America and China: Partners, if Not Friends - New York Times
America and China: Partners, if Not Friends - New York Times
November 20, 2005
Power Couple
America and China: Partners, if Not Friends
By JIM YARDLEY
BEIJING
SOMETIMES, past really is prologue.
Today's meeting here between President Bush and the Chinese leader Hu Jintao seems shadowed by a visit, made early in 1979, by Deng Xiaoping, who was barnstorming America to celebrate the historic agreement normalizing relations between the two countries.
At a stop in suburban Atlanta, Deng toured a Ford factory that made more cars in a single month than China produced in a year.
Aware of his country's economic inferiority, Deng, then emerging as China's paramount leader, said he hoped to transform China into an industrial power by the distant year of 2000. "We in China are faced with the task of transforming our backwardness and catching up promptly with the advanced countries of the world," he said. "We want to learn from you."
Twenty-six years later, this policy of economic engagement between China and the developed world remains largely unchanged. China still wants trade, technology, expertise and investment to help create a modern and prosperous society. But China's roaring economic success has altered the equation. Now, Mr. Hu must add a disclaimer to Deng's pitch: We're really not trying to take over the world.
"Facts have proved that China's development will not stand in the way of anyone, nor will it pose any threat to anyone," Mr. Hu said Thursday in South Korea. "Instead, it will only do good to peace, stability and prosperity in the world."
Perhaps, but the meeting of Mr. Bush and Mr. Hu comes as friction over issues like America's record trade deficit with China is rising.
From China's vantage point, the pressures that propelled Deng are undiminished, but the nation's increasing wealth has made it harder for Chinese leaders to claim the latitude given to developing countries in areas like environmental and worker protections and civil liberties.
In fact, China is effectively two economies. It is a manufacturing goliath, a major engine for worldwide economic growth that has doubled its foreign trade in just three years. But roughly 500 million of China's 1.3 billion people still live on less than $2 a day and the overall population is aging rapidly, in a country where the social safety net is almost nonexistent.
Chinese leaders have made 2020 the target year for achieving their goal of a "well-off society," and they realize that economic ties with America are critical to getting there.
China "must maintain a close relationship with the United States if its modernization efforts are to succeed," wrote Wang Jisi, a leading Chinese expert on Sino-American relations, in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs. "Indeed, a cooperative partnership with Washington is of primary importance to Beijing."
Mr. Wang said he believed that the post-9/11 cooperation between the two countries in fighting terrorism has created a basic stability in the relationship. And he said their economic interdependence means that if one suffers, so, most likely, will the other. But he also described the relationship as "beset by more profound differences than any other bilateral relationship between major powers in the world today."
Among other problems, he said, China's rising prosperity had made it inevitable that it would strengthen its military. This has alarmed leaders in America, among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who recently made a speech questioning double-digit percentage increases in Chinese military spending. The concern of some Asia experts is that the arms buildup in the region is escalating tensions with Japan, and increasing the chance of conflict over Taiwan.
China has responded with repeated reassurances, from Mr. Hu and others, of a "peaceful rise." In a recent speech, Zheng Bijian, an architect of the "peaceful rise" formulation, called 1979 China's watershed year. In that year, Mr. Zheng said, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, "under the banner of 'world revolution' that was a dead end." China under Deng, he added, chose to open up to the outside world. (Mr. Zheng did not mention that in 1979 China also engaged in a brief border war with Vietnam.)
The development challenges in China remain so enormous, Mr. Zheng said, that "we have no time, no energy and no need, therefore, to threaten any other people and nation."
Development is still the centerpiece of China's foreign policy. Like Deng, Mr. Hu has made economic development tours in recent years. He has visited Africa, Europe and South America, proposing military exchanges, lucrative trade deals and promising that trade with China will be a win-win proposition. Topping his wish list are the energy resources, like oil and natural gas, needed to fuel China's growth.
But Mr. Hu's audience is growing more skeptical, in the face of the environmental damage being caused by Chinese companies around the world, which are also helping to finance conflicts in countries like Sudan and Zimbabwe.
"If you look more carefully, here is what you see: a rising power exploiting other countries' natural resources, spoiling the global environment, making economic deals but looking away from serious government mistreatment of its citizens and not delivering on promises," Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote recently in The International Herald Tribune.
Economic and military power are not the only issues in the Sino-American relationship. The Bush administration wants Mr. Hu to embrace political reform. In a speech in Japan on Wednesday, Mr. Bush warned that Chinese citizens would one day demand political freedom. But Chinese leaders are far more concerned with social stability in their rapidly changing country than they are with individual rights.
For now, the relationship still revolves around managing the consequences of China's growth, which can be seen everywhere in America. For example, the car plant Deng visited in 1979 is still open, but Ford is reducing the size of its North American workforce, even as it expands in China. China manufactured 13,000 cars in 1979; last year, the number exceeded five million.
The belief that America is losing jobs unfairly to China is one reason Congress is expected to begin debating an anti-China trade tariff next year. Then again, Deng ended his tour with a visit to Boeing, in suburban Seattle. Today, the aviation company has billions of dollars of China contracts. And many of the cheap consumer goods Americans want are made in China.
