China vows to pursue balanced trade with US

12 Feb 2012
AFP News

A top Chinese official on Sunday vowed Beijing would pursue more balanced trade with the United States, as the country's Vice President Xi Jinping prepares for an official US visit.

Xi, the country's leader-in-waiting, is likely to face a barrage of complaints over China's allegedly discriminatory trade policies when he visits the United States in the coming week.

Trade tensions between the world's two largest economies are on the rise as US President Barack Obama seeks to spark economic growth and create jobs -- and bids for re-election -- by attacking the deep US trade deficit with China.

China's Vice Minister of Commerce, Gao Hucheng, said both countries should make efforts to address the imbalance.

U.S. Pacific "Pivot" -- A New Cold War?

11/16/11
By Joshua S. Goldstein
Huffington Post

Thursday's ASEAN summit in Indonesia will feature an unprecented addition -- an American president. Fresh off an Asia-Pacific summit in Hawaii and a visit to Australia, President Obama will drop in to underscore the new Asia-Pacific focus of U.S. foreign policy.

You might have thought that America's direction is homeward as our wars wind down. But the administration has the idea of stepping sideways from the Middle East to the Pacific region. They call it the "pivot." If done well, it could be a good idea to keep the United States engaged and deepen trade and cooperation. If done badly, it could needlessly antagonize China and lead to wasteful military spending, or even stupid wars.

Hillary Clinton lays out the strategy in the first paragraph of her article "America's Pacific Century" in the current Foreign Affairs:

As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. ... One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region.

Biden's China Visit: Supplicant to Beijing?

Biden and Xi: Seems clear, right there in front of us

Monday, 22 August 2011
Written by Philip Bowring
Asia Sentinel

Vague agendas, US weakness on display

What was the point of Vice-President Joseph Biden’s just ended visit to China? It is surely not enough to point vaguely to the supposed goodwill generated by formulaic visits between leaders.

Given the number of such exercises in superficial global bonhomie, one would expect the world to be in a better shape than it is. It is one thing from a US perspective to have high-profile state visits such as President Obama’s to China or to have working visits by officials such Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. But the Biden visit appears to have had only the vaguest of agendas and if anything put US weakness on display at a time when China is boasting its global importance.

Ostensibly Biden was on a “get to know you” visit, in particular to “build a relationship” with fellow vice-president Xi Jinping, who is expected to succeed Hu Jintao as president and party boss next year. Biden was lyrical: “Foreign policy is more than just formal visits; it’s establishing personal relationships and trust. And it is my fond hope that our personal relationship will continue to grow”.

Politiktoons No. 130: Taming the Red Dragon

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com
and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Hu's Missing

Chinese rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, the victim of an enforced "disappearance" from February 2009 to March 2010, and again in April 2010. © CHRD

Give China's disappeared a voice at U.S.-China summit

By Phelim Kine
Published in: The Washington Times.
January 17, 2011

"If President Obama can raise just one human rights issue at the summit this week with Chinese President Hu Jintao, he should speak for China's disappeared." - Phelim Kine, Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.

If President Obama can raise just one human rights issue at the summit this week with Chinese President Hu Jintao, he should speak for China's disappeared.

On Dec. 19, 2009, 20 Uighurs - a Muslim ethnic minority in China who have long suffered from state discrimination and other abuses - were forced onto a Chinese government plane in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, flown back to China and effectively disappeared into official custody. Since then, the only whisper of the fate of the deported Uighurs - who included two infants - was an unconfirmed report in mid-January 2010 that some of them had been sentenced by a Xinjiang court to verdicts that included the death penalty.

The group - which had sought refugee status in Cambodia - had been issued "persons of concern" letters by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees; under international law, those documents should have provided them protection from deportation. The Chinese government insisted that the 20 Uighurs were "criminals" to whom those protections did not apply. The Cambodian government ignored the high likelihood that the Uighurs would face torture, disappearance and/or arbitrary detention upon return to China, and under pressure from Beijing, Cambodia forced the Uighurs to return. Shortly after their plane left, Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping touched down for a high-profile state visit to Cambodia, suggesting that Phnom Penh prioritized Beijing's demands over Cambodia's obligations under international law.

Dear President Hu: China must meet its global responsibilities

January 18, 2011
By Jamie Metzl, Special to CNN

Editor's note: Jamie Metzl is executive vice president of the Asia Society. He served in the U.S. National Security Council and State Department during the Clinton administration and as a human rights officer with the United Nations in Cambodia. The views expressed are his own.

