The timing of the Noda visit may well have been designed to set the stage for the U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, to occur this week in Beijing with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner leading a 200-strong U.S. delegation.

The U.S. “pivot” or “rebalancing” to Asia is a major concern in China, and U.S. leaders may have sought to reassure Japan that it is still a centerpiece of U.S. strategy in Asia and the Pacific.

If all had gone as planned, the administration could have enjoyed an Asia-focused news cycle all week, as the Japanese leader visited, followed by the meetings in Beijing.

But in the last days of preparation for the Japan summit, the U.S. government was confronted by a much more high-profile challenge: the escape of Chen Guangcheng a well known blind activist from extrajudicial house arrest, and his apparent flight to the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

As it happens, the first question for Obama in the Noda–Obama press conference was about Chen, not about Japan (though the reporter also asked Noda about Japan’s response to a potential North Korean nuclear test).

[Obama acknowledged he's aware of "press reports" on the Chen case, but wouldn't make a statement except to say the U.S. government always brings up human rights in its meetings with China.]

A lesser-known disappointment for some about the U.S.–Japan meeting is that it did not include an announcement that Japan would join the eight countries (including the United States) currently negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement that does not include China but does include other East Asian countries.

There is significant opposition to the TPP overall, mostly over its intellectual property measures that some view as a rehash of the SOPA/PIPA fight and over a perceived lack of transparency in the negotiations. But the greater opposition to the specific question of Japanese participation comes from sectors in Japan that would lose some existing trade protections, and from the U.S. auto industry.

In their White House statement, both leaders mentioned that TPP talks would continue, but the issue lies largely unresolved. Meanwhile, the U.S.–Japan relationship still spends time on the disposition of the U.S. base at Futenma, the challenge of North Korea, and rather generalized concerns about China.

Too little understanding of how the Chinese political system actually functions also leads easily to Americans’ viewing Chinese decision making as strategic, coordinated, and disciplined. Disparate conflicting outcomes produced by the relatively uncoordinated initiatives of different ministries, enterprises, and localities are therefore often seen as part of a seamless web of Politbuto Standing Committee policy designed to confuse and deceive American policy makers.

Lieberthal is in a sense offering a think tank–style version of a much older insight that came to be known as the “fragmented authoritarianism” model. Nonetheless, presented here as part of an account of U.S.–China distrust, the message that U.S. leaders misunderstand Chinese political processes is important.

However, U.S. policy makers are not uniquely responsible, according to Lieberthal: “The Chinese system takes particular care to conceal its core political processes—such as selection of top leaders and civil-military interactions—from outside view.” Indeed, the lack of mutual understanding between the U.S. and Chinese governments is at times extraordinary.

I find the rest of the paper interesting, if not especially ground-breaking. Co-written with Wang (each author writing from the perspective of his government, and then co-writing the analysis), the Brookings paper has been touted by The New York Times as a “Rare Glimpse of U.S.-China Frictions.”

One thing that persists through the paper—though it includes some good ideas about potential for increased mutual trust—is that it stubbornly sticks to a rhetoric and vocabulary of “U.S. interests” and “Chinese interests.” This interests framework is terribly limiting: It fails to capture the entanglement and integration of the two countries’ economic, security, environmental, and political lives. Moreover, it buys the realist international relations conceit of self-same nation-states that possess characteristics like power and interests without internal differentiation or fundamental diversity.

As the paper argues, people in both countries would do better to think carefully about precisely who is doing what in the other country. The authors argue for more subtlety while using the language of simplicity. For a Brookings report (as opposed to for instance an academic conference paper), it’s perhaps hard to push a new way of thinking about “our nation,” but consider this:

Who do the so-called U.S. interests really represent, as practiced at the top of government? Has U.S. democracy been successful in aggregating, harmonizing, and empowering the collective interests of all citizens, or is it more likely that certain groups are being served more directly by U.S. foreign policy? How about in China: What precisely does a “Chinese interest” mean? As the report notes, various parts of the government don’t always act in coordination—so why should we expect interests to be more coherent than actions?

