How Will Obama Approach China?

The question of whether Barack Obama will follow the same path is especially important not only because, once again, we have a new and "untutored" president on the scene. It is also important because, inside China, protests from below are again on the rise. Resentment of local officials is growing more intense and a "rights movement" is spreading, as became dramatically evident this week with the release in Beijing of "Charter 08," a call by more than 300 prominent Chinese for an end to authoritarian government. A significant amount of good could be done by an American president saying--just saying--to the Chinese people that yes, human rights, democracy, and rule are law are fine ideals and we support you 100 percent if you want them, too. But the China policy managers will not recommend this. They normally refer to "China human rights issues" not as things that are actually going on in China but as domestic U.S. political problems. ("Congress is fussing!") A smart policy manager has to "manage" the problem, because the rulers in Beijing are "very sensitive" to it.

clipped from blogs.tnr.com One question is whether an Obama administration can be the first in more than 50 years to think of China as a bigger, more complex thing than the Chinese government alone. The other is whether it can get beyond the coterie of "China policy managers" in and around Washington who have "educated" (their word) every president since Jimmy Carter in why and how to be sensitive to China's rulers. The issue matters because, without discounting the importance of what goes on in those small meetings, the whole of China is much, much bigger. And different, too. The cost of ignoring the differences can be immense.