Tag Archives: China-U.S.

Clinton on China relations: 'A more comprehensive approach'

The economy will be at the center of the U.S.–China relationship in the Obama administration, but a “comprehensive dialogue” is necessary. That’s the word from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking with reporters recently. The transcript is, strangely, undated.

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, your colleague – now your colleague, Tim Geithner, raised some eyebrows with comments he made about China in his written testimony to the Senate. And I know that you are interested in the State Department having a robust role in economics as well as diplomacy. My question is about China. Should we read anything broader into what he said? Could we expect the Administration to have a slightly more vigorous diplomacy toward China? And also, what role do you see for the State Department in that relationship? Would you like to see State be the central player? I know under Mr. Paulson, he sort of consolidated a lot of that at the Treasury Department.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, Mark, we need a comprehensive dialogue with China. The Strategic Dialogue that was begun in the Bush Administration turned into an economic dialogue, and that’s a very important aspect of our relationship with China, but it is not the only aspect of our relationship.

So we’re going to be working together in the government across our agencies to design a more comprehensive approach that we think will be more in keeping with the important role that China is playing and will be playing as both a regional and international player on so many important issues.

So I look forward to working with my colleagues in government, in the White House, Treasury Department, and elsewhere, in forging such an approach. And I look very much forward to working with my counterparts in the Chinese Government, because I think there is – there are many opportunities for us to cooperate going forward.
And given the current global economic crisis, you know, we have to work our way through that with the minimum amount of damage to global capacity to restart the economy. You know, obviously, our economic problems here at home mean that people are being laid off not only here in America, but also in China. And so the economy will always be a centerpiece of our relationship, but we want it to be part of a broader agenda, and that’s what we’re working to achieve.

[h/t Jim Fallows]

The straw man of Internet-fueled civil discourse

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Just because people are online doesn’t mean they engage in civil public discourse. This simple idea has emerged as one thread of conventional wisdom in recent years, especially in the context of the People’s Republic of China. In an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama, Rebecca MacKinnon reinforces the idea:

Back in 2001 a U.S. spyplane made an emergency landing on Hainan island after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet which crashed into the sea. If people in the Chinese Internet chatrooms had gotten their way, the U.S. crew would be in a Chinese jail today. In a recent interview with The Atlantic’s James Fallows, the President of the China Investment Corporation Gao Xiqing pointed out that his P.R. department is inundated with public comments calling for him to sell U.S. dollar assets.

This sort of argument, parallel to the idea that the United States might not like what it sees if some states hold truly democratic elections, has become so common that I wonder whether MacKinnon can still reasonably say, as she does in the letter, “Americans tend to think of the Internet as the medium that will inevitably free the Chinese people of authoritarian rule.” Maybe my reading diet has become more isolated, but I don’t hear that argument anymore except as a foil. Is the narrative of a liberalizing Internet medium becoming a straw man?

Beijing Universities Top U.S. Doctorate Feeder List

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Beijing University (aka Peking University) and Qinghua University (Tsinghua) top Science magazine’s list of top undergraduate schools for students obtaining U.S. Ph.D.s.

A new study has found that the most likely undergraduate alma mater for those who earned a Ph.D. in 2006 from a U.S. university was … Tsinghua University. Peking University, its neighbor in the Chinese capital, ranks second. Between 2004 and 2006, those two schools overtook the University of California, Berkeley, as the most fertile training ground for U.S. Ph.D.s (see graph). South Korea’s Seoul National University occupies fourth place behind Berkeley, followed by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Via China’s Scientific & Academic Integrity Watch. The text of the article, without a pay wall, is at MITBBS.

Obama Says He Would Hear From Dalai Lama Before Going to Olympic Ceremony

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Without saying definitively he would not attend the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing one month from today, U.S. Senator Barack Obama said as president he would skip the ceremony without hearing from the Dalai Lama that there had been progress on the Tibet issue.

“In the absence of some sense of progress, in the absence of some sense from the Dalai Lama that there was progress, I would not have gone,” Obama said at a news conference, according to the Associated Press.

From a Chinese perspective, the statement that Obama would take cues from the Dalai Lama is quite bold and constitutes a public articulation of which side the candidate has chosen in the Dalai Lama–P.R.C. disputes. While few would be surprised to hear a Democratic candidate support human rights in Tibet, it’s diplomatically significant if enunciated.

The AP article notes that Obama had encouraged President George W. Bush to skip the ceremony, as had Senator John McCain in April.

McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent, also issued a hypothetical ultimatum, similarly saying that he would only attend the ceremony if he saw improvements on human rights issues. McCain’s April statement was in some ways stronger than Obama’s most recent one, though he did not allude to taking cues from the exiled Tibetan leader.

“If Chinese policies and practices do not change, I would not attend the opening ceremonies,” said the Arizona senator, who has clinched the GOP nomination for president. “It does no service to the Chinese government, and certainly no service to the people of China, for the United States and other democracies to pretend that the suppression of rights in China does not concern us. It does, will and must concern us.”

These statements, which apparently promise to show symbolic support in exchange for concessions on human rights issues, recall the early Bill Clinton administration principle of conditional engagement: The United States would work with China on trade in exchange for rights improvements. What the candidates haven’t mentioned is that when Clinton tried this tactic, it either failed or was abandoned in favor of, say, less-conditional engagement.

Could the candidates be reacting to George W. Bush’s friendly behavior toward China in the way that Clinton reacted to George H. W. Bush’s? The current president, for one, comes near toeing the Chinese line in his most recent statement, promising to attend the ceremony. Skipping the event would be “an affront to the Chinese people,” he said.

George Bush Sr.'s Frustrated Tenure in China

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One of George H. W. Bush’s less discussed jobs, lost among president of the United States, ambassador to the United Nations, and CIA director, was head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing during the Nixon administration. Bush’s China journal has recently been published, and it reveals frustration at being made irrelevant by direct contacts between Henry Kissinger and Deng Xiaoping.

James Mann, author most recently of The China Fantasy, has an article on the book in The New Republic. A couple of choice paragraphs.

When Bush landed in Beijing on October 21, 1974, its wind and dust reminded him of places he had encountered in the oil business. “It reminded me very much of West Texas and also of a trip to Kuwait,” he observed. He soon tried to establish high-level contact with Chinese leaders. He paid a call on Deng Xiaoping, then a vice premier under Mao Zedong. Bush’s initial impression of Deng, eventually the father of China’s economic reforms: “He was a very short man.” (For American one-liners about China, this ranks right up there with Richard Nixon’s verdict on the Great Wall: “It really is a great wall.”)

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And then there was the question of human rights. “China is very vulnerable on human rights, just as the Soviet Union was,” Bush thought. “Some day sure as can be Congress will turn its attention to these aspects of the Chinese policy. … [T]his euphoric analysis of this society as an open society, as a free society, a soft or gentle society, is simply wrong.” All in all, Bush concluded, China was getting more out of its relationship with the United States than the United States was getting from China. “They need us, actually more than we need them in my judgment,” he decided. “This is the consensus of the international community incidentally.”