But if China continues to rise without sufficiently supporting an international system that helps everyone, many aspects of that system will collapse and we will all be worse off.

(CNN) -- Dear President Hu Jintao,

Welcome to the United States. China is a great and ancient civilization, and we are thrilled that your country has made so much progress in so many areas over past decades, that it has brought hundreds of millions out of dire poverty and done so much to promote global economic growth during the recent financial crisis.

At the same time, we are both painfully aware of the rising tensions between our two countries. Many people here in the United States are critical of some of China's actions: its perceived unfair business practices through its currency valuation, subsidies to local manufacturers and weak intellectual property protections, its seeming unwillingness to address nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, its support of extremely abusive regimes, its rapid and opaque military buildup, and its more aggressive posture in the South and East China Seas, to name a few.

Chinese media have been equally critical of America and the West, asserting that we are unfairly blaming China for our own economic challenges and seeking to block China's growth.

Whatever our differences, one thing is absolutely clear. No major global challenge of the 21st century can be addressed without the active collaboration of our two countries.

A Key Link With China

August 13, 2010
By H.D.S. GREENWAY, I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor
International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)

One felicitous result of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan was the setting up of a military-to-military relationship between China and the United States 30 years ago. The move was born of mutual fear of Russian expansion, for no one could foresee then that Afghanistan would be the undoing of Soviet power and that the Soviet Union itself would collapse partly because of it.

Nor was it clear then that China would emerge in the next century as the potential rival to American power in the Pacific. But militaries have their own codes and their own ways of thinking and it is always a good idea to keep them talking and getting to know each other.

Recently China put a halt to these exchanges because of American arms sales to Taiwan — which are mandated by American law. When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asked if he could come to Beijing as part of his five-nation tour earlier this year he was rebuffed.

The exchanges began in the Carter administration, soon after the Soviet invasion, when Secretary of Defense Harold Brown visited Beijing.

“Brown’s visit marked the wary beginning of the formal relationship between two military establishments whose most recent view of each other had been over gun sights in the Korean Peninsula 27 years before,” wrote the old China-hand Nicholas Platt in his recent memoir “China Boys.”

Platt, a retired State Department officer who was seconded to the department of defense and accompanied Brown, writes that the Chinese could not get used to the idea of a Pentagon hotline in their midst. They would not get around to setting one up until 2008.

Most of the Chinese generals and admirals that Brown met were well into their seventies and beyond, for retirement was unthinkable in those days.

“The freefall from four-star rank to life in one’s home village was just too far,” according to Platt. Back then the Chinese had none of the support systems of a fruitful retirement that old soldiers in America enjoyed. They peppered the American delegation about annuities, promotion rates and jobs in industry.

A Chinese military delegation followed up Brown’s visit with a trip to Washington, and was taken to visit military facilities in Indiana, Colorado, California and Hawaii. The U.S. side looked for “ways to improve China’s defense capability without threatening others,” according to Platt.

One of the things China really wanted was help in developing sophisticated fighter planes — especially advanced radars, electronics and guidance systems — so its planes could match the Soviet MIG-23, which the Vietnamese had been given. In those days, China was more than a little annoyed at the Vietnamese for invading Cambodia, and in a short, sharp incursion to teach Vietnam a lesson, the Chinese had come off second best.

The Americans were not willing to share with the Chinese at that level, but the relationship developed despite that early disappointment. It would later expand and flower under Secretary of Defense William Perry, who served President Bill Clinton.

There have been stresses and strains in America’s relationship with China since then, and the pity is that the first thing to get curtailed when we have a spat is the military exchanges. The United States suspended them after the suppression of the Tiananmen demonstrations, and China followed suit after the recent arms sales to Taiwan.

Many China watchers have wondered why the Obama administration ran into such hostility after the president’s visit with the Dalai Lama and the sale of arms to Taiwan. After all, American presidents often meet with the Dalai Lama, and the Taiwan arms sales have been a regular feature since Congress mandated them in 1979, before Harold Brown’s visit.

Nicholas Platt, who still visits China several times a year as a private citizen and is well respected there, believes the big fuss and the slighting of Gates is due to what the Chinese perceive as a changed relationship between the two countries.

