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))))))\))))), February 2011In November 2009, United States President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao held their first summit meeting in Beijing, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute published a collection of essays by scholars from the United States, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan addressing many aspects of U.S.-China relations and issues that were on the agenda, or should be on the agenda, for the two leaders. The 14 months following the Beijing summit were an eventful— and in many respects troubled —time for U.S.-China relations, a period marked by rising Chinese assertiveness especially on questions of disputed claims to territory and maritime zones, heightened tensions between the People’s Republic of China and U.S. friends and allies in Asia, a difficult global meeting on climate change, an increasingly volatile situation on the Korean peninsula, and seemingly intractable disputes between the United States and China on a host of trade-related issues. Cross-strait relations were a relative bright spot, with the two sides inking an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement and continuing the warming trend begun in 2008.
Against this backdrop, Hu prepared to travel to Washington for a state visit in mid-January 2011. This Washington bilateral summit occurred in a context of impending transition— or potential transition— among key leaders that was not present at the Beijing summit. For China, Hu’s term was nearing its 2012 end (as was the tenure of Premier Wen Jiabao, who made his own high-level visit to India a month before Hu’s trip to Washington). For the United States, Obama was facing the aftermath of a “shellacking” in the mid-term elections and uncertain prospects for his 2012 reelection bid. (In Taiwan, a setback for the ruling party in interim elections similarly raised doubts about President Ma Ying-jeou’s chances in 2012. On the Korean peninsula, the illness of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il and the uncertain grip on succession of his son were also sources of leadership uncertainty.)
In this collection of essays, a group of authors including most of the contributors to our 2009 collection, The Hu-Obama Summit and US-China Relations, assess the significance and impact of the January 2011 Hu-Obama Washington summit and examine the issues and prospects in U.S.-China relations in the aftermath of the summit.
Da Wei (China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations) argues that the summit was successful in accomplishing the important but limited tasks that were within its potential grasp but that a stable and sustainable cooperative relationship will require more, including forging a domestic consensus and setting reasonable expectations on both sides. Wu Chunsi (Shanghai Institute of International Studies) addresses the problems of mutual mistrust and mutual misunderstanding in bilateral relations and argues that leader-level commitments, practical cooperation on specific issues, and stronger U.S.-China societal connections can help to address these issues.
Jacques deLisle (FPRI and University of Pennsylvania) argues that the United States could benefit from making more use of international law in bilateral relations, given the presence of international legal questions in many troublesome areas of U.S.-China relations, the fact that international law is more closely aligned with Washington’s views than Beijing’s on many issues that currently trouble the bilateral relationship, and the apparent comparative advantage the United States holds in invoking broad norms of international legality in areas of disagreement and conflict with China and competition for support from other states. Terry Cooke (FPRI) examines developments in U.S.-China cooperation on clean energy, tracing the path from the difficulties prominently on display at the December 2010 Copenhagen Conference through the gains achieved after the Obama administration struck a tougher stance in both the broad politics of U.S.-China relations and the "new politics" of economic statecraft. Cooke also discusses the quiet and gradual but concrete and promising progress toward clean energy cooperation made through investment in technology development projects.
On Taiwan issues, Shelley Rigger (FPRI and Davidson College) finds the U.S. and China committed to accentuating the positive (the stable and improving cross-strait relationship) and downplaying the negative (the areas where each side’s long-standing positions are unacceptable to the other) at the Hu-Obama Washington summit, but also notes that Washington then dispatched its top Taiwan affairs official to reassure Taipei. Rigger is skeptical about the durability of the happy equilibrium seemingly attained at the summit. Chen-shen J. Yen (Institute of International Relations and National Chengchi University) argues that China holds, and Hu's state visit reflected, a misplaced zero-sum conception of the relationship between human rights and sovereignty that is especially problematic for Beijing's policy toward Taiwan. Beijing's failure to accept that more promotion of human rights at home, and less rejection of foreign criticism of China's human rights record as an assault on China's sovereignty, explains why otherwise successful efforts to improve cross-strait relations have not been yielding the dividends Beijing had hoped in advancing its agenda of reasserting sovereignty over Taiwan and achieving cross-strait unification. So-Heng Chang (FPRI and Cross-Strait Interflow Prospect Foundation) assesses the implications of the ruling party’s disappointing showing in Taiwan’s November 2010 mayoral elections, concluding that Ma Ying-jeou faces significant challenges on his road to reelection and that Taiwan’s shifting and uncertain electoral landscape presents Beijing and, to some extent, Washington with potentially difficult choices.
Gilbert Rozman (FPRI and Princeton University) addresses the problem of North Korea, arguing that it was a central and defining concern for the summit, that the Obama administration faced especially difficult challenges in dealing with China on the issue and that apparent progress in securing greater cooperation from Beijing is far from certain to endure. Jacques deLisle juxtaposes Hu’s state visit to Washington with Wen’s earlier trip to New Delhi and considers the ways in which U.S.-China-India relations do—and do not—resemble and have the potential to resemble the U.S.-Soviet Union-China triangle of the later decades of the Cold War.
), November 2009For additional information, please e-mail fpri@fpri.org
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