What Obama Accomplished in China
I suppose China’s behavior immediately after the president’s departure is all the evidence you really need.
An activist who was investigating the role shoddy school construction played in the deaths of more than 5,000 children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake was given a three-year prison sentence Monday on charges of possessing state secrets. Huang Qi, 46, a veteran activist and blogger, is the most prominent of more than a dozen people who were arrested for demanding investigations into construction standards after the magnitude 7.9 temblor. Others included prominent artists, former teachers and parents who lost their only children in the earthquake. [L.A. Times]
Gone, at least for now, are the days in which the visit of an American president would be welcomed as at least a temporary respite from the oppression and would seed the soil with the promise of the same individual liberties we love, guard, take for granted, and consider a birthright (is it that Chinese love their children less, or are they simply not capable of self-government?).
Well, maybe the president held his tongue so that China would cease its support for Iran or North Korea as they flout U.N. resolutions, proliferate at will, and terrorize at home and abroad:
Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie is in North Korea in the first visit by a Chinese defense chief since April 2006. “No force on earth can break the unity of the armies and peoples of the two countries and it will last forever,” Liang was quoted by the official KCNA news agency as saying Sunday.
He was speaking at a reception hosted by North Korea’s Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces. “I personally experienced the bilateral friendship sealed in blood when I was in Korea about 50 years ago as a member of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army,” fighting in the Korean War on the North Korean side. His North Korean counterpart Kim Yong-chun said, “It is the firm stand of our Army and people to develop the Korea-China friendship, which has withstood all trials of history.” [Chosun Ilbo]
The emerging consensus is that President Obama’s trip to Asia was a fiasco because he had no plan, no concrete objectives that his presence could accomplish, and insisted on no fora where he use his sublime eloquence to advance our national interest. It is not enough that German intellectuals prefer Obama to Bush by 11 to 1; after all, when is the last time a brigade of German intellectuals volunteered to fight for intellectual freedom, tolerance, or diversity in Afghanistan? Obama’s prostrations actually lowered our status in Asia. If he could do nothing else, couldn’t the world’s most charming politician direct his magnificent oratory toward the peoples of Asia in some way reasonably calculated to advance our national interest?
It is suggested by some that we are in no position to demand anything of China because of China’s holdings of our debt, but this is a misapprehension on several levels. First, the economies of China and the United States remain interdependent: China knows it can’t begin to sell off dollars without reducing the value of what holdings it retains, China needs America to keep its markets open to its exports to keep its population employed, and China has much more at stake politically and socially if America doesn’t help bring the global economy out of a recession. A most underappreciated point is that all economies are cyclical. If this recession is deeper, it may be because the government delayed the natural cyclical contraction of our economy through excessive intervention in the housing market. The same can be said for Japan’s excessive intervention in its manufacturing and export economy in the 80’s — and I’m old enough to remember the days when everyone thought Japan’s boom would last forever. But booms never last forever, and only a fool can believe that China, the most interventionist state of the aforementioned, is an exception to this rule.
Furthermore, our reduced economic leverage — a legitimate, if often overstated concern — certainly does not mean that our political and diplomatic leverage is suddenly extinguished, as some would suggest. Above all, it does not mean that we are more likely to secure our interests by prostrating ourselves. This misapprehends the nature of authoritarian regimes, which by their very nature pursue their ends through the coercive power of the state to impose their will by fiat. The diplomacy of compromise and consensus works well between democracies in which leaders learn to compromise with opposition parties, or factions within parties, or popular opposition. It works badly with with dictatorships, which deal with opposing views with purges, arrests, night sticks, and tear gas. The people who rise in systems like those view negotiations as zero-sum games, in which obsequiousness signals weakness. It only encourages them to demand more and deliver less (and isn’t Chris Hill’s failure a fine illustration of that?).
Such systems also tend to promote nationalism as a substitute for individual worth, which also promotes a zero-sum approach to negotiations. All negotiations with authoritarian regimes are about imposing your will. No doubt, some will find this idea deeply distasteful, but that doesn’t make it less true. When negotiating with an authoritarian regime, the only way to achieve your objectives is to negotiate from strength and show a merciless approach to verification and enforcement of the terms.
In some ways, our new president has shown himself to be a quick study. Let’s hope, for our country’s sake, that President Obama grasps this difference soon.
I have a lot of time on my hands these days and have spent the bulk reading various analyses of Obama’s China/Japan/SK/Burma visit. Yours is probably in the top three that I’ve read to date. Very nice.
“But booms never last forever, and only a fool can believe that China, the most interventionist state of the aforementioned, is an exception to this rule”
I wonder if there is a theory out there, a fantasy perhaps, that Obama is so far to the left that he’s coming around to the hard-core right. I mean, accomplishing basically nothing on this trip simply enables the ChiComs to continue along the same path…a slow boil of internal pressure, political suppression and denial of basic human rights. It would be a supreme irony if the sheer ineptitude of Obama’s China’s foreign policy precipitated a major crisis much faster than perhaps a McCain policy would have.
Perhaps. In which case the phrase, “God works in mysterious ways” will have never been more appropriate.
@jimmy
I think you misspoke: Obama was in Singapore for the APEC summit, not Burma. It would be wrong to say that his appearance at the APEC Summit was useless; the contrary is probably true. America must be involved in APEC and should have been all along.
Also, this blogger well knows that China is not nearly as “interventionist” as North Korea and many other parts of the world. Furthermore, China has experienced their decades-long boom because of the government’s tight control over development and not despite it. China is merely further proof that a highly skilled, professional, competent authoritarian regime can direct capitalism more efficiently than a democratic government during the early and middle phases of industrialisation. It is in line with the experiences of Singapore and the ROK. Vietnam is the latest authoritarian government trying to follow this model. And Myanmar may eventually take this path, also. Excepting the obvious aging demographics concern, there does not seem to be any other fundamental reason why China’s boom should stop anytime in the near future.
Also, no serious person thinks Obama is far left. And to say that Obama is inept because he failed to rein in China’s human rights abuses is silly. No one on earth–not John Sydney McCaine nor John Robert Bolton nor you nor me–is going to persuade the Chinese communists to let up on human rights abuses any time soon. Now, I agree with the sentiments of those who believe that the US-China relationship is healthy enough today that American presidents can express grave concerns publicly to the Chinese over human rights issues and that Obama should have spoken out. And I also agree that the Chinese have invested too much financially in America to be able or willing to disrupt America’s economy. But merely expressing displeasure over human rights concerns is not going to change anything as long as the vast majority of the Chinese people can freely observe the communists performing brilliantly in developing the country. It is ultimately the vast majority of Chinese people who want the communists to keep doing what they are doing. That is the problem in trying to get the Chinese communists to increase personal liberty and democratic participation in China.
On the Chinese human rights issue, the only thing we can do now is wait for a change in circumstance. But there is a good possibility that we could be waiting decades. This is why we should not be looking to China for help on the North Korean issue. Should the DPRK survive Kim Jong Il’s death and, moreover, should the DPRK continue their present policies, the developed world should really move to forcibly collapse the regime from the outside through total and comprehensive sanctions. Because, otherwise, the bright destiny of the Koreans subjected to DPRK misrule will have to be deferred indefinitely. Along with sanctions, if news that the DPRK is increasingly turning away Chinese direct investments is true, then the DPRK’s own incompetence could only help.
Finally, God, the actual being, has nothing to do with international relations. :/
I misspoke above, also.
Many economists have been warning for some time that property values in China, as in Korea, may be overheating. The Asians are aware of the situation, but nobody seems to know what to do about it, given the need to keep interest rates low at the moment.
However, no American should be hoping for a massive asset bubble to form and burst in China. Massive wealth destruction in China is the last thing the world needs.
Seems a lot of folks don’t know how to negotiate with authoritarian regimes. America has had abundant experience in doing so, Cold War, hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, post-Cold war “Peace Dividend” era, etc., but the lessons, if ever really learned, seem to have been easily forgotten. Regarding dealing with China and North Korea, a lot of learning occurred in the Korean War armistice negotiations. One of the participants, US Navy Admiral C. Turner Joy, wrote a book about his experience that would behoove the present administration to read, titled “How Communists Negotiate.” I wonder how similar and/or different the Chinese and North Korean negotiating techniques are today as compared to back then during the armistice negotiations…
@Pops
Thank you for pointing out a wonderful book. I discovered that it is available on the internet as a legally free download at the internet archives website. I read the last four chapters this morning and will finish the book over the holiday. Admiral Joy is a talented writer who dryly captures how mercilessly annoying the communists were in negotiations.
To be fair, I believe every nation has resorted to such negotiation tactics. But the communists seemed to especially relish them.
It seems certain that it is still DPRK’s policy to dispense with good faith in negotiations. But I think the Chinese are changing. They no longer are the gueriila revolutionary movement trying to pick up whatever diplomatic scraps of recognition they can find. They are the recognized future driver of global economic growth. They have already surpassed Germany in exports and their middle class domestic market is bigger than the entire American population. It is no longer appropriate or possible to deal with them with carrots and sticks. Today, if the Chinese don’t like something, they don’t have to play games; they’ll either let you know upfront that it is not happening or they’ll just ignore any agreements they made. And it seems you have little choice but to accept it.
Today, when American leaders try to get China to do something which is against Chinese interests, the Americans have to look for workarounds. For instance, the Chinese will continue to support Iran’s authoritarian regime so long as Iran meets China’s need for energy. The only way the Americans could persuade China to stop their support would be to find an alternative energy source as vast as Iran’s. Of course, today, that is impossible.
Finally, God, the actual being, has nothing to do with international relations. :/
That’s your opinion. Most of us believe God rules over the nations by His infinite power and wisdom.