 photo by Keith Kamisugi
This goes beyond the
Chinese leadership's wariness about the Democratic Party's
traditional ties with big labor. This was manifested last week, when
Senator Barack Obama accused China of unfair trade practices, which,
he said, were "directly related to manipulation of its
currency’s value."
Before reaching the
White House in 1992, Bill Clinton also tried to please labor unions
by blasting China's huge trade surplus; similar charges were
repeated by Hillary Clinton before her campaign fizzled out last
June.
Yet US-China relations
went along very well during the eight-year Clinton presidency, to the
point where the two countries were close to cementing a "constructive
strategic partnership." And hiccups in bilateral ties occurred
not over trade but diplomatic and geopolitical issues such as the US
bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia during the 1999 Kosovo
crisis.
More significantly, the
power equation has shifted in China's favor in the past decade,
making it very unlikely that an Obama presidency, if it indeed comes
off tomorrow, would create inordinate troubles for China over trade
issues. For one thing, Washington has become more dependent on
Beijing, which already holds close to $600 million worth of treasury
bills, to buy more US government bonds.
It seems clear that the
Hu Jintao administration's misgivings about Obama are based on
two factors: the African-American’s ability to break through
racial barriers to seize the highest office in the US; and Obama’s
probable abandonment of President George W Bush's "neoconservative" foreign and defense policy, which is
seconded by Senator John McCain.
An Obama victory would
debunk decades of Chinese propaganda about white supremacy in the US
and Washington’s alleged violations of the human rights of
minorities in America. Much more significantly is the so-called
mirror effect: in China, members of ethnic minorities, especially
Tibetans and Uighurs, have been barred from top regional positions,
let alone senior national slots. For example, it has been an unbroken
tradition since 1949 that the party secretaries of Tibet and Xinjiang
must be Han Chinese.
It is perhaps for this
reason that according to diplomatic sources in Beijing, the CCP’s
Propaganda Department last month asked major media and websites to
tone down reporting about Obama, who has a surprisingly large number
of fans among the country’s estimated 220 million Netizens.
More important, Beijing has been the
major beneficiary of eight years of Bush-style unilateralism, which
has resulted in American forces being bogged down in Afghanistan and
Irag – and the depletion of Washington’s soft power.
The Hu administration
has deftly taken advantage of the decline of American clout –
in regions ranging from Asean to Africa and Latin America – to
boost its global reach. Needless to say, the CCP leadership stands to
gain if McCain were to continue Bush’s security and foreign
policy.
This is despite the fact
that a McCain presidency would probably mean an exacerbation of the
so-called “anti-China encirclement policy,” a reference
to Washington trying to “contain” China with the help of
Asia-Pacific allies including Japan, Australia and, beginning last
year, India.
Thanks to the Illinois
senator’s apparent popularity in Europe, Asia and even Latin
America, an Obama White House could significantly improve relations
with a number of countries that feel neglected or slighted by Bush’s
unilateralism.
And with Obama having
spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, it is possible that his
foreign policy would put more emphasis on restoring ties with Asean,
an important bloc of countries that the Eurocentric Bush
administration has largely ignored. Given the increasing competition
between the world’s sole superpower and its fast-rising
quasi-superpower, Beijing seems to have solid ground for its doubts,
if not suspicions, about an Obama presidency.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
Coal surge is unabated, raising environmental concerns
Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, both nearing retirement, go different ways on reform
"We should judge China by its journeyand not a spot point. It isnot easy to keep China in one piece as it is constantly being pulled apart by vested internal forces as well as by external interference."
China's journey has been thousands of years of assumed ethnic and cultural superiority over the world as well as constant aggression against its neighbors.
"I don't think that the USA government would tolerate any of its states trying to declare independence.Would the USA allow Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, California or Texas to declare independence? Places like Tibet or Xinchiang has been part of China centuries before the USA was formed."
Actually the US gov't has no legal standing to stop a state from seceeding and there is a strong aboriginal movement in Hawaii for some of the islands to break off, so the US is negotiating a sort of "Puerto Rico-hood" or state level native territory for the Hawaii'an tribes.
As for Tibet, China has never had a political or military presence in Tibet, not until its invasion in the 1950s. Beijing gets Tibet's rental of past Chinese imperial army protection for loyalty to Xian/Nanjing/Beijing. The Tibetans were too weak to defend their territory against China and the Mongols and the central Asian tribes to the west, so it paid China to fight for them and since Tibet was to China as the Vatican and Jerusalem has long been to much of the Christian and Muslim worlds, protection was a given.
China's conquest of E. Turkestan started in its failed invasion of central Asia, where the Tang army was stopped at the Talas River by two Saudi princes/brothers fighting under the Persian banner.
Throw away that CCP history book, it is bad for your eyes and your brain.