This is not a new argument, and indeed Lieberthal’s work helped introduce me to the notion of disaggregating the Chinese state for analysis, but it bears mentioning that even a paper about misperception and distrust falls into the old patterns of oversimplification. If there’s one message I’d like to pass across the trust divide here, it’s that we’re all baffled by the complexity. U.S. leaders are never sure what’s going to happen next at other levels of government. Chinese leaders may have little knowledge about what another department is up to. If top think tank and government thinkers start to acknowledge mutual confusion, perhaps caution will reign.

The mere fact that the Wen argument is self-serving, however, doesn’t invalidate the point:

Lastly, while there are unmistakable signs that the CCP legitimacy is weakening and that the people are becoming more intolerant of secrecy in personnel arrangements and manipulation of the press, the top is still driving the political process and can make and enforce decisions on personnel and other issues.  Any talk of an imminent meltdown of the CCP control is wishful and unfounded.  Nonetheless, politics as usual has been riddled with bullets.  One of the shooters is Wen Jiabao himself.  His admission of helplessness and lack of achievements in the political reform sector and his attribution of these failures to being constrained by the special interest groups, unreasonable governance system, and Cultural Revolution mentality has sounded the death knell for those who champion the Beijing Consensus.  His declaration that China’s economic reform cannot be sustained without political reform may force the Party to pay more attention to the timetable and action plan of political reform.

The podcast is available Sunday now (yesterday it said it would be held; now the link is here). Notes will accumulate below:

• My original review of the monologue as performed on stage in Seattle about a year ago.
• “The most powerful and memorable moments in the story all seem to be fabricated.” –Ira Glass
• Fact checking 101: If the best part of your story can’t be verified, and if there’s a lot of material there, and your “reporter” can’t help verify—kill the story.
• Daisey admits that he misled TAL on the name of “Cathy” to prevent them from finding her, Glass says.
• The Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz’s first clues were things I chalked up to storytelling exaggeration: the guns. But the question of laborers at Starbucks did bother me. Where was the money coming from?
• From the transcript: “Cathy Lee: I think that if she said she was 13 or 12, then I would be surprised. I would be very surprised. And I would remember for sure. But there is no such thing.
”
• Another falsehood/exaggeration I caught immediately: When Daisey said “There are no iPads in China.” This doesn’t really minimize the power of the scene in the full narrative (beyond the TAL excerpt). This mixed purpose seems to be the real trouble.
• Nice that Schmitz notes Cathy’s memory wouldn’t necessarily be fully clear.
• Daisey bears down on the girl who said she was 13; that exchange is pretty damning:
  

  Mike Daisey: I don’t know. I do know when doing interviews a lot of people were speaking in English. They enjoyed using English with me and I don’t know if she was paying attention at that particular point. I don’t know. There was a lot of wrangling that Cathy was doing, talking to people and sort of pre-interviewing.

  Rob Schmitz: So Mike, according to what you’re saying, these are migrant workers who are preteen, 13 or 14 years old, there English isn’t going to be very good. You’re telling me that they were speaking English to you, in a way that you could understand? [This resonates with me, especially for a worker so young. -gw]

  Mike Daisey: Well, I only know – only one of them was really talkative and that was the main girl I was talking to.

  Rob Schmitz: So you have a clear recollection of meeting somebody who was 13 years old?

  Mike Daisey: Yes.

  Rob Schmitz: And twelve years old?

  Mike Daisey: Yes of the girl who was thirteen and her friends who represented themselves as being around her age and so the spread there is just an effort to cover the ages that I suspect they are around that age.

• “I really do believe that stories should be subordinate to the truth.” –Daisey. Definition of truth seems important.

Act II, in which Ira Glass speaks directly with Daisey:

• Glass, citing n-hexane, asks why Daisey didn’t take the opportunity of their queries to acknowledge that some of the details were dramatized. “I think I was terified,” Daisey says. Glass: “Of what?” Daisey: “I think I was terrified that if I untied these things, that the work, that I know is really good, and tells a story, that does these really great things for making people care, that it would come apart in a way where, where it would ruin everything.”
• Daisey acknowledges he did think about the fact that others—TAL—were vouching for him.

• KEY QUOTE from Daisey: “My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes – has made- other people delve.”

