CHINA WATCH

The Unissue

Mon. Jul 21, 2008


If you can't recall hearing much debate about China during the 2008 presidential campaign, don't bother asking your friends whether you've missed something. Relations with China haven't been a front-burner issue this year, and aren't likely to be -- thank goodness for all concerned.

That might seem a bit curious, given the importance of the relationship between the two countries. Dealing with the rise of China over the next few decades "is one of the big questions we face in this century," says Joseph Nye, a veteran U.S. foreign policy expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

"Historically, when you have a rise of one country challenging a dominant power, you have a war," Nye observes.

But so far, at least, the two major parties' presumptive presidential nominees -- Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill. -- have barely mentioned the China issue.

Part of the reason is that many of the hot-button issues involving China have cooled. The uproar over Beijing's crackdown in Tibet has abated in the face of global concern over China's earthquakes. China finally has let its yuan appreciate -- by a hefty 20 percent. Beijing has sent peacekeeping troops to help in Darfur. Iraq has moved to center stage.

But the biggest factor for the omission might be that both major candidates essentially agree on what policies the United States should pursue in its dealings with Beijing.

In the brief statements they have made, both men have indicated they would continue America's growing engagement with China in the economic and diplomatic arenas, while simultaneously hedging that approach with U.S. military vigilance in case the relationship sours.

"China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries," McCain wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last winter. "We have numerous overlapping interests. ...But until China moves toward political liberalization, our relationship will be based on periodically shared interests rather than the bedrock of shared values."

"Obviously, China is rising, and it's not going away," Obama said. "They're neither our enemy nor our friend. They're competitors. But we have to make sure that we have enough military-to-military contact, and forge enough of a relationship with them that we can stabilize the region."

Indeed, McCain and Obama aren't the only recent party chieftains to share the engage-but-hedge approach. Presidents Bush and Bill Clinton ended up following those policies, with substantial success. "There's been a surprising continuity of policy for the past 13 years," Nye says.

To be sure, that doesn't mean there aren't some serious issues the United States should push, says Doug Paal, a China-watcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Washington wants Beijing to soften its human rights posture, improve relations with Taiwan, do more to slow emissions and stop gobbling up long-term oil supplies.

On the military side, the United States wants Beijing to disclose more about its military buildup, address American concerns about its force-projection abilities and explain why it used force against a Japanese fishing boat -- the first such naval hostility in Asia in 50 years. All that is fair grist for debate.

But both candidates know that the heat of the campaign isn't the place to resolve those questions. Indeed, what a frontrunner says on the hustings could easily come back to haunt him once he takes the oath as president -- as it did in the cases of Clinton and Bush.

Clinton campaigned by lambasting the "butchers of Beijing" for human rights violations and trade disputes, which ultimately backfired on U.S. efforts to get China to open its markets. Once in office, he ended up supporting China's entry into the World Trade Organization -- a step that has helped make China a major U.S. export market.

In 2000, then-candidate Bush, seeking to distance himself from anything Clintonesque, pointedly described China as a "strategic competitor" rather than a "strategic partner," which had become a Clinton mantra. He quickly backed away from it after the resulting frosty relations with China proved a handicap.

Ironically, Bush's handling of China might go down as one of his few foreign policy successes. His former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick advanced U.S.-Chinese relations significantly by urging Beijing to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the global economic system, providing a path for China to join the international club.

And Treasury Secretary Paulson has conducted a series of high-level talks on a broad range of economic topics under a Strategic Economic Dialogue. The effort hasn't brought dramatic results, but it's served to bring the two sides a bit closer together.

Maintaining that course, the two candidates have yet to proffer such proposals such as "retaliatory" trade legislation; penalties for China's failure to let its currency rise, or protectionist barriers to Chinese investment -- all of which would end up hurting America. Instead, they've kept silent, making China the Unissue of the 2008 campaign.

That might not satisfy China's critics here, but it means that whoever becomes president in January will have less backtracking to do. To Paal and others, that's good news.

by Art Pine

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