Experts run the gamut in predicting the course of relations between China and the United States. But one prediction that turned out wrong was made in an article in The New York Times in 1979: namely, that Deng's economic overture to America would have limited impact because China economy was too backward to take off.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
November 20, 2005
Power Couple
America and China: Partners, if Not Friends
By JIM YARDLEY
BEIJING
SOMETIMES, past really is prologue.
Today's meeting here between President Bush and the Chinese leader Hu Jintao seems shadowed by a visit, made early in 1979, by Deng Xiaoping, who was barnstorming America to celebrate the historic agreement normalizing relations between the two countries.
At a stop in suburban Atlanta, Deng toured a Ford factory that made more cars in a single month than China produced in a year.
Aware of his country's economic inferiority, Deng, then emerging as China's paramount leader, said he hoped to transform China into an industrial power by the distant year of 2000. "We in China are faced with the task of transforming our backwardness and catching up promptly with the advanced countries of the world," he said. "We want to learn from you."
Twenty-six years later, this policy of economic engagement between China and the developed world remains largely unchanged. China still wants trade, technology, expertise and investment to help create a modern and prosperous society. But China's roaring economic success has altered the equation. Now, Mr. Hu must add a disclaimer to Deng's pitch: We're really not trying to take over the world.
"Facts have proved that China's development will not stand in the way of anyone, nor will it pose any threat to anyone," Mr. Hu said Thursday in South Korea. "Instead, it will only do good to peace, stability and prosperity in the world."
Perhaps, but the meeting of Mr. Bush and Mr. Hu comes as friction over issues like America's record trade deficit with China is rising.
From China's vantage point, the pressures that propelled Deng are undiminished, but the nation's increasing wealth has made it harder for Chinese leaders to claim the latitude given to developing countries in areas like environmental and worker protections and civil liberties.
In fact, China is effectively two economies. It is a manufacturing goliath, a major engine for worldwide economic growth that has doubled its foreign trade in just three years. But roughly 500 million of China's 1.3 billion people still live on less than $2 a day and the overall population is aging rapidly, in a country where the social safety net is almost nonexistent.
Chinese leaders have made 2020 the target year for achieving their goal of a "well-off society," and they realize that economic ties with America are critical to getting there.
China "must maintain a close relationship with the United States if its modernization efforts are to succeed," wrote Wang Jisi, a leading Chinese expert on Sino-American relations, in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs. "Indeed, a cooperative partnership with Washington is of primary importance to Beijing."
Mr. Wang said he believed that the post-9/11 cooperation between the two countries in fighting terrorism has created a basic stability in the relationship. And he said their economic interdependence means that if one suffers, so, most likely, will the other. But he also described the relationship as "beset by more profound differences than any other bilateral relationship between major powers in the world today."
Among other problems, he said, China's rising prosperity had made it inevitable that it would strengthen its military. This has alarmed leaders in America, among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who recently made a speech questioning double-digit percentage increases in Chinese military spending. The concern of some Asia experts is that the arms buildup in the region is escalating tensions with Japan, and increasing the chance of conflict over Taiwan.
China has responded with repeated reassurances, from Mr. Hu and others, of a "peaceful rise." In a recent speech, Zheng Bijian, an architect of the "peaceful rise" formulation, called 1979 China's watershed year. In that year, Mr. Zheng said, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, "under the banner of 'world revolution' that was a dead end." China under Deng, he added, chose to open up to the outside world. (Mr. Zheng did not mention that in 1979 China also engaged in a brief border war with Vietnam.)
The development challenges in China remain so enormous, Mr. Zheng said, that "we have no time, no energy and no need, therefore, to threaten any other people and nation."
Development is still the centerpiece of China's foreign policy. Like Deng, Mr. Hu has made economic development tours in recent years. He has visited Africa, Europe and South America, proposing military exchanges, lucrative trade deals and promising that trade with China will be a win-win proposition. Topping his wish list are the energy resources, like oil and natural gas, needed to fuel China's growth.
But Mr. Hu's audience is growing more skeptical, in the face of the environmental damage being caused by Chinese companies around the world, which are also helping to finance conflicts in countries like Sudan and Zimbabwe.
"If you look more carefully, here is what you see: a rising power exploiting other countries' natural resources, spoiling the global environment, making economic deals but looking away from serious government mistreatment of its citizens and not delivering on promises," Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote recently in The International Herald Tribune.
Economic and military power are not the only issues in the Sino-American relationship. The Bush administration wants Mr. Hu to embrace political reform. In a speech in Japan on Wednesday, Mr. Bush warned that Chinese citizens would one day demand political freedom. But Chinese leaders are far more concerned with social stability in their rapidly changing country than they are with individual rights.
For now, the relationship still revolves around managing the consequences of China's growth, which can be seen everywhere in America. For example, the car plant Deng visited in 1979 is still open, but Ford is reducing the size of its North American workforce, even as it expands in China. China manufactured 13,000 cars in 1979; last year, the number exceeded five million.
The belief that America is losing jobs unfairly to China is one reason Congress is expected to begin debating an anti-China trade tariff next year. Then again, Deng ended his tour with a visit to Boeing, in suburban Seattle. Today, the aviation company has billions of dollars of China contracts. And many of the cheap consumer goods Americans want are made in China.
Experts run the gamut in predicting the course of relations between China and the United States. But one prediction that turned out wrong was made in an article in The New York Times in 1979: namely, that Deng's economic overture to America would have limited impact because China economy was too backward to take off.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
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