Ira says out loud what any editor should have said before running this story as journalism:

Ira Glass: I guess I thought that you were going to come in and say that more if it wasn’t true because, um, there are parts of it I just don’t buy based on what you’ve said. I don’t believe you when it comes to the underage worker. Like, it seems credible that your translator if she saw an underage worker, it seems credible that she says that she would remember that kind of thing because it’d be so unusual. That seems credible. And I don’t believe you when it comes to the guy with the twisted hand because your translator who was there doesn’t remember that he said he worked for Foxconn and doesn’t remember the incident with the iPad. And I might be more inclined to believe you but you admit to lying about so many little things – the number of people who you spoke to, the number of factories that you visited – you admit to making up an entire group of characters who didn’t exist, who were poisoned by hexane and the only person who was with you said these things didn’t happen. So when it comes to underage workers and the man with the claw-hand it’s like – I don’t believe that that happened.

…

Mike Daisey: Yes. And I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

My comment here, after Glass says he thought it was literally true on stage, is that Glass is not as clever as I thought he was.

More to come from another outlet.

Tricia Wang, being silly, Beijing, 2009.

This entrepreneurship is tough, and the family’s living conditions and lack of urban citizenship status pose challenges. Tricia’s account is required reading for those interested in migrants, if only because it shows the kind of ideas, opportunities, and challenges the migrants face.

Read the piece at That’s Shanghai.

Among the several great passages is this one, describing the scarcity of water in the urban enclave:

At 8am I start washing vegetables. Anything involving water takes a long time because there is one faucet for every four homes and every five faucets are connected to one main pipe. So when any one of the 20 families uses their faucet, none of the other 19 can. Someone is always washing vegetables, dishes, hair or clothes. Each family pays RMB10 per person, per month. Peer pressure and faucet scarcity prevents anyone from using too much.

Sometimes we aren’t able to arrive at the construction site in time to sell food because we’re waiting to use the faucet. I’ve learned to stand in the water line and not move until I’ve filled the basin. Since it’s so hard to get water, most food isn’t washed well, it’s soaked. The same water is then used to soak other vegetables. Then the same water is used to scrub the pot. The same bowl is used to wash hair, clothes and Li Jie’s child.

Li, who is currently vice premier, comes across as a careful—if reformist-leaning—politician. Indeed, the extent of his ties to the Tiananmen movement is part of the story.

Lim also includes reference to one of my favorite Wikileaks cables, one that endeared Li Keqiang to me during an academic project, for his insight if nothing else.

People like to quote Li’s assertion that Chinese GDP figures are “man-made.” This is notable only in that Li said it as Party Secretary of Liaoning Province, a large northeastern economy bordering North Korea. But what he supposedly said next is far more interesting for people who, despite bad GDP figures, want to understand the magnitude of Chinese economic activity. Li offered three proxies for economic output that he looked at to keep an eye on Liaoning’s heavy industry–dominated economy.

The full excerpt from the cable:

4. (C) GDP figures are “man-made” and therefore unreliable, Li said. When evaluating Liaoning’s economy, he focuses on three figures:
1) electricity consumption, which was up 10 percent in Liaoning last year;
2) volume of rail cargo, which is fairly accurate because fees are charged for each unit of weight; and
3) amount of loans disbursed, which also tends to be accurate given the interest fees charged. By looking at these three figures, Li said he can measure with relative accuracy the speed of economic growth. All other figures, especially GDP statistics, are “for reference only,” he said smiling.

The scholarly community had already thought of electricity consumption, and economists are creative when looking for proxies. But this is a vote of confidence in the idea of proxies over primary indicators, even when the indicator is “known.” The message is that closely watched numbers are also closely controlled; reality may be hiding in less scrutinized places.

It’s also worth noting that this frank discussion with someone who got the information into a U.S. diplomatic cable suggests that Li is perhaps more comfortable than usual working internationally. His English, for one thing, sounds great in the radio report.

4:00 p.m.

Last update today. Off to CFR and then offline for the evening.

The White House has posted a transcript of Obama’s remarks, as well as the “Joint Fact Sheet on Strengthening U.S.-China Economic Relations.”

Neither document is especially surprising. I noted earlier that Obama said he welcomes China’s “peaceful rise,” a reference to an earlier rhetoric associated with Zheng Bijian. A quick look reveals that “we welcome the peaceful rise of China” has been something of a talking point. See this from November.

The economic relations document is what it sounds like, focusing exclusively on economic issues. It will take some comparison to other statements in the past to assess the significance of this document. And remember, Xi isn’t president yet.

3:00 p.m.

