The China Thread

[CountDeMoney]

An Appel aPod! I love it!

[Jacob]

May 35th Anniversary:







Article in the Atlantic here: http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/tiananmen-square-how-chinese-bloggers-play-cat-and-mouse-with-censors/276523/

[Tonitrus]

[CountDeMoney]

Shit, now I've got to find my old "Summer of Mono" photoshop.

[Admiral Yi]

I think this one may have been shopped.  The shadows don't match the ducks.

[DGuller]

 

[MadImmortalMan]

Banning emoticons?   

[DGuller]

Banning emoticons?   

 

[CountDeMoney]

U.S.-China Meeting's Aim: Personal Diplomacy
By MARK LANDLER and JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — When Tom Donilon, President Obama's national security adviser, met with President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week to discuss his coming visit to the United States, China's newly minted leader told him he wanted a conversation with Mr. Obama that did not involve diplomatic talking points. As if to underscore the message, he ignored the notes sitting in front of him.

When Mr. Xi arrives on Friday for his first visit as president, Mr. Obama will make his own symbolic gesture, welcoming him amid the olive trees and artificial lakes of a 200-acre California estate.

In more than six hours of meetings over two days, with ample time for dinner and a sunset stroll beneath the San Jacinto Mountains, administration officials hope Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi, who met for the first time last year in Washington, will really get to know each other, while exchanging ideas about how best to manage a complex, sometimes combustible relationship between the world's two biggest economies.

It is an enormous bet on the power of personal diplomacy, in a setting carefully chosen to nurture a high-level friendship.

Rarely, if ever, have American and Chinese leaders had so much unscripted time together. Jiang Zemin met with George W. Bush at Mr. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., in 2002, but it was shortly before Mr. Jiang stepped down. And after talking for an hour, the two men jumped into a truck for a tour of the ranch, ate barbecue and held a news conference.

This time the setting will not be a ranch but Sunnylands, the desert retreat in Rancho Mirage built by Walter H. Annenberg, where Ronald Reagan celebrated New Year's Eve and Richard M. Nixon went to lick his wounds after Watergate.

For Mr. Obama, who is keenly interested in Asia but has little emotional connection to China, it is a chance to escape the stifling protocol of state visits and establish a rapport with Mr. Xi that the president never enjoyed with his predecessor, Hu Jintao.

Mr. Obama, his aides say, was frustrated that he rarely broke through in a dozen stilted encounters with Mr. Hu, who would respond with bland talking points, even when, for example, the president implored him to do more to curb the nuclear threat from North Korea.

For Mr. Xi, a tough-minded party veteran whose no-nonsense style recalls Deng Xiaoping, it is a chance to set the tone for his most important diplomatic relationship at the start of what is expected to be a decade atop the Chinese power structure.

"Their leadership was very open to this kind of encounter," Mr. Donilon said. "They sense that this is an important moment in the relationship."

The choice of Sunnylands, about 120 miles southeast of Los Angeles, with its history as a place where Republican presidents and their Hollywood friends went to unwind, was calculated to give this diplomatic first date the best chance of succeeding. Even the estate's Republican lineage may play a part, at least metaphorically.

"Sunnylands is a West Coast monument to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan," said Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center for U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. "The last time the U.S.-China relationship broke through was Nixon and Kissinger."

Mr. Xi has on a number of occasions signaled his desire to break from normal protocol. At a meeting with Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, he also did without talking points, prompting Mr. Lew to set aside his own notes.

Most significant, Mr. Xi, while vice president, spent about 20 hours with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in reciprocal visits. In those encounters, administration officials said, Mr. Xi expressed a keen interest in how China figured in American politics.

Mr. Biden, for his part, emphasized that the militaries of the two countries needed to communicate better, particularly given that China's growing military might is putting its warships and planes closer to American ones. The substantive nature of the meetings helped persuade the White House that it was worth putting Mr. Xi and Mr. Obama together sooner than the diplomatic calendar would have dictated.

Mr. Xi, analysts in Beijing said, has two very different goals: to nurture trust, yet project self-confidence. He appears genuinely to want a stable and productive relationship, but there is also widespread wariness of American intentions, said Sun Zhe, director of the Center for U.S.-China Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

"China hopes that this visit will help to build personal ties and friendship between the two leaders so that conflicts in relations can be moderated," Mr. Sun said in an interview. "But expectations cannot be too high; otherwise, they'll be followed by frustration."

Tensions between the United States and China have flared over the Obama administration's so-called strategic pivot to Asia, which some Chinese, particularly in the military, have viewed as an American plot to check China's influence in its region.

"This isn't prewired for success," said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a top China adviser in the Clinton administration now at the Brookings Institution. "There is a sense that the relationship has gotten into trouble. Both sides feel it can no longer be treated in a regularized manner."

Cheng Li, another China expert at Brookings, noted that after a brief honeymoon when Mr. Xi assumed power, he has already sowed suspicion among liberal elites in China with his strong ties to the military and what some see as nationalistic impulses.

Whatever the Sunnylands summit meeting might mean for United States-China relations, it will reset the Annenberg estate's long-established image as a Republican playground, where presidents relaxed with guests who included Frank Sinatra and Queen Elizabeth II.

"This place was created specifically for just this kind of meeting," said Geoffrey Cowan, president of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. "It's beautiful; it's completely private; it's secure."

