Nuances of not-so delicate ties

Don't get me wrong. Abject kowtowing is no way to forge an honest and productive relationship with anyone, including China. The United States has differences with China - as does China with the US. Covering them up or ignoring them will allow them to fester. Relatively minor issues can become major when both sides act as if serious problems don't exist.

The Chinese are unhappy with the US because they view Americans as having raised the military stakes in the Pacific region, parts of which they regard as more or less their backyard. For its part, the US government is unhappy for a host of reasons, including first, human rights in China (so what's new?) and second, China's treatment of Tibet (or so Washington complains - although it's not going to do anything about Tibet and never will) and third, intellectual property protection (okay, this does need work) and fourth, obstruction of collective action on Syria (but Moscow took the lead in the veto).

Solving such difficult issues may take almost forever. Both sides have their positions and they are well staked out. Few are quickly or easily resolvable. Probably time will vitiate some of them, but perhaps intensify others. Only nationalistic partisans on either side can honestly believe that the other is wholly wrong and they are wholly right.

So how should the US-China relationship then proceed? The answer is: cautiously but honestly - because so much is at stake - but never much publicly. And so here we raise the case of last week's official visit of China's Vice-President Xi Jinping to the US.

Xi was invited to the Oval Office by US President Barack Obama in part as a return favor for the gracious treatment accorded to US Vice-President Joe Biden during his August trip across China. Alas, it is a US presidential election year so the rest of the world had better watch out. That even includes China, to whom Americans owe a great deal of money via China's purchase of about $1.1 trillion of US Treasury bills.

It was during a "toast" at a US State Department lunch last week that Xi got his not-so-funny "roast" - and from Biden of all people. It wasn't that the issues raised were inappropriate. It was that they were raised so publicly, and so ungraciously, during this official event.

It was difficult not to feel that the US administration's public edginess was for domestic political effect. With the showdown election only nine months away, the Obama administration had to show - but to whom exactly? - that it could be tough on China.

So who was the target? The Republicans. That's not going to work. Independent voters? It's hard to imagine anyone who's truly anti-China voting for a Democratic president because he appears during re-election season to be tough on China.

So who's the Obama administration fooling?

Maybe they're not fooling? Maybe they think it's appropriately muscular of them to have public airings of differences with China - so public that it makes the front pages of The New York Times and the Financial Times, two leading English-language newspapers in the West?

China was giving as well as taking. Xi himself lobbed a few tart innuendoes Obama's way in response to written questions submitted by The Washington Post. So one has to wonder: Does Xi have to play the tough guy role back home?

The two countries should have done better in communicating publicly. They should be confining their differences to the intense private sessions provided amid the routine of their ongoing bilateral discourse; but in public almost exclusively emphasize areas of agreement or at least commonality.

The stability of the international political system depends on a confident and civil relationship between Beijing and Washington. Both need to keep in mind the crucial difference between the short and the long run. Today's hot differences may over time cool to become unimportant. But if over the course of time the Sino-US relationship truly deteriorates and becomes some kind of new Cold War, the consequences will be serious and harmful for the entire planet.

Wise politicians will be fully aware of the potentially serious problems. Who in the world needs them?

The author is a distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific studies at Loyola Marymount University, and founder and editor-in-chief of Asia Media.

(China Daily 02/20/2012 page9)