MSNBC has posted video of Obama’s appearance with Xi Jinping:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Also, former Obama East Asia adviser Jeffrey Bader is rooting for Xi Jinping’s success.

2:00 p.m.

The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China has released its statement on Xi Jinping’s visit. It is predictably focused on human rights concerns, the major activity of the CECC:

“[W]e remain extremely concerned, as the run-up to Vice President Xi becoming the next leader of China has been accompanied by one of the worst crackdowns in recent memory,” said Representative Chris Smith, Chairman of the Commission. “Beyond that, China’s oppression of house churches, censorship of the Internet, and one-child policy continues unabated.”

“As China’s likely next leader, Vice President Xi has a unique opportunity to improve relations with the United States,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Cochairman of the Commission. “But in order to win the respect of the American people, Vice President Xi must make every effort to ensure China plays by the rules, abides by its international obligations, and guarantees the fundamental rights of all its citizens.”

The release also targeted China on trade and labor conditions:

They noted that the WTO recently decided that Chinese restrictions on raw material exports violate WTO rules. “The WTO decision on raw materials is just further evidence of the Chinese government’s willingness to cheat and game the system at the expense of our companies and our workers,” said Chairman Smith.

The chairs also observed recent high-profile reports about the Foxconn manufacturing company detailing horrific conditions at Chinese factories, including dangerous work environments, long hours, and low wages. “The reports underscore the need for China to allow workers effective and independent labor representation, and for the Chinese government, domestic Chinese companies, and multinational companies to do much more to improve China’s poor worker safety record,” said Cochairman Brown.

The full text is not online yet, so I’ve posted it here.

12:30 p.m.

President Obama used the language of Zheng Bijian in encouraging a Chinese “peaceful rise.”

Obama: “We welcome China’s peaceful rise.” … “We believe that a strong and prosperous China is one that can help to bring stability and prosperity to the region and to the world.”

Biden: “We are not always going to see eye-to-eye. We are not always going to see things exactly the same, but we have very important economic and political concerns that warrant that we work together.”

Xi: Xi said he hoped his trip would build on the progress made by Obama and Hu during a state visit by China’s president a year ago, in building a “cooperative partnership based on mutual respect and mutual benefit.” He said he looked forward to having “an in-depth and candid exchange of views.”

(All MSNBC)

12:00 noon

“Vice President Joe Biden, Gov. Jerry Brown and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are all gathering in LA Thursday and Friday for Xi’s visit to the city.” (Huffington Post)

Getty has some early images of Xi’s meeting with Biden today, and with Obama. This link will return the latest.

11:30 a.m.

Of course, the very best thing published today on China and the United States has just come out at Al Jazeera English. #shamelessplug

11:00 a.m.

POLITICO has an op-ed by Reps. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) and Charles Boustany (R-La.),  the co-chairmen of U.S.-China the Working Group. It’s a laundry list of issues, pushing for  greater cooperation in name. The full text is concilatory, but the policy points read like a list of demands:

The Obama administration and its Chinese counterparts must focus on developing a bilateral investment treaty. …

Beijing must accede to the Government Procurement Agreement within the World Trade Organization. …

China’s leadership must be challenged on policies that aim to link government procurement to pre-approved suppliers, maintain currency misalignment and provide unfair subsidies to broad economic sectors. …

Beijing must also work to protect the intellectual property rights of U.S. companies, as well as Chinese firms. …

10:30 a.m.

From China's mission to the United Nations (click for article)

• “US-China economic tiff simmers … the relationship between Washington and Beijing on economic issues is for the moment a manageable tiff rather than all-out conflict.” So, a conflict story about how the conflict doesn’t amount to much. (Financial Times)
• Also from the FT, speculation about a yet-to-be-announced increase in the Chinese defense budget.
• Ten years ago: George W. Bush meets Hu Jintao. This will be a good basis for comparison when the new release appears. (Chinese Foreign Ministry)
• “Who’s Hu?” — The jokes were groaners, but they weren’t old yet in 2002. (News Hour)

9:45 a.m.