David Dreier, a recently retired House Republican leader who now leads an Annenberg commission on Pacific issues, said he told Mr. Obama about the estate at a White House reception in December and added, "One of my priorities is to get you there."

Other officials at the foundation also promoted the estate as a presidential location, so when the Chinese agreed to a meeting outside Washington, the White House director of scheduling, Danielle Crutchfield, raised the idea of holding it there.

Mr. Xi will arrive in California from Mexico after a three-country visit to Latin America, while Mr. Obama was planning to be in California for two Democratic fund-raisers.

There are limits to the coziness. Mr. Xi will not stay on the estate but at a nearby Hyatt hotel — a reflection of Chinese concerns about eavesdropping, according to a person familiar with the planning. Translators will be required, since Mr. Xi is not fluent in English. And while Mr. Xi's wife, Peng Liyuan, is traveling with him, Michelle Obama is not planning to accompany her husband, which will deprive the meeting of a layer of informality.

Still, other Americans who have met Mr. Xi recently expressed some optimism for the Sunnylands summit meeting. George P. Shultz, a secretary of state in the Reagan administration who was part of a small delegation to Beijing that also included Henry A. Kissinger, said the Chinese "are really trying to give us a message that they want to have a constructive, not a confrontational, relationship with us."

[Valmy]

It sounds like they are dating.  Tyr will be outraged.

[Josquius]

It sounds like they are dating.  Tyr will be outraged.

[CountDeMoney]

Fareed Zakaria, Islamopologist and overall anti-America-as-Colossus weenie, actually says something rather relevant.

China is not the world's other superpower
By Fareed Zakaria, Wednesday, June 5, 7:21 PM

In February 1972, Richard Nixon went to China and restored Sino-U.S. relations that had been broken for 23 years. During that visit, Nixon held a series of critical meetings with China's premier, Zhou Enlai, and they discussed the broad strategic framework that would guide bilateral relations. President Obama's meetings with President Xi Jinping this weekend have the potential to be a similarly historic summit — but with an important caveat.

China has always played a weak hand brilliantly. When Mao Zedong and Zhou met with Nixon and Henry Kissinger, China was in the midst of economic, political and cultural chaos. Its per capita gross domestic product had fallen below that of Uganda and Sierra Leone. Yet Beijing negotiated as if from commanding heights. Today, it has tremendous assets — but it is not the world's other superpower, and we should not treat it as such.

The United States has been accused of having a confused, contradictory foreign policy, as each administration reverses its predecessor. This is often a mischaracterization, never more so than with China policy. Since Nixon and Kissinger opened the door, U.S. foreign policy toward China has been remarkably consistent over 40 years and eight presidents. Washington has sought to integrate China into the world, economically and politically. This policy has been good for the United States, good for the world and extremely good for China.

But many of the forces that pushed the two countries together are waning. For the first two decades of relations, Washington had strategic reasons to align with Beijing and shift the balance of power against the Soviet Union. While China was in its early years of development, it desperately needed access to U.S. capital, technology and political assistance to expand its economy. Today, China is much stronger and is acting in ways — from cyberattacks to its policies in Africa — that are counter to U.S. interests and values. For its part, Washington must respond to the realities of Asia, where its historic allies are nervous about China's rise.

That's why the meetings between Obama and Xi are important. Both countries need to take a clear-eyed look at the relationship and find a new path that could define a cooperative framework for the future, as Nixon and Zhou did in 1972. Both sides should seek to create a broad atmosphere of trust rather than to work through a "to-do" list.

Some Americans want to see these meetings as a "G-2" alliance of sorts between the world's largest economies. That would not serve U.S. interests nor those of broader global stability and integration.

China is the world's second-largest economy and, because of its size, will one day become the largest. (On a per-capita basis, it is a middle-income country, and it might never surpass the United States in that regard.) But power is defined along many dimensions, and by most political, military, strategic and cultural measures, China is a great but not global power. For now, it lacks the intellectual ambition to set the global agenda.

The scholar David Shambaugh, who has always been well-disposed toward China, put it this way in a recent book: "China is, in essence, a very narrow-minded, self-interested, realist state, seeking only to maximize its own national interests and power. It cares little for global governance and enforcing global standards of behavior (except its much-vaunted doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of countries). Its economic policies are mercantilist and its diplomacy is passive. China is also a lonely strategic power, with no allies and experiencing distrust and strained relationships with much of the world."

Beijing wants good relations with the United States and a general climate of external stability. That's partly because it faces huge internal challenges. Chinese leaders want to embark on serious reform at home (described as "rectification") and are searching for a way to generate greater legitimacy for the Communist Party, experimenting with both a return to Maoist rhetoric and a revival of nationalism. Beijing wants to rise without creating a powerful anti-Chinese backlash among Asia's other powers.

The United States should seek good and deep relations with China. They would mean a more stable, prosperous and peaceful world. Further integrating China into an open global system would help maintain that system and the open world economy that rests on it. But this can happen only if China recognizes and respects that system and operates from the perspective of a global power and not that of a "narrow-minded" state seeking only to maximize its interests.

In other words, when China starts acting like a superpower, we should treat it like one.

[derspiess]

So what's he want us to do?

[CountDeMoney]

Go back to treating them as a quaint insignificant people, with nothing of value to offer.  Because that worked so well for centuries.

[Monoriu]

I don't understand.  What is the difference between being treated like a superpower, and not being treated like one?