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TOPIC: Hillary's Quiet China Victory (The Daily Beast 5/29/10)
Jen the Michigander


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Hillary's Quiet China Victory (The Daily Beast 5/29/10)
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-29/hillary-clintons-chinese-diplomacy/

Among the Chinese, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is known as lihai, a compliment of sorts, which translates roughly as "fierce" or "severe."

But when it comes to China, Clinton seems to have learned that fierce isn’t always useful.

Patience is a more effective virtue.

This week, Clinton and about 200 American officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Adm. Robert F. Willard, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, concluded at weeklong trip to Asia.

The sizeable delegation left Beijing with several deals and memorandums of understanding under their belts, proving that both the U.S. and China have learned important lessons in negotiation.

For those used to the lightning speed of events chronicled on the American 24-hour news schedule, negotiations with China moved at a glacial pace. And in a country where decisions are made behind closed doors and very little information trickles out from the halls of power, those who get paid to read the tea leaves said that—despite the growing tensions on the nearby Korean peninsula—the second annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue concluded much as everyone expected.

As Xinua, China’s state-run news agency declared: "A single meeting cannot resolve all existing differences.”

Those issues now include the value of China's currency, the yuan, which the Obama administration would like to see raised in order to make American exports more competitive. While no announcements were made this round, it appears Treasury Secretary Geithner backed off on exacting further pressure because the Chinese have stated the currency revaluation will happen, which would vindicate Washington's slow-burn approach.

Clinton's team also succeeded in winning concessions on another major American concern. When Beijing announced new Chinese procurement rules last November that gave priority to intellectual property developed, owned and registered in China, the American business community went apoplectic, lambasting China's indigenous innovation policies for shutting out U.S. companies and turning its back on prior free-trade commitments. This week's talks yielded a retreat from Beijing, with Chinese officials claiming the procurement rules have been modified. In return, Beijing is hopeful the U.S. will relax controls on high-tech exports to China.

While the U.S. would prefer China-supported sanctions against the rogue state and, in the realm of fantasy for the time-being, a democratic, unified Korean peninsula, the Chinese are taking a vastly different tack toward their Communist neighbor. Long obsessed with maintaining stability in the country and region—the Chinese government's winning recipe for economic success and domestic political legitimacy—Beijing is willing to do whatever necessary to avoid a Korean war. Any major conflict there could propel millions of starving North Korean refugees across the border into China.

Likewise, a war could bring the 28,500 American troops currently stationed in the South right to the Chinese border. So maintaining a buffer zone ruled by the Kim dynasty satisfies all of Beijing's concerns. Yet the Americans understand that Beijing and Pyongyang are not as close as it would appear. "It's often portrayed that China and North Korea are best mates but that's not true," says IHS Global Insight's Thornton. "Privately the Chinese are fuming. The last thing they want is for North Korea to get hostile, which would destabilize trade and possibly lead to Japan going nuclear—China's worst-case scenario."

Whether a suspicious Beijing will sign on to Clinton's calls for further sanctions on North Korea is an open question, but observers stress patience when judging the Obama administration's China strategy as a whole.

"To expect the Chinese to turn on a dime and come to a quick conclusion based on Clinton being their for a short period of time is setting the bar too high," says Richard C. Bush III, an expert on U.S-China relations and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "She was laying the groundwork in a very intensive process that's not designed to achieve specific results by the time these meetings are over."

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freespirit


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Everything I have read about Hillary's china trip has been very complementary of her. More and more people are recognizing how capable and competent she is, and how good a diplomat - not at all the "polarizing" person MSM repeatedly accused her of being.

I read somewhere, back during the primary, a quote attributed to Hillary about herself. I can only paraphrase, since I can't remember the exact wording of the quote. The article claimed that Hillary said, "I'm the most disliked person no one knows." As I said - paraphrasing. Throughout the primary, when MSM and her opponents, described Hillary as cold, evil, power-hungry, and polarizing - while she was clearly demonstrating that she was none of those things, as she spoke to individuals and groups around the country, I just kept thinking of that quote, and how accurate it was.

Not to put Hillary on a pedestal, as she is human, and has her faults, but it is beyond me how anyone could doubt her competence and her compassion for the people of this country. It makes no sense.



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