• Evan Osnos has a roundup of profiles of Xi. (The New Yorker)
• “Friendly, but not an ally.” That’s what 63 percent of Americans think of China, according to a new Gallup poll. Thirteen percent said an ally, 17 percent “unfriendly,” and 6 percent “enemy.” (POLITICO)
• At least one story about the Xi Jinping transition is actually a story about Wang Lijun. (The Wall Street Journal)
• Others are making this about Xi Zhongxun, Jinping’s father (and mentioning Jinping’s daughter at Harvard). (Washington Post)
• Still others are going for the relatively straight biography. (Los Angeles Times)
• China Digital Times has its own write-up with characteristic thoroughness.
• Louisa Lim does her radio biographical treatment. (NPR)
• Daniel Russel, a top White House Asia adviser talks about the visit, and Michael Green says it’s designed to pay off in the future when Xi is in power. (NPR)

Xi Jinping

In written answers to questions from the Washington Post editorial board, Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to take power as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party in November, implies that anti-China economic rhetoric is based in ignorance.

As economic globalization gathers momentum, China and the United States have become highly interdependent economically. Such economic relations would not enjoy sustained, rapid growth if they were not based on mutual benefit or if they failed to deliver great benefits to the United States. The Americans who know the real picture of China-U.S. economic relations, including those in the business community, will echo this point.

This to me was the most pointed of the comments the Post published. It also so happens that I largely agree.

Image credit: Creative Commons photo via nznationalparty on Flickr.

White House Photo

James Fallows has published the capstone to his blog’s meditation on whether U.S. President Barack Obama is a chess master or a pawn—a long-game strategist with high tolerance for disappointment along the way, or a hapless newb whose ability to inspire was never matched by political mettle.

Despite Fallows’ continued exhortations to subscribe, I encourage you not to wait and to read the article now at The Atlantic.

Among Obama’s achievements, he lists:

• putting U.S. relations with China on a better footing than in many years, a task that has to be among the very most important for any president of the early 21st century.

In particular, Fallows describes Obama’s 2009 visit to Beijing, amid a period of increased international bluster on the part of some in the Chinese government:

Yet even as Obama was politely listening to lectures about China’s new superiority, members of his administration were executing an elaborate pincer movement to reestablish American influence, real and perceived, among the growing economies of Asia. In practically every formal statement by U.S. officials, from President Obama to Secretaries Clinton, Geithner, and Gates, U.S. representatives hammered home a single message. The message was that America welcomed rather than feared China’s continued rise.

That “pincer” policy included doubling down on U.S. relations with other East Asian countries during a period when China’s diplomatic stance was less than diplomatic. It culminated, Fallows writes, in the establishment of a permanent U.S. base on Australia’s north coast.

I find this account largely convincing, but I do question the “better footing” characterization of U.S.–China relations under these conditions. If the improvement is in the U.S. influence in the region and a perceived retrenchment of Chinese regional power, I’m not sure that puts the relationship on great footing. (I don’t ascribe this tradeoff to Fallows’s account; that’s my own interpretation.)

The relationship between the two countries is complex and, in my assessment, largely stable. Tossing aside abstract international relations debates between those who believe great powers must balance one another and those who believe 21st century economic integration makes Cold War rivalry untenable, I like to argue that the United States and China are so deeply tied that an alignment of interests is inevitable.

Given that integration, a better footing for the relationship would be manifested in each population’s increased understanding of the others’ needs. This means U.S. voters learning about the needs and priorities of Chinese—and about the forbidding diversity of those priorities. And it means Chinese learning about the living standards and unwillingness to compromise among many in the United States. Both sides, in my dream land, would start building policies based on enlightened mutual interest, which by the way should not be limited to these two countries.

As Fallows tells us, a U.S. president only has so much power, and national identity is hard to shake. But what metric should we use to judge the development of one country’s relationship with another? Perhaps we need something more people-based and less focused on diplomatic victories.

I have a brief addition to the problems people have already noted—including the idea of an East Asian-looking female with perfect American English pronunciation but artificially stunted grammar as symbol of the China threat.

Namely, the website viewers are directed to at debbiespenditnow.com uses Traditional Chinese characters (used mainly in Taiwan and Hong Kong), as opposed to Simplified Chinese (used in the People’s Republic of China).

The slogan below “現在黛比花” would appear as “现在黛比花” in the mainland. A subtle difference, but obvious to any reader. Even more striking, the “spend money now” banner at the top is rendered as “現在花錢” instead of “现在花钱.”

Previously in GOP yellow peril junk, see here.

UPDATE: I see now that Isaac Stone Fish caught this as well.