AMERICAN.COM

Vice President Joseph Biden has written a very clear-headed analysis of our relationship with China. Though the idea that both Americans and many “in the region” entertain “visions of a cold-war-style rivalry” is a strawman, (this great power competition will make the Cold War seem simple—the Soviets were autarkic, China is not) Biden’s description of the duality of our economic partnership and military competition with China is a fair assessment of the current state of the relationship.

He is also correct that our strengths far outweigh China’s. He mentions the absence of liberty in China as one weakness. I would add a crushing amount of debt on Chinese bank sheets accumulated by the supposedly successful Chinese stimulus, the lack of currency convertibility, and the closed capital account. Chinese leaders seem ill-prepared to tackle any of these problems.

In contrast, the United States has many natural strengths. As Biden says, our open system creates the conditions for innovation and the attraction of the world’s top talent, and we possess an abundance of natural resources. To that I would add a much better demographic picture than China’s. And, compared to China’s, our entitlement problems seem manageable.

But our leaders do not seem well equipped to deal with our problems either. We are not making use of our natural resources. Our immigration policy is broken and not as good as it once was at attracting and assimilating talent. We are not tackling our entitlement problems.

And finally, though Biden pays lip service to a “greater presence” in Asia, we are in fact going in the opposite direction. The Obama defense cuts are imperiling our forward presence in the region and the new round of cuts Obama has proposed will do even more damage.

Though Biden has the prescription about right, we need leaders who will fix entitlements and who will ensure that America maintains its innovative edge, continues to lead on free trade, and resources its defense commitments. Unfortunately the Obama-Biden administration has failed on each count.

Does the Chinese leadership respond to international pressure when they behave badly? This was a question I was asked on PRI/NPR/BBC’s “The World” yesterday. In the case of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s release from prison the answer is yes. The condemnation of his imprisonment rang from many quarters, public and private, government and civil society. Finally, on the eve of Chinese Premiere Wen Jiabao’s trip to Germany, the Chinese caved. Ai Weiwei will be forced to remain silent about his political views, but there are many more like him, increasingly willing to speak out against the rampant repression, injustice, and corruption that has come to characterize modern China. Why does this kind of pressure on China work? The Chinese people are dynamic, entrepreneurial, and creative. The growing middle and upper classes want to be accepted by the West and thought of as cosmopolitan and law-abiding.

Legions of Chinese businessmen, intellectuals, and artists do business and shop in European and American cities (and increasingly illicitly take their money and families out of China). There is an increasing divergence between the parochial party cadre who run China’s government and the country’s vibrant populace. Many talk about how the Chinese leadership is constrained by “hyper nationalist netizens” in forging more responsible policies. But the Communist Party is equally beholden to a more cosmopolitan elite who are embarrassed by their leadership’s policies. This development is one lesson of Ai Weiwei’s release.

There is a line of thinking among some foreign policy observers that the Chinese play the long game, and can withstand public and private pressure in order to obtain their strategic objectives. Henry Kissinger is the dean of this school of thought (for example, see his new book On China). But it is easy to get carried away by China’s supposed strategic subtlety and hyperopia. Arresting a world renowned artist is not subtle. In foreign policy, antagonizing most of your neighbors in a period of three years is not farsighted.

The key to good China policy is the proper assessment of relative leverage. We still have the upper hand, particularly if we work with allies in Asia and in Europe. Our leverage ought not to be used to “keep China down” as the Chinese leadership likes to say. Rather it should be used to push and prod China to play by the rules internationally, and support the growing segment of the Chinese populace who wants justice at home. We have tried Kissinger’s way. How about trying more unified pressure?

Asia’s success can be explained primarily by three things: a commitment to free and open markets, a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and a U.S. commitment to its allies.

So President Obama’s decision to impose tariffs on tires made in China is indicative of exactly the wrong policy instincts toward Asia. Beijing and Washington have much to discuss in terms of rebalancing their respective economies, including fiscal discipline in the United States, getting China to respect intellectual property property rights, and increasing market access for high value-added (excluding defense) goods that the United States makes. But trade is the one dimension of the relationship that is strong and should be made stronger. With his latest decision, based on a very fuzzy law allowing for tariffs when a country “surges” a good or service, Obama further demonstrates his lack of commitment to free trade.