The last eight years have seen American power decline and the Chinese have looked on with wonder as we Americans seemingly self-destruct with two wars on the mainland of Asia and what looks to many as the failure of the U.S. economic model in the current great recession. What was acceptable to the Chinese before is no longer acceptable now. The relationship is less unequal today than it was when China was trying to catch up with the Vietnamese military and begging for radar systems.

China and the United States should realize the intrinsic value in military exchanges that will only grow more important in years to come. These exchanges should not be the first to go every time the two countries want to show displeasure.

Bottoming out

But the stomach-churning descent of the Chinese-American roller-coaster should concern everyone

Apr 15th 2010
The Economist (USA)

China bullied Cambodia into handing back 22 Uighurs seeking political asylum

IT’S official then. The world’s most important relationship is back on the rails, after weeks of major wobbles. That is the message conveyed by the attendance of Hu Jintao, China’s president, at Barack Obama’s nuclear-security summit in Washington this week. Just a short while ago, the United States’ relationship with its second-biggest trading partner was on ice. Chinese officials refused diplomats’ requests for meetings. Telephone calls went unreturned. China suspended most military relations. Mr Hu’s attendance in Washington looked in doubt. A no-show would have given the finger to the American-led international order.

Now, both sides talk of putting the unfortunate period behind them, stressing the need to look to the future. The “Strategic and Economic Dialogue”, the two countries’ high-level forum, will resume in May, when the treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, leads a delegation to Beijing. Now that Mr Geithner has tactfully postponed the publication of a report that might have condemned China for manipulating its currency, hints are growing that China will start to allow the yuan to appreciate, as America’s Congress noisily demands. Above all, improved relations appear to have won China’s acquiescence in a further round of American-led sanctions on Iran for its nuclear rule-breaking. Hitherto, China has not even countenanced discussion of the issue in the United Nations Security Council.

“Future-oriented relations”, then. But though both sides say they have put it behind them, the recent past says a lot about the future. In his first year in office Mr Obama waged a charm offensive towards China, inviting it to join America in tackling global problems. That counted for precious little at the Copenhagen summit on climate change, when Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, sent a junior official to lecture the leader of the free world. Mr Obama then committed two wicked sins. In January he approved a package of arms for Taiwan, worth over $6 billion. And in February he met the Dalai Lama. Mr Obama had violated China’s “core interests”, even its sovereignty. The freeze set in.

The United States was not the only country to fall foul of a new assertiveness in Chinese diplomacy, and a prickliness in dealings with the world. Sino-British relations unravelled in late 2009 when China executed a British drugs mule with apparently severe mental problems. China’s neighbours also felt the heat. China bullied Cambodia into handing back 22 Uighurs seeking political asylum. To some, China seemed to be abandoning Deng Xiaoping’s keep-your-head-down policy of taoguang yanghui—literally, hide brightness, nourish obscurity.

Mr Hu’s trip to Washington undermines that conclusion. What the Washington Post calls an “intensely choreographed” series of moves to get bilateral relations back on track suggests no radical change has taken place. It also underscores how China wants to work within the international order, not challenge it. Taoguang yanghui, a Chinese official insists, is alive and well.

If so, what was going on earlier this year? One factor, says Zhu Feng of Peking University, was hubris. With a robust economy, some Chinese had imagined the gap with America was closing fast. Rather than focus on the fragilities arising from growth, such as social unrest, corruption and scepticism over one-party rule, they dwelt instead on America’s dependence on China, as a manufacturer and as a buyer of Treasury securities. They wrongly equated mutual dependence with unilateral leverage.

What’s more, says Mr Zhu, it was “stupid” of the government to label American actions on Taiwan or Tibet as affecting core interests. The sale of weapons to Taiwan (defensive in nature and in the context of a huge mainland build-up) was well-flagged and not excessive. As for the Dalai Lama, can Chinese leaders seriously expect American presidents not to meet him? The answer, by implication, is no: in private, apparatchiks say their language was actually less strident than on previous occasions. Thus China boxes itself in with such reactions, says Mr Zhu. Diplomacy should “explore the possibilities” not just “highlight the rigidity”.

