China and Tale of Two Clintons

By Tom Plate

Gigantic, historic China immediately weights on the mind of an incoming U.S. President, one way or the other, Democratic or Republican. Three years after the awful tragedy at Tiananmen Square, President Bill Clinton came to power, in 1992, but he didn't visit the world's most populated country until 1998. It took him six years to make it.

It's true that President Barack Hussein Obama hasn't decided yet when to go, but you can bet it won't take him six years. That was evident when his administration announced that the first trip abroad by the secretary of state would be to Asia.

As we all know, that person is none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC), the wife of the guy who took six years to get there. It looks like his wife will, in person, make her mark on China's mainland a lot quicker than her husband.

That's a big plus. The United States perhaps could have afforded a leisurely approach to China in the past, but those days are long gone. China's government now holds more American Treasury notes, is a huge trading partner, shares a number of strategic commonalities (stability in Asia, world economic stability) and has demonstrated, over and over again, that it would greatly prefer not to permit national-interest differences (e.g., Taiwan) to upend the relationship with the U.S. in a disproportionate way.

In hearing the news of HRC's impending swing through their neighborhood ― including ally Japan, perhaps first, and ally South Korea ― Beijing was positive: ``We appreciate the attitude that the U.S. side has devoted to developing a more active and constructive relationship with China. We are willing to enhance dialogue and mutual trust, expand cooperation, respect each other's core interests, and jointly respond to global challenges."

Those official words from Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu reflect China's actual feelings. The government is well aware that the economy of the planet is in a perilous state, and that the China of 2009 ― as opposed to the one of 50 years ago, say ― will have to play a key role in easing the crisis and getting us all going in the right direction again.

In fact, China is taking pride in this heightened new role. The splash headline over a recent lead story on page one of ``China Daily," the nation's English language newspaper, reflected this new role and its accompanying sentiment: "China Key to Easing Global Recession." The story breathlessly quoted a U.N. World Economic Situation and the Prospects 2009 report that forecast the growth of China ― perhaps the world's third-biggest economy ― at 7-9 percent, contrasted with the global economic figure of only 1 percent. Commented Wang Tongsan, an economist with the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, ``It is beyond doubt that China will play a more important role in the world economy as the U.S. and Japan experience setbacks."

The Chinese are either part of the solution or there is no solution; they did not create the problem, force America to go on a mortgage and credit-card binge of unprecedented magnitude, or construct Ponzi-like fraud schemes the size of the gross national product of whole nations.

To that end, the former First Lady's visit needs to be marked more by a posture of humble listening than public lecturing. The frightening loss of altitude in the U.S. economy would appear to be the product of shortsighted piloting in the cockpit and the failure of the economic ground staff (especially Wall Street) to observe sensible safety procedures. No American official should go to Asia with the idea that she ― or he ― should expect a respectful audience for knee-jerk lectures in Market Capitalism Fundamentalism 101.

The U.S. has collapsed with an embarrassing thud; the hope is that the rest of the American economy, though now tanking, can be eased back up. That effort will require us to maximize our friends and minimize or at least neutralize those working against us.

China should not be viewed as one of the real bad guys ― at least not at this juncture in history. After all, it has put a lot of its renminbi, its national currency, into the U.S. economy in one way or the other. It too hopes that the U.S. economy is too big to fail, for if it does hit rock bottom, it is so big it will take many others down with it, perhaps including even China. Then we have a world economic depression on our hands so big as to make our quibbles and quarrels with China seem like small stuff indeed. Let us treat China, for all our differences, not as a student needing instruction, or as a potential enemy ― but as something like an equal. That would be smart diplomacy.

Veteran journalist and syndicated columnist Tom Plate is a member of the China Study Group of the Pacific Council on International Policy. E-mail him at platecolumn@gmail.com.