What more can China do to boost ties

By David Shambaugh (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-13 08:56

Everyone is eagerly awaiting US President Barack Obama's state visit from Sunday to Wednesday. Every time an American president visits China, or vice versa, it is a significant diplomatic event given the primary importance of the two nations in world affairs. It is significant symbolically, substantively, globally, regionally, and bilaterally.

It is also personally significant for the US president as his first-ever visit to China. He will form various first-hand impressions of China, its two major cities (Beijing and Shanghai), its leaders, and the elements of Chinese society with which he interacts. These experiences will provide Obama with more of a "real feel" of China, and will hopefully raise China in his consciousness and up his list of competing priorities.

Obama already knows of China's importance and has said so on several occasions (notably in his speech to the first Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington in July), but given the vast number of domestic and international challenges he faces - from economic recovery to health care reform to unemployment to infrastructure rebuilding to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to rebuilding America's relations in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia - his visit to China will be important in lodging relations with China among his top priorities. More importantly, China is not an issue unto itself - it is rather intertwined with virtually every other issue in domestic and world affairs for Obama.

Obama visits China at a time when the relationship is at its best in 20 years. It has taken two decades to rebuild the relationship to the productive point that it is today. Just as importantly, inside the US it has taken this period to rebuild the domestic bipartisan consensus on a China policy, which was shattered in 1989.

Although there remains (and always will remain) a spectrum of opinion among the American "policy class", a broad "center" in the spectrum has been rebuilt in favor of good relations and partnership with China. The rebuilding process, bilaterally and domestically within the US, began during the second Clinton administration and was strengthened considerably by the George W. Bush administration. The Bush administration deserves high marks for its China policy and bequeathing a generally robust relationship to the Obama administration.

For its part, China's government under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao has emphasized relations with Washington because it knows the US is the key to all of China's domestic, regional, and international priorities.

While there continue to be some elements of discord in the trade area, and lingering strategic mistrust in the military arena, on the whole the relationship has never been stronger or deeper. This is reflected in what I call the "two I's": interdependence and institutionalization.

At the societal level, American and Chinese societies are deeply intertwined (much more deeply than average people realize). This is a good thing because the mutual dependence buffers the overall relationship from "shocks" or difficulties in specific sectors.

Adding to the new durability of ties is the institutionalization of inter-governmental relations. More than 60 bilateral dialogues exist and with over 200 bilateral agreements in place. Virtually every ministry and department of the two governments regularly interactswith their counterparts, including in the sensitive areas of intelligence exchange and law enforcement.

With General Xu Caihou's successful trip to the US recently, and his seven-point agreement with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, hopefully military ties can be broadened, deepened and stabilized.

Obama and a wide range of other US officials have stated America's desire to form a lasting "positive, cooperative, and comprehensive" relationship with China, as well as a growing global partnership in addressing a wide range of international challenges. These are indeed worthy and appropriate goals. China should shoulder an increasing amount of responsibility in regional and global affairs - particularly in the financial, energy, humanitarian, and security realms - while the US and other actors need to make room for China to play a greater role.

While Washington should ask for more from Beijing, it must also be careful not to expect too much. The history of Sino-American relations over the past 30 years is replete with examples of one side or the other having unrealistically high expectations of the other, only to be disappointed by the other's ability to match expectations. Today, the Chinese government continues to have great domestic responsibilities, and its international positions are often at considerable variance with the US. Thus, the partnership has to be pursued within limits and often in parallel rather than directly, although both sides should constantly look for further opportunities to expand global and regional Asian cooperation.

At present, two potential new areas of cooperation are Afghanistan and western Pacific maritime security. The first will require adjustments in thinking in Beijing, while the second will need adjustments in Washington and Tokyo.

China could provide a great deal of useful security, aid, and other humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan - if it decided to and Washington and its NATO partners welcomed it. To date, Washington has not asked and Beijing has been reticent to contribute. But China could allow the People's Armed Police (Wujing) to help train Afghan police (a pressing need), and the People's Liberation Army could perhaps even participate in the multinational military operations against the Taliban and Al-Qaida (also China's enemies).

China could also do much to build hard infrastructure in Afghanistan - roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings - as well as contributing personnel to tertiary education and public health clinics across the country. China has much experience in these areas in Africa and elsewhere - the time is now ripe to get involved in partnership with NATO and others on the ground in Afghanistan.

Maintaining maritime security in the western Pacific region has been primarily an American responsibility since World War II. But as the Chinese navy continually expands its operational range and China's interests in keeping the sea-lanes of communications (SLOCs) open and secure increase, it should naturally play a greater role in Asia-Pacific maritime security.

This will require a fairly major adjustment in the strategic thinking of Japan and the US - seeing China's expanded operations in terms of co-management of the maritime commons - while it will require Beijing to accept an expanded role for the Japanese maritime forces in the region. It will also require intelligence sharing and joint naval and air operations, things that adversaries do not do.

Thus, underlying such maritime cooperation requires the US and Japan to abandon the "strategic hedging" and "balancing" mindset - while China must open up its military operations to external scrutiny and fully engage the American and Japanese militaries as partners.

Forging cooperation in the two sensitive areas will not be easy, as they require fundamentally changed strategic mindsets, substantial resources, and perhaps the loss of Chinese lives (in Afghanistan). But they would pay enormous dividends if the impediments can be overcome - establishing precisely the kind of "strategic trust" that still remains elusive in Sino-American (and China-Japan) relations.

"Reaching for the difficult" is not easy. But that is what former US president Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao did nearly 40 years ago. To forge a truly global partnership between the US and China today requires such vision and will.

Even if the two sides do not move forward in these two areas, Obama's visit is likely to be quite successful in other areas. But at the end of the day, one should not expect too much from such summits - as they are only one instance of regular interaction between the two leaders throughout the year. When they sit down in the Great Hall of the People on Monday, it will be their fifth meeting in 11 months and they talk once or twice per month over the telephone.

The real value and opportunity of such summits is twofold. First, to have truly broad-gauged and minimally scripted strategic dialogue, including that on each other's domestic policy concerns. Second, to energize the respective government bureaucracies to forge bilateral cooperation. If this can be accomplished, the Sino-American summit will be a considerable success.

The author is a visiting Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of World Economics & Politics on leave from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

(China Daily 11/13/2009 page9)