Other earlier assertiveness should also be reassessed. The same Chinese official says of the drugs-mule case that China was “clumsy” in explaining itself. With luck, she says, China will consider defendants’ medical condition in future. More broadly, she argues, much of China’s perceived prickliness is actually a gaucheness at being thrust into new global leadership roles. Copenhagen is a fine example. Chinese diplomats are unused to fast-moving negotiations. Even senior leaders lack authority to make decisions. Mr Wen was thus in a bind. In danger of humiliation, he sent a lackey to sit in for him. This, the official says, is the price of an intensely bureaucratic process of government.

Dark matter
She and other officials also argue that even a one-party state is constrained by public opinion, including internet nationalism. Fine, as far as it goes. That public debate of sorts takes place in China is welcome, except for one nagging thing. About the debate within the highest political organ in the land, the nine-member standing committee of the Politburo, nothing is known—other than that, had it been in agreement this year, Sino-American relations would not have taken their lurch for the worse. Such strident nationalism would not have been heard in public without tacit support from at least one standing-committee member.

That should worry the United States, wondering for three decades how to smooth the roller-coaster ride of its relations with China—the latest downward whoosh appeared to come out of a clear blue sky. It also ought to worry everyone else looking to the world’s second-biggest economy, its biggest polluter and its biggest buyer of oil from Iran for clarity over how China intends to help play its role as a global leader.

The Dragon's Swagger

January 11, 2010
By ROGER COHEN
The New York Times

BEIJING — A U.S. official here told me he was “getting a little nervous about 2010” when it comes to Chinese-American relations. I’d say there’s plenty of cause for that. I’m not optimistic about the world’s most important relationship in the short term.

The Obama administration came in with a deeply held philosophical view about making the Chinese stakeholders, and partners, in an interconnected world. Human rights complaints were muted, the Dalai Lama put on hold, and President Obama swung into town in November with arms outstretched to the rising behemoth.

The Chinese were polite enough, if less so at the Copenhagen climate talks a month later, but they’re not buying this touchy-feely interconnection thing. When you’re sitting on sums north of $2 trillion in reserves, riding three decades of near double-digit growth, and just trucked past the United States to become the world’s largest auto market, nationalism trumps globalism.

Think of the headiest moments of U.S. expansion — the Gilded Age or the Roaring Twenties — to get some idea of Chinese swagger and possibility.

It’s been a rough two months since that November visit. China has snubbed Obama.

Top of Obama’s human rights list when he met President Hu Jintao was the case of Liu Xiaobo, the principal author of a pro-democracy manifesto. Liu’s since been sentenced, on Christmas Day, to 11 years in prison. Take that.

Top of Obama’s nonproliferation list was Iran and the need for a united front on its nuclear program. China has since said “sanctions themselves are not an end” as the United States tries to harness support for them. Take that, too.

Top of Obama’s trade list was the need for China to allow its currency, the renminbi, to appreciate rather than pegging it at an artificially low rate that spurs Chinese exports and, in effect, keeps jobs in Guangzhou as it kills them in Ohio. But a basic rule in China is that it looks inward before it looks outward. Its cheap-currency job-hoarding is about Chinese social stability, which is Job One for Hu and his cohorts, so there’s no sign of any movement.

Take that, for good measure, Mr. President — and in a year with a U.S. mid-term election where disappearing jobs are going to haunt Obama and the Democrats.

Then there was Copenhagen, of course, where Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s treatment of Obama left a bad taste in Washington; and the forced repatriation of Uighurs who’d fled to Cambodia from China, which infuriated Washington; and the execution of a U.K. citizen with mental problems, which dismayed Washington (and left British leaders seething). Well, you get the idea.

“Things are much tougher than I thought possible a couple of months ago,” William McCahill, a former U.S. diplomat who heads a Beijing research company, told me. “With the mid-terms and the Chinese inching toward their succession in 2012, a period when hard-line positions get staked, you can expect the rhetoric to pitch up.”

It already has. Since I arrived in China, newspapers have been awash in Chinese outrage at reports of the Obama administration’s approval of a sale by Lockheed Martin of advanced Patriot air defense missiles to Taiwan, the self-governing island that China views as a renegade province. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spoke of “severe consequences” from the sale, part of a $6.5 billion arms package for Taiwan approved under the Bush administration.

I have a double reaction to this Taiwan arms contract. On the one hand, Obama’s been stiffed, the United States is obliged under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 to provide arms of a defensive nature to Taiwan, and China responds better to resolve than all that interconnected globe stuff. On the other, come on! Relations between Taipei and Beijing have never been as good, you’re never ever going to get a Chinese buy-in to real cooperation as long as it views Washington as meddling with its core strategic interests in this way, and “one country, three systems” looks a thousand times more likely to me within the next half-century than a Taiwan war that would shred Chinese stability.

Of these reactions, the latter is stronger because Obama is accepting a core antagonism of interest in the Chinese relationship even as he’s talked up cooperation. Perhaps that’s inevitable between the world’s superpower and its ultimate likely successor; but the Taipei deal guarantees it.

“The arms sales are stupid,” Chu Shulong, a political scientist often critical of the Chinese government, told me. “Yes, Taiwan and its democracy are important for your credibility in Asia, but what’s more important, that or the mainland? As long as America does this, it will be perceived as wanting to check China, divide China and challenge China’s fundamental national interests.”

The painful condition of the United States and China is that they are codependent, through trade and debt, but antagonistic. As elsewhere, Obama has changed language but not reality. I see a 2010 of rising protectionism, suspended military dialogue, Iranian discord, human rights disappointments and wars of words.

It could be worse. I don’t see outright confrontation now or any time. China wouldn’t risk its rise with that.

Tongue tied

November 24, 2009
FARIBORZ MOSHIRIAN
The Age (Australia)

DURING the recent press conference of US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, the two leaders did not address each other, and the body language of the two leaders indicated their frustration, which may reflect how difficult it was to come up with a joint statement. It is also noteworthy that the US official said that Obama's trip to China was only ''an important first step''.

Over the past few years, bilateral negotiations between the US and China have failed to resolve the problems - including the absence of a market-based exchange rate - that have contributed to the trade imbalance between the two countries.

In the absence of genuine reform of domestic policies by the US and China, it will be almost impossible for the G20 to achieve its goal of a ''framework for strong, sustainable, balanced growth'' in the years ahead. The lack of an effective global or regional framework to resolve the economic policy differences between the US and China is also creating challenges for other countries whose currencies have increased in value in recent times due to the decline in the value of the US dollar.

The low value of the yuan is also discouraging exports from the US, the European Union and Asia to China. At the same time, China's goods are becoming increasingly cheaper in places such as Europe and Asia. There is also a danger that the low value of the US dollar, similar to the Connelly-Nixon era, will lead to lower living standards and higher inflation in the US.

In an increasingly integrated global economy, the US needs to focus not only on its relationship with China as a way of tackling global economic, financial and environmental challenges, it also needs to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and assess how key players there, including Japan and India, can become accountable towards each other and also economically and financially integrated.

The Obama-Hu summit led China to explicitly welcome the US role in the Asia-Pacific region. In other words, there is no fear that China wishes the US out of this region. The US must capitalise on the goodwill from China and work hard for a new, inclusive, accountable and transparent regional architecture that in turn will influence the domestic policies of the relationship with China far more effectively.

The great differences between Germany and France were gradually resolved not only by bilateral negotiations, but particularly when these two countries became part of a regional bloc in Europe and had to ensure that their domestic policies were consistent with the exigencies and requirements of European policies. Despite the argument that the Asia-Pacific region is different to the 27 European countries (which also have vast differences in religion, culture, language, per capita income), modern technology, including the internet and the highly interdependent global economy in the 21st century, are making nations in Asia more willing to work closely with each other.

Despite the vast differences in religion, culture, language and political systems among the 10 member countries forming ASEAN, this bloc is gradually integrating. However, its new toothless Human Rights Commission and tension between Thailand and Cambodia have highlighted the significance of other stronger nations (such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea and India). These, with better track records on human rights, transparency and democratic systems, could work towards a more credible regional framework that includes ASEAN and China.

While Japan's new Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama, is keen for a regional community with these 16 nations, China is keen to work more closely with ASEAN. To counter the forces of ASEAN and close ties with China, the US is promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership to assist the US and seven other countries to work towards a free trade zone and bring other nations in this region into such a partnership. It is almost a parallel force against ASEAN plus China and an indirect way of encouraging other nations to join this partnership rather than work with ASEAN plus China.

Such an approach may lead to further retarding of any cohesive regional architecture of which both China and the US could be members. At the same time, Russia is somehow left out in this process. It is part of APEC, though, but APEC is not an effective regional body, as testified by the recent statement of the APEC leaders' summit in Singapore where, for instance, the issue of a market-based foreign exchange could not have been frankly discussed as China did not support it. When climate change was discussed, there was even less commitment there. The absence of India from APEC also makes this forum less effective.