The tire decision is not the first sign of Obama’s less than stellar commitment to trade in Asia. As he gets the United States in a tangle with China over trade, the largest American free trade agreement ever in Asia, between the United States and Korea, sits frozen in Congress.

What about the other pillars of our Asia policy? Well, there has been no Obama vision on how to strengthen our alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, and India. And Obama’s defense cuts will affect our Pacific forces more than any others.

It is no wonder, then, that despite all the Obama campaign talk of re-engaging Asia, our allies such as Australia are taking steps to hedge against the possibility that we are weakening our commitment to the region.

Without a doubt, the United States should be concerned about China’s growing military ambitions, its human rights practices, and its regional intentions. At the same time, though, the United States must keep working to ensure both countries’ markets remain open to one another, or the two powers will not have much of a relationship at all.

So far on the key elements of an Asia policy Obama is failing: his trade policy is signaling protectionism, his strategic policy is signaling a weakening regional commitment, and his alliance policy does not seem to exist.

Beijing is the rare great power capital where visitors can still be on the receiving end of lectures about “splittism” and “foreign meddling.” After exchanging pleasantries, foreigners meeting with Chinese officialdom are treated to stern warnings not to encourage “splittists” in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. The net effect of these exchanges is to remind foreigners that despite the beautiful skyscrapers in China’s main cities and the economic sophistication of many Chinese elites, China is not quite the gentle post-modern power it pretends to be. Indeed, Chinese officials are concerned, to the point of paranoia, that their vast multiethnic empire will not hold. And, following the dictator’s playbook, rather than engage in any introspection as to just why it is that so many “Chinese” do not really want to be part of China, Beijing blames “foreign forces” and meddling from the West for their troubles.

While China should be worried about unrest, Uighur and Tibetan discontent is not manufactured by foreign forces. To the contrary, the West barely bats an eye about China’s repression. As events in Xinjiang, have demonstrated, Uighur Muslims are quite capable of expressing their discontent by themselves.

Thanks to Chinese efforts to block reporting and Internet access to Xinjiang, no one can be clear about exactly what is going on in that province. What is known is that the recent round of protests and counter-protests followed by brutal suppression has its roots in the Uighurs’ profound feeling of ethnic and religious discrimination. Uigurs marched on Uramqi over this past weekend to demonstrate their outrage over the killing of two co-religionists in Guangdong province. Protesters called for a fuller investigation into the killing of Muslim factory workers by Han Chinese laborers. Han Chinese in Xinjiang launched a counter-protest, and things got violent quickly. Chinese police and paramilitaries responded in their usual heavy-handed way (with a force of about 20,000 People’s Armed Police), and more violence ensued. The death count is at 156, while the Chinese security forces have arrested more than a thousand protesters. Beijing’s response has been true to form: block Internet access, keep reporters out, put down the protests by any means, and blame foreign forces such as D.C.-based Uighur human rights activist Rebiya Kabeer. This is about the same game plan that China followed last year when Tibetans protested their maltreatment.

In the short term, China’s approach works. Thanks to China’s propaganda machine, many if not most Chinese people believe that foreign forces are busily at work trying to “split” and humiliate China. China thus maintains the support of its own citizens. Moreover, for now Beijing does not have Washington to worry about. The Obama administration’s China policy seems to be focused on begging China to keep buying our ever expanding debt. And, the Politburo can count on President Obama to downplay human rights concerns, lest they stand in the way of his “can’t we all just get along” foreign policy.

But what about the long term? There are tens of millions of Muslims in China who are fed up with religious persecution and second-class citizenship. If China does have a terror problem, continuing to anger its Muslim population is not the way to confront it. And, with a violent uprising last year in Tibet, scores of weekly protests within China, and now the Uighur demonstrations, can we really call China a stable country?