What the Chinese Want From Obama
By The Editors
February 20, 2009
roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com
As she meets with Chinese leaders this weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to begin a more vigorous engagement with China on issues ranging from climate change to the global financial crisis.
We asked these experts, all of whom are based in China, what people there expect from the Obama administration and what issues they think should be on Mrs. Clinton’s agenda.
Daniel A. Bell, professor at Tsinghua University Andy Xie, economist Zhang Haibin, professor at Peking University Michael Meyer, author and hutong expert
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Chinese Skepticism
Daniel A. Bell is professor of political theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is the author of “China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.”
Hillary Clinton visits China at a time when fewer young people are looking West for political ideals, when American-style capitalism is typically blamed for the global financial crisis, and when foreign firms have lost their shine. This attitude shift means that building a more mature U.S.-China relationship and broaching issues like global warming and human rights will require even deeper engagement.
Most of my students seem surprisingly immune to Obama mania. That may be because relations between China and the United States have been steady since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, largely because the Bush administration turned its attention away from China and toward other perceived threats.
Of course, there is respect for Mr. Obama’s intellectual abilities and leadership skills. But even “liberal” students are given to skepticism. One of my graduate students told me that she was dismayed by the uncritical coverage of the inauguration, the kind of love-fest for a political leader that could only make the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party envious. We discussed, only half-jokingly, the possibility that China should adopt some form of constitutional monarchy, so that the public could project its emotions on a symbolic leader while evaluating the de facto political leader’s performance more rationally.
For now, debate over political structures has taken a back seat to worries about the financial meltdown. China’s export-based economy has been hit hard, though there’s optimism that domestic consumers will lead the recovery. Today, the most competitive jobs are in the public sector, with tens of thousands of students competing for jobs in the civil service that offer more security.
Most students recognize that change must come, but democracy is now more often blamed for political instability and economic inefficiency. Hence, they and many intellectuals are turning to China’s own traditions for inspiration. Democracy with Chinese characteristics is still the slogan, with more debates centering on the Chinese characteristics.
The Obama administration could better connect with these groups, which have influence on political change, by showing a genuine interest in China’s culture, allowing for the possibility of morally justifiable difference and treating China as an equal with something positive to offer. At this moment, even symbolic gestures — perhaps using a few words of Chinese in speeches addressing them — could help in that direction.
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Two Economies, Inseparable
Andy Xie, formerly of the World Bank, is an economist based in Shanghai.
It’s never been more true that Americans and the Chinese are joined at the hip, at least economically. And nothing demonstrates that more clearly than the current financial crisis — which may make the U.S.-China relationship more of a partnership and also more fraught with new kinds of tensions.
What happens in Florida and Arizona can have a significant and immediate effect on jobs in Guangdong. For example, when 70 percent of the furniture sold in the United States is made in China, any downturn in the housing market (fewer buyers of new furniture) means layoffs in China. The United States lost three million jobs since the subprime-mortgage debacle. China has lost 20 million.
More than five million Chinese college students are graduating, and they will compete for jobs against five million college graduates from previous years who haven’t found jobs. Ten million unemployed college graduates pose a big stability issue for the Chinese government. That is a situation that can push a country into a more aggressive posture, sometimes toward trading partners. Though, so far, the Chinese leadership has taken more conciliatory stance toward the United States than popular opinion demands.
On the finance side, the United States is now the largest foreign investor in China. And China is the largest owner of the U.S. treasury bonds. Some estimates put China ‘s holdings of the U.S. debt papers at $1.7 trillion. Since President Obama’s $783 billion fiscal stimulus will be financed by issuing more treasuries, there’s no doubt China’s continued buying of the bonds will be essential.
But many Chinese are becoming very uneasy about the country’s huge holdings of United States treasuries and agency bonds. America has gotten into the current trouble from living beyond its means — borrowing to maintain a lifestyle it cannot afford.
The Obama policies don’t address this problem. In fact, the stimulus replaces household borrowing with government borrowing, with ever more debt owed to foreigners. China’s position as the largest creditor adds to the concern here about the dollar’s value and how well the U.S. is managing the financial crisis.
Lastly, the valuation of the yuan could remain a divisive issue for the two nations. In fact, the yuan’s value should be allowed to float in the future. But to insist on that now would be dangerous with the dollar’s stability dependent on its linkage to yuan. If China is pressured to float the yuan, the dollar’s value could fall, causing an inflationary surge in the United States. We need to work out a long-term plan for floating the yuan, but not use megaphone diplomacy to harangue China into doing something that could hurt everyone now.
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How to Make Progress on Climate Issues
Zhang Haibin is an associate professor at the School of International Studies, Peking University, and a member of the Expert Team on Trade and Environment, Chinese Ministry of Commerce.
It’s unrealistic to expect a great leap in climate cooperation between China and the United States, given the complexity of the issue and the lack of mutual trust. Still, there are good signs that meaningful progress can be made with the Obama administration.
