Obama engages a muscular China

What happened

For the first time in history, the presidents of the U.S. and China met in Beijing this week as near equals, with President Obama seeking to “rebalance” U.S. relations with its surging Asian counterpart. In six hours of private talks and in public events tightly scripted by the Chinese government, Chinese President Hu Jintao showed little inclination to accommodate Obama on key issues, including the potential imposition of sanctions on Iran, the revaluation of China’s currency, or human rights and Internet freedom for China’s 1.3 billion people. In nonconfrontational language, Obama gently asserted American values on free speech and “universal” human rights, while describing China as a vital “partner” in America’s future. “The major challenges of the 21st century, from climate change to nuclear proliferation to economic recovery,” Obama said, are “challenges that neither of our nations can solve by acting alone.”

Obama’s visit provided a graphic visual representation of how much U.S.-China relations have changed over the last decade. China owns $800 billion in U.S. Treasury securities and billions more in other U.S. debt, and its economy remains robust while the U.S. remains mired in a shaky recovery. “It used to be the U.S. could go around and say, ‘Do this’ and ‘Do that’ because they had so much leverage,” said Dali Yang, an Asia scholar at the University of Chicago. “Today, the U.S. can’t do that.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What the editorials said

Obama was wise to take a respectful tone, said the Los Angeles Times. Conservative hard-liners prefer belligerence and threats, based on the assumption that global power is “a zero-sum game.” It isn’t. We have our differences with China on such issues as currency valuation, the growing U.S. debt, protectionist trade policies, and human rights, but “for better or worse, the two economies are interdependent” and will progress in tandem. The U.S. can “acknowledge China’s economic and political clout” without surrendering its own claim to global leadership.

A change in tone is due, said the Financial Times, but Obama “is still fumbling for the right one.” In truth, “China’s huge holdings of U.S. treasuries are not a sign of great strength” but of China’s dependence on the U.S. Yet Obama seems to be “treading on eggshells,” declining, for example, to meet with the Dalai Lama for fear of offending China’s authoritarian leaders. “Accommodation can be taken too far.”

What the columnists said

The sad truth is that China now has the upper hand, said Robert Reich in The Wall Street Journal. China’s economy is a roaring engine of production, while its consumers remain relatively conservative, saving far more of their incomes than Americans do. Our consumption of Chinese products boosts employment in China, and keeps dollars flowing east while undermining our own economy. China has now banked so much money from exports, said John Ross in TheNewYork Times.com, that it has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s greatest source of capital, with Beijing supplanting New York as the primary lender. If Obama’s tone with China seems new, perhaps it’s because it marks a “turning point in world financial history.”

It doesn’t have to be that way, said Gordon Chang in The Weekly Standard. Nearly all of China’s $295 billion trade surplus last year flowed from U.S. consumers. This gives Obama leverage, in the form of possible tariffs on imports—“but only if he uses it.” Instead, he adopts the role of needy supplicant, bowing before China’s arrogant and “anti-American” leader.

Unfortunately, we are needy, said David Brooks in The New York Times. Our deficit with China goes beyond trade—it’s “spiritual.” Today’s Chinese are “astonishingly optimistic,” with 86 percent believing their country is headed in the right direction and two-thirds expressing confidence that China will become the global technology leader. Americans, by contrast, are now plagued by self-doubt. We worry about the wounded economy and what lies ahead. The Chinese now seem to possess the vital ingredient that once defined American success: “faith in the future.”