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.