(Click to enlarge.) Factory in Tianjin. (Photo: Reuters)As the world’s two biggest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouse gases, both nations have to find ways to create low-carbon economies. China is potentially a huge market for clean energy technology, and the United States has advanced energy technology and rich resources. Cooperation on this issue could actually lead to better economic and trade relations.
Three factors, however, have stood in the way, even though the two nations have signed almost 40 bilateral energy and environmental agreements in the last three decades. Until now, there’s been reluctance on the part of the United States to make climate change a real priority in bilateral relations with China. (The European Union and Japan both released joint statements with China on climate change, demonstrating their intention to work together.)
The U.S. should set an example on greenhouse gas limits that China can follow.
Hostility toward Communism excludes China from receiving official development aid from the United States, which could significantly hasten climate-change-related projects. Such aid remains a main channel for North-South cooperation on climate change, and without it China-U.S. efforts have been crippled. (Japan and the European Union both provide aid to China for climate-change projects.)
Perhaps the greatest hurdle has been the disagreement over which nations should take the lead in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The United States required developing nations, China and India in particular, to reduce emissions in step with developed countries; China rejected any binding mitigation commitment.
The Obama administration could end this impasse by signing a summit document on climate change with China, helping China invest in climate-change projects by providing development assistance, and setting an example by accepting binding emissions targets.
In response, China will need to show that it can meet the ambitious energy conservation and emissions mitigation targets in its 11th Five-Year Plan. It should set firm targets beyond 2010, and be open to a discussion of when China will join the developed countries in accepting binding targets.
Nobody knows exactly how far and fast the two nations can go in addressing climate change. But it’s clear that cooperation on this issue will, to a great extent, define their future relations.
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China’s American Way of Life
Michael Meyer is the author of “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed.”
If Hillary Clinton were to step away from photo-ops at the Great Hall of the People and walk 200 yards south past the edge of Tiananmen Square, she would enter Dazhalan — a half-square mile of 114 hutong, or lanes. Home to 57,000 people, this 800-year-old neighborhood exemplifies the sort of urban planning that many American cities seek to recreate, featuring narrow, car-free streets enlivened by a tight-knit community. Mrs. Clinton should visit the area while it’s still there; wide roads are slated to pierce through the heart of this historical center, where a new boutique mall and a Wal-Mart already shadow its edges.
(Click to enlarge.) One of the Beijing alleyway neighborhoods known as hutong. (Photo: Shiho Fukada for The New York Times)To rationalize their destruction, city officials call these neighborhoods slums. They are not. As blighted as their single-story courtyard homes may be — most lack central heat and toilets — the hutong do not cause pathologies, but instead foster the type of civic life absent in Beijing’s high-rise apartments, partitioned by security guards, fences, multilock doors and a lack of public space.
While no one should have to live in poverty, no matter how picturesque, the lanes’ melting pot of natives and migrants, laborers and entrepreneurs, old and young, form a safe, diverse community that would be familiar to Mrs. Clinton, author of a text praising the social model of a village. In Beijing, she might note, it takes a hutong to raise a child.
While fewer than one-eighth of the capital’s lanes survive, it may seem beyond our top diplomat’s authority to lobby for their preservation. Certainly, Mrs. Clinton’s Chinese counterpart could counter with some choice observations of Washington. (Prince Charles, who has never visited Beijing, recently launched a project with a Chinese university to modernize the lanes’ housing.)
Yet as modernizing Chinese cities emulate America’s car-friendly designs — and often employ American architects, but not clean-energy firms to realize it — she could tie China’s urbanization into her broader agenda of engaging Beijing in a partnership to reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency, measures that would affect global health and the economy.
“If Chinese want to live the American way of life, then we need seven earths to support them,” the founder of China’s first environmental nongovernmental organization once told me. That impact is of less concern to a government funding large-scale urbanization in the service of economic growth. Planners and officials here often insist, with rightful indignation, that “we have every right to make the same development mistakes that America did.”
Mrs. Clinton could correct that perception with a visit to the hutong the way her husband galvanized AIDS awareness when he hugged an H.I.V.-positive girl at a Beijing speech in 2003. Photos of that encounter still circulate, and AIDS prevention is one of the few positive issues that link Sino-American exchanges. Smart growth could be another. By placing the same importance on development as the countries apply to trade and security, China can learn from the United States’ planning mistakes, while also showcasing its huge investment in national infrastructure — airport expansions, bridge-building, high-speed rail projects.
When I first arrived in China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1995, an American diplomat counseled, “Forget democracy. You’re here to create future Pepsi drinkers.” So here’s a suggestion in turn: Mrs. Clinton, forgo a tour of Beijing’s restored palaces and impressive Olympic venues. Instead, take a short walk down to Dazhalan’s narrow lanes, and as the flashbulbs pop, simply say, “This is the type of neighborhood I wish America had more of.” If she’s thirsty, Wal-Mart’s wide aisles are crowded with Pepsi. |