The recent meeting of Obama with ASEAN was an attempt to ensure that ASEAN was willing to embrace other countries in its bloc. The Obama Administration should capitalise on this momentum, particularly when the Obama-Hu summit led China to explicitly welcome the US's role in the Asia-Pacific region.

The inability of the US and China to adequately reform their domestic policies for the sake of regional and global interests, the lack of capacity of the G20 to bring its member countries to account except through peer review, and the difficulties in non-binding regional architectures so far should be justification enough to lead to the creation an effective framework for the emergence of an Asia-Pacific community that requires some accountability on the part of the member countries.

Obama's recent trip to Asia has created momentum for seriously promoting such a regional framework that could include ASEAN plus six and the US. Russia could also apply for membership over time. Such a regional approach will be more effective than simply relying on the US and China to reform their domestic policies in the absence of other key players such as Japan and India.

Fariborz Moshirian is professor of international finance at the Australian School of Business, University of NSW.

Politiktoons No. 65: US-China, a new blossom tree

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com
and also at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Group Says China Cracking Down on Dissidents During Clinton Visit

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) meets with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in Beijing. The United States and China have glossed over differences on human rights as they pledged to work more closely in tackling the global economic crisis and climate change. (AFP/POOL/Oliver Weiken)

By VOA News
21 February 2009

Chinese human rights activists say police have harassed and intimidated dissidents so they would not speak out during U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Beijing.

The Chinese Human Rights Defenders group said Saturday that a number of dissidents have been put under house arrest, questioned and followed by Beijing police in an effort to silence them during Clinton's visit.

The group said that among those under house arrest is Zeng Jinyan, the wife of imprisoned activist Hu Jia.

It issued a statement after Clinton said the debate with China over human rights should not get in the way of progress in other areas.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP abd AP.

Activists 'shocked' at Clinton stance on China rights [-Will Hun Sen Inc. receive the same red carpet treatment from the Obama administration?]

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton smiles upon arrival at the airport in Beijing. Amnesty International and a pro-Tibet group voiced shock Friday after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed not to let human rights concerns hinder cooperation with China. (AFP/POOL/Greg Baker)

Fri Feb 20, 2009

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Amnesty International and a pro-Tibet group voiced shock Friday after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed not to let human rights concerns hinder cooperation with China.

Paying her first visit to Asia as the top US diplomat, Clinton said the United States would continue to press China on long-standing US concerns over human rights such as its rule over Tibet.

"But our pressing on those issues can't interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis," Clinton told reporters in Seoul just before leaving for Beijing.

T. Kumar of Amnesty International USA said the global rights lobby was "shocked and extremely disappointed" by Clinton's remarks.

"The United States is one of the only countries that can meaningfully stand up to China on human rights issues," he said.

"But by commenting that human rights will not interfere with other priorities, Secretary Clinton damages future US initiatives to protect those rights in China," he said.

Students for a Free Tibet said Clinton's remarks sent the wrong signal to China at a sensitive time.

"The US government cannot afford to let Beijing set the agenda," said Tenzin Dorjee, deputy director of the New York-based advocacy group.

China has been pouring troops into the Himalayan territory ahead of next month's 50th anniversary of the uprising that sent Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama into exile in India.

"Leaders really need to step up and pressure China. It's often easy to wonder whether pressure makes a difference. It may not make a difference in one day or one month, but it would be visible after some years," Dorjee said.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had sent a letter to Clinton before her maiden Asia visit urging her to raise human rights concerns with Chinese leaders.

Before she left, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said human rights would be "an important issue" for Clinton and that she would "raise the issue when appropriate."

China has greeted President Barack Obama's administration nervously, believing he would press Beijing harder on human rights and trade issues than former president George W. Bush.

Politiktoons No. 32: We're the world, aren't we?

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com
and also at http://politiktoons.blogspot.com)

US State Dept releases: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XVIII, China, 1973–1976

Media Note
Office of the Spokesman
US Department of State
Washington, DC
February 12, 2008

Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs Release of Foreign Relations, Volume XVIII, China, 1973–1976

Click here to read this document in PDF (3.7MB)
(Right click to save the document)

The Department of State released today Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XVIII, China, 1973–1976. This volume documents fluctuations in Sino-American relations, ranging from the euphoria lingering from President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, to the practical challenges of normalizing diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing.

Like all recent Foreign Relations volumes in the Nixon-Ford subseries, the emphasis of this volume is on policy formulation, rather than the implementation of policy or day-to-day diplomacy. Influence on major U.S. foreign policy decisions was generally restricted to a small circle including the President, Henry Kissinger, and some influential officials they trusted. During this period, control over U.S. China policy shifted from the White House to the Department of State as a result of the Watergate crisis, the appointment of Kissinger as Secretary of State, the resignation of Nixon as President, and Kissinger’s involuntary resignation as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. The chapters of this volume integrate documents about U.S. relations with the People’s Republic of China and with Taiwan, reflecting the fact that the former government received much more attention from high-level American policymakers than did the latter. The central theme of the volume is the effort to strengthen and formalize the U.S.-PRC relationship, which had been established during 1971 and 1972 after decades of bitter estrangement, and the concurrent disestablishment of formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, a task that remained unfinished at the end of the Ford Administration. The primary means of improving relations during these years were long conversations between U.S. and PRC leaders, recorded in memoranda of conversation, which were supposed to initiate—but at this time generally substituted for—a more developed and institutionalized relationship.

The volume is divided into five chapters. The first chapter, from January until May 1973, documents the establishment of unofficial liaison offices in Washington and Beijing, the most concrete achievement of the 1973–1976 period. Both sides expressed their desire to normalize relations by 1976. In retrospect, however, Kissinger’s February 1973 visit to the People’s Republic of China proved to be the acme of Sino-American relations during these years. Although the United States and China agreed to finesse the Taiwan dispute and formed a tacit anti-Soviet alliance, the two countries did not agree on the war in Cambodia or the wisdom of détente with the Soviet Union. The second chapter, containing documents from June 1973 until August 1974, indicates that domestic politics in both countries threatened the still-fragile Sino-American relationship. In China, aftershocks from the Cultural Revolution and the death of Lin Biao, as well as the aging of China’s leadership, raised doubts about the stability of Chinese foreign policy. This chapter also reveals U.S. efforts to reassure Chinese leaders baffled by Watergate and fearful that American policy would become erratic. In addition, China was dissatisfied with the pace of U.S. disengagement from formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Meanwhile, an early example of economic competition is revealed through the fears of U.S. textile manufacturers that they would be hurt by increased American trade with China. The third chapter, with documents from September 1974 until July 1975, covers the Sino-American effort to re-establish the momentum toward normalization. Along these lines, the United States attempted to reconcile the improvement of Sino-American relations with the preservation of Taiwanese security through such policies as a careful diminution of U.S.-Taiwanese military links. Nonetheless, the United States and China continued to bicker over the subjects of détente and Cambodia. The fourth chapter, which covers the period from August to December 1975, includes the planning for Ford’s trip to Beijing, and the details of the actual trip itself. China experts within the U.S. Government asserted that the President should attempt to normalize relations quickly, but Kissinger believed that such a policy would produce a right-wing backlash against Ford that would endanger the Administration’s effectiveness and reelection. The Chinese Government agreed to host Ford without a prior agreement for rapid normalization, and the visit maintained existing friendly relations, while breaking little new ground. The final chapter, containing documents from January 1976 until January 1977, reveals how domestic political developments in both countries distracted policy makers from the Sino-American relationship. By January 1977, the change of leadership in both countries had been so dramatic that there seemed little doubt that the Sino-American relationship was entering a new era. During these years, relations between the United States and China were conducted at the highest political level, which meant that incapacitation of the top leadership tended to bring progress to a standstill. More than most volumes in the Foreign Relations series, this one documents the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy. However, despite numerous obstacles and failures, each country’s troubled relationship with the Soviet Union produced a continual impetus to improve the Sino-American relationship.

The volume and this press release are available on the Office of the Historian website at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/xviii. Copies of the volume will be available for purchase from the U.S. Government Printing Office online at http://bookstore.gpo.gov (GPO S/N 044–000–02612–1; ISBN 978–0–16–077110–1), or by calling toll-free 1-866-512-1800 (D.C. area 202-512-1800). For further information contact Edward Keefer, General Editor of the Foreign Relations series, at (202) 663–1131 or by e-mail to history@state.gov.