway over the North Korean leadership, will not be there.
To the contrary, China’s strategy on North Korea is at odds with that of Washington and its allies. In Monday’s telephone call with Mr. Hu, the White House said, Mr. Obama said North Korea’s new enrichment facility flouted commitments it made during the six-party talks on curbing its nuclear program, and urged China’s help in sending “a clear message to North Korea that its provocations are unacceptable.”
One former Chinese official with close ties to the government dismissed the American approach last week as characteristically legalistic. The former official, who would not be named because he is not authorized to speak on the topic, said China’s strategy is to reassure the Koreans about their security, not lecture them about diplomatic obligations.
Indeed, China’s strongest public reaction to last month’s shelling of South Korea has not been to condemn the North, but to criticize Washington’s response — joint war games with South Korea that put the American carrier George Washington and its strike force in the Yellow Sea, off China’s borders.
After Mr. Obama’s national security team met last Tuesday night, administration officials began saying that the United States would conduct more military exercises near North Korea and China should the North engage in further provocations. It was an unmistakable message to Beijing that failing to rein in its ally would only increase an American military presence that China loathes.
But the lack of cooperation on North Korea only hints at the deterioration in the U.S.-China relationship.
In another leaked diplomatic cable, the American ambassador to Beijing, Jon Huntsman, wrote last January that the United States faced “a challenging year ahead” in relations with China, adding: “We need to find ways to keep the relationship positive.”
Instead, two successive meetings between Mr. Obama and China’s top leaders in recent months have yielded little change in China’s management of its currency. A China-based attack on Google computers early this year riveted attention on Beijing’s potential for cyberwar, and provoked nasty exchanges on the two nations’ concepts of free speech. In public and private, China bitterly accuses the United States of engineering the award in October of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, in an effort to undermine its government.

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And those are but lowlights of a year in which Chinese officials have railed loudly and publicly against what they consider to be American efforts to smother their rightful emergence on the global stage.
No outsiders can peer inside the black box where Chinese policies are made. But rumors abound that Beijing’s leadership decided in the last year that the United States’ faltering after the 2008 economic crisis had handed Beijing an opportunity to seize the global initiative.
“They feel the ball is at their feet,” one well-connected Chinese political analyst, who did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said in an interview. “The economic crisis was the main thing. China could really say ‘no’ to the U.S.”
By comparison, he said, Washington has little leverage over Chinese policies.
There are doubtless other factors at work. China’s domestic Internet is being bombarded by ardent nationalists whose sheer volume of comments may sway official policy. The government faces a difficult succession in 2012 — one in which the safe route for every contender for power is to hew to solidly pro-China ideology.
Nor are Americans ready to accept a world in which their top-dog status is at considerable risk.
“A lot of America hasn’t caught up with the fact that China now can say no more often,” said Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst of China’s leadership. “When you’ve got a 6-year-old and he throws a whiffle ball against a window and it bounces off harmlessly, nobody thinks anything of it.
“But when he’s older, and he throws a hardball, you’ve got a broken window.”
The difficulty in connecting Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu is reminiscent of the last moment of deep tension between the two countries in early 2001, after a Chinese fighter collided with an American spy plane trailing just off the Chinese coast, sending the American plane and its crew into an emergency landing on Chinese soil.
President George W. Bush spent more than a week trying to get his counterpart, Jiang Zemin, on the phone. The Chinese — clearly trying to sort out how to handle the crisis — declined to take the call until their internal debate was over. The American crew was eventually returned; the Chinese sent the plane back in a box, after disassembling and inspecting every component.
Several current and former American officials, as well as foreign diplomats, say they suspect that this time, the Chinese leadership is still debating how to balance its interest in propping up North Korea with their interest in preventing more incidents or another nuclear test, which would be North Korea’s third.
But the outside world may never know, particularly after candid discussions about North Korea between American and Chinese officials have been revealed in WikiLeaks documents.
“The Chinese don’t like talking about this stuff,” one senior American official put it two weeks ago, after the North revealed its new nuclear site. “And they certainly don’t like talking about it over the phone.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/world/asia/07china.html?pagewanted=2&ref=china

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