20110116 China is still growing into its status

China is still growing into its status

By Chris Patten

Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) will travel to the US for his third official visit as China’s leader on Wednesday. It may be his last before he hands over power to his apparently designated successor, Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (習近平), in 2012 — coincidentally the same year that US President Barack Obama will be campaigning for a second term in the White House.

According to Forbes Magazine, Hu is the most powerful man in the world. Leaving aside the fact that power at the top is much more bureaucratically institutionalized in China than it was in Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) day (a good thing), certainly this visit is hugely important. Indeed, the US-China relationship will be the most significant bilateral engagement in shaping the course of the 21st century.

At the heart of globalization has been the emergence of fast-growing economies, most notably Brazil, India and, above all, China. The US, of course, remains the world’s only superpower — militarily, economically, politically and culturally. While the world’s democracies are not slow to criticize US leadership, they know that they rely on the US in tackling the most serious global problems. Without the US, nothing much gets done.

However, China now has enough commercial clout, backed by more than US$2 trillion in -foreign-exchange reserves, to play a decisive role in advancing or impeding global problem-solving — from the G20 agenda to efforts to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. China is far too big to be taken for granted and it wants to be shown the respect that it associates with being an ancient civilization that has contributed so much to human progress.

For the rest of us, the key question is whether the US and China will be increasingly acrimonious competitors or cooperative partners, albeit with very different political systems. Will they fight to dominate the century or to make it more peaceful and prosperous?

China has become surprisingly maladroit in handling the US and its Asian neighbors in recent months. Its leaders seem to have interpreted Obama’s attempts to engage with them, down-playing bilateral aggravations, as a sign of the US’ weakness in the wake of Wall Street’s crash and military reverses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arrogance has replaced sophisticated modesty. What else can explain the treatment of Obama on his first trip to China and during the disastrous 2009 climate-change conference in Copenhagen, where a relatively minor Chinese official wagged his finger in the face of the US president?

China’s official behavior following the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) turned an embarrassment into a public-diplomacy disaster and China’s neighbors have been disturbed by Beijing’s efforts to throw its weight around. Japan, Vietnam and even Singapore have reacted with consternation, highlighting the need for the US to remain the principal guarantor of stability in Asia.

It is surprising that this has happened under Hu, a cautious and intelligent man. Maybe this behavior is attributable to the imminent leadership change, with an aggressive faction in the Chinese Communist Party Politburo and Central Committee needing to be mollified. There must be some explanation for China choosing this moment even for an unnecessary and ham-fisted row with the Vatican.

So the stakes in Washington are high for Hu. He will hear for himself the strength of US arguments about trade and the yuan’s exchange rate. He will be able to point out, at least in private, that if you look at the real effective exchange rate — taking account of the impact on export prices of rising labor costs — the yuan-US dollar gap is a lot less important than China’s critics suggest. However, he must also provide some real evidence that China is opening its markets as domestic consumption grows and that it recognizes that a -sustainable global recovery requires adjustments in China as well as the US to redress international imbalances.

On the security front, China should show that it shares the nervousness of the US, Europe and the Middle East about the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. It is not enough to hope for the best. No one doubts that North Korea is responsible for its own delinquent behavior, but China’s public failure to distance itself from the North’s military provocations has undermined its credibility in efforts to defuse the crisis.

More important, China must make clear that it will support tougher sanctions on Iran — and help to implement them — if the Iranian regime continues to lie about its nuclear program. Iran’s oil and gas should not blind China to the dangers to its neighborhood and the entire world if the Islamic Republic develops a nuclear weapon.

China deserves to be treated seriously as a major player in global governance, but in order to secure the status that it desires it must demonstrate that it understands that partnership is a two-way street.

Chris Patten is chancellor of the University of Oxford, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs.