As a dangerous confrontation flared between China and Taiwan in 1996, US president Bill Clinton deployed the Seventh Fleet to deter the two rivals from going to war.
Five years later, when a US spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter, US President George W. Bush faced a prolonged international crisis. Meanwhile, human rights and democracy in China were a perennial hot-button issue.
Now it’s US president-elect Barack Obama’s turn to deal with the China challenge, and this time, it’s all about the money. As the global financial system teeters, China, with its US$1.9 trillion in foreign reserves and slowing but still strong economy, offers a potential lifeline.
The crisis that Obama is inheriting has pushed aside the old points of contention and underscored how profoundly the power equation between Washington and Beijing has changed.
China now owns more than half-a-trillion dollars in US government bonds, more than any other country, and Washington needs Beijing to continue buying them to help finance the national debt and the US$700 billion financial industry bailout.
And while China’s economy is heavily dependent on exports to the US, it is also a growing market for US products, making trade retaliation — long a threat wielded solely by Washington — more of a two-way street.
“The power shift in China-US relations is making them more interdependent,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an international relations scholar at Beijing’s Renmin University. “This next president will need to exercise greater caution.”
When Clinton first ran for the White House, he made human rights an issue, accusing then president George Bush of “coddling” the communist dictatorship. But during his presidency, the administration moved to uncouple human rights from trade privileges — a milestone in normalizing ties between the two powers.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, as Chinese exports boomed, China’s trade surplus hit US$163.3 billion last year, becoming an increasingly fractious political issue, even as the question of human rights was moving to the fringes of the public agenda.
In the Obama-John McCain race, human rights figured early when Tibetan unrest flared and Obama called on Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympics.
However, the issue soon faded from his talking points and when relations with China briefly resurfaced, the context was purely economic.
China is a veto-holding permanent member of the UN Security Council and there are many other reasons why Washington needs Beijing’s help — to maintain detente in the Taiwan Strait, strip North Korea of its nukes and pressure Iran into cooperating with nuclear inspections.
Throw in the economy and many expect Obama to take a mild approach toward Beijing on issues of human rights, freedom of speech and Tibet.
That would be a mistake, argues Wei Jingsheng (魏京生), the internationally renowned pro-democracy dissident whose imprisonment and exile came to define the difficulties of the US-China relationship in the 1980s and 1990s.
Wei, who now lives in Washington, maintains that the root of the economic crisis lies in the trade imbalance with China, and that China’s industrial might is built on underpaid, badly treated workers. China gets away with it because Western business doesn’t want human rights getting in the way of profits, he says.
“This expectation of China to save the West is only a dream,” he said. “But why is this dream fanned up so much? Because the big businesses in the West are pumping up this idea; they do not want to see Western governments take severe measures against the Chinese government.”
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese