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CHINA: Postscript to Obama Visit: When Beijing Blinked
Analysis by Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING, Nov 26, 2009 (IPS) - The jury is still out on what Beijing and Washington achieved during President
Barack Obama’s first state visit to China last week. But one trait has emerged
more strongly than anything else.
While eager to receive recognition for its star-power economy and financial
crisis management, China balked at suggestions of global burden sharing
with the U.S. and rejected the possibility that the Group of Two (G2) will play
a role in shaping the new world order.
Many other sensitive issues were broached only indirectly during Obama’s
stage-managed visit, but on the subject of G2 and acting as U.S. partner in
global management, Beijing was more than explicit.
"We do not approve of the notion of G2," Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said.
"China is the world’s most populous developing nation, and we are very
conscious of the long way China has to go before it becomes a modernised
country."
Wen went on to praise the importance of U.S.-China cooperation in the
current fraught-with-risk international situation, but emphasised that China
was going to consider first and foremost its national interests.
"Advocating the G2 is in fact an American strategy, not China’s" said Shi
Yinhong, an expert on international relations at Renmin University in Beijing.
"The U.S. wants us in a tandem because that way it will be easier to work on
all financial and security issues the way they want us to."
Since the conclusion of Obama’s visit, a string of articles and opinions have
appeared in the press appraising the new status quo between the world’s
only superpower and the one aspiring for the title. A note of caution has been
recurrent in most of them. In a rebuke of proliferate predictions of America’s
decline of recent months, experts are now warning that the U.S.’s "era of
world dominance" is far from over and China has been misled into believing
the opposite.
"We must be crystal-clear that the United States still is and will remain for
some time the only superpower in the world. Its supremacy in military,
technological and any other area of importance is unrivalled," said an editorial
in the ‘China Business News’ this week. "Those who profess America’s decline
are being too rushed."
Some experts see the rise of the European Union as the only viable threat to
U.S. supremacy, and caution that all advances to China made by the U.S. are
based on the premises of reluctance to cede international leadership to the
EU.
"The last 10 years have been all about U.S. efforts to preserve the dollar’s
status as a global currency from the challenges posed by the euro," said
Wang Jian, a well-known expert with China Society of Macroeconomics, in an
opinion article published by the same paper.
"Washington’s international strategy has been to ‘stir trouble in Europe while
keeping Asia stable’. This is why Washington is so keen on drawing close to
China and vehemently opposed to Japan’s idea of creating an Asian
community without the U.S.," he argued.
Warnings have been issued that China has done little to loosen the embrace
of Chinamerica—the interdependence of the countries’ economies that is
often blamed for creating trade imbalances and contributing to the financial
crisis.
Since China’s economy continues to be largely dependent on exports, Beijing
reacted nervously to suggestions by U.S. officials that the United States was
now ready to shrug off its role of insatiable buyer of Chinese goods to save
more.
For months now China has been the target of calls from the West to get its
huge population to spend more. Chinese leaders have rolled out a series of
policies to boost consumption in the countryside, where two-thirds of
China’s population live. The results have been negligible.
Wang Jian openly dismissed Beijing’s progress in boosting domestic demand,
saying nothing much has changed since the days before the crisis. "Unless
China changes the way national income is distributed, domestic consumption
will not replace exports as the new economic engine," he said.
Fears that exports may suffer explain Beijing’s refusal to budge at prodding
from the U.S., Europe and several Asian countries to let its currency, the yuan,
appreciate.
Allowing the yuan to rise is seen by many now as China’s due contribution to
reversing global trade imbalances. During his visit Obama repeatedly paid
tribute to China’s rise as a global power, arguing that its emergence as such
gives it a greater share of global responsibility.
But Beijing rebuffed all these calls, saying that in regard to the yuan, its
national priorities converged with the world’s best interests.
"We maintained a stable yuan during the financial crisis, which not only
helped the global economy but also the stability of the world’s financial
markets," deputy foreign minister He Yafei told journalists just hours after
Obama issued his call for "more market-oriented exchange rate over time."
(END)
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