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Keith B. Richburg: Mr Xi goes to Washington
Summits between the American and Chinese presidents are almost always fraught affairs. Longstanding contentious issues — including U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, China’s human rights record, the manipulation of its currency or the status of the Dalai Lama — typically converge to overshadow the official agenda. And new disputes become diplomatic tripwires to navigate.
But rarely has a Sino-U.S. summit found the two countries in the state of animosity looming over the upcoming session between President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, scheduled for Sept. 25 at the White House. Not only do the new issues dividing them seem intractable, but it seems neither is in a mood to make concessions or to show any spirit of compromise. Today there are very real fears the two sides could be sliding toward a confrontation, if not an all-out conflict.
Consider: China’s recent and aggressive reclamation activities in the South China Sea have prompted some senior Pentagon officials, and American lawmakers from both parties, to urge the administration to challenge Beijing’s sovereignty claims by sending American warships and planes into the contested area. The goal would be to protect “freedom of navigation.” But what many defense analysts now worry about is an accidental shooting war that neither side wants.
The hardened attitudes on both sides reflect the differing domestic positions of the two leaders, and the current state of affairs in their respective countries.
Xi, in his third year in power, has consolidated and centralized power faster and more completely than any Communist Party leader in decades, and perhaps since Deng Xiaoping ruled as the country’s paramount leader, or, before him, Mao Zedong. Xi has launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign to purify the party and, in the process, purge potential political rivals. He has also launched a broad crackdown against journalists, Internet activists, human rights lawyers, non-governmental organizations and anyone else considered a challenge to the party’s absolute control.
Yet Xi’s crackdown and consolidation of power belie an essential internal weakness. The economy is slowing down faster than even Beijing’s government forecasters expected — and some Western analysts believe the real numbers behind the official statistics would show an even sharper economic decline. China spent billions of dollars of its foreign exchange reserve in a failed attempt to try to prop up falling stock prices, leading many to question the Communist Party’s vaunted economic management skills.
In a reversal of a decade-long trend, hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars have flowed out of China this year — as much as $500 billion by some estimates — with experts suspecting a country once a destination for excess cash is now experiencing capital flight, and that China may be facing a future liquidity crisis. Those moving money out include foreign businesses as well as hedge funds and Chinese companies, an apparent sign of sagging confidence in China’s economic future.
The growing economic and societal pressures on the regime have led some longtime China scholars to predict, prematurely in my view, that the world may now be witnessing the end-game for Communist Party rule in China.
China’s response to this reversal of fortunes has been marked by bellicosity and bluster.
China is ramping up its military construction activities on the reefs and shoals it controls in the disputed South China Sea, unnerving its Southeast Asian neighbors, some of whom are looking to cement their alliances with Washington to counter the threat. China has been accused of hacking into American private and government computers to steal trade secrets from U.S. companies and personal data on American citizens. In a brazen move the first week of September, China moved five navy warships into the Bering Sea and within 12 miles of the U.S. coastline in Alaska, while Obama was there making his first extended visit to the state.
Internal stress masked by increasing repression, and rising assertiveness abroad, leaves Xi a leader who seems in little mood for compromise. “Xi will likely strike a tougher stance to avoid any appearance of weakness or vulnerability,” Kurt Campbell, the senior State Department official on Asia during Obama’s first term, told my old Washington Post colleague David Ignatius recently.
For that reason, most independent analysts are downplaying the odds of any major bilateral agreements to emerge from this summit. The best, they say, will be incremental progress on topics like controlling carbon emissions, establishing joint military talks over cybersecurity and broad commitments to global nuclear non-proliferation.
“So it is optimistic to expect anything substantial to emerge from the summit,” said the lead editorial in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s premier English-language daily newspaper.
The two sides do expect to make progress on a long-stalled bilateral investment treaty to help pry open each other’s markets.
On the U.S. side, Obama faces a domestic landscape that is, in many ways, the opposite of Xi’s.
While Xi has silenced most internal rivals to his position and can be expected to rule for at least the next seven years, Obama is in the final 16 months of his presidency, and attention in the U.S. has already shifted to the election for his successor.
Even as a lame duck, Obama has enjoyed a string of recent foreign policy successes, including his dramatic opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba and the establishment of respective embassies in Havana and Washington, and, more recently, the completion of the hard-fought multilateral nuclear accord with Iran. But his most important foreign policy goal directly aimed at Asia and countering China — the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement — is bogged down in contentious talks among the 12 member countries.
After winning Congressional authority this summer to negotiate the final TPP deal, using powers called “fast track,” Obama had hoped to have the accord completed by the time of Xi’s visit, as a show of American commitment to Asia under his announced “rebalancing” or “pivot” after a decade of wars in the Middle East. Now without the Pacific trade deal, Obama will appear weakened — and it will be Xi who is on the diplomatic offensive in the region with China’s new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank fully formed and functioning.
But while Obama may be seen as weakened and in his waning days, the U.S. economy has rebounded since the depths of the 2008 recession. The country has now enjoyed 66 straight months of private sector jobs growth – the longest streak on record – and unemployment has dipped to its pre-recession level of just around 5%. The dollar is strong, the stock market is higher than before the 2008 crash and the U.S. has regained much of its global swagger lost in the market slide and recession of seven years ago.
Xi might also find American attitudes toward China hardening, particularly if he tunes in to any of the U.S. cable channels fully engaged with the upcoming 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump, the real estate mogul, reality television star and current Republican Party frontrunner, has soared to the lead in the polls by openly bashing China, as well as Mexico, and promising to take a tougher line with Beijing.
Trump criticized the American trade deficit with China, calling it “the greatest theft in the history of the United States and perhaps the world.” He suggested that Obama should skip the formal State dinner for Xi and instead serve him a McDonald’s hamburger. Several of Trump’s Republican rivals, in various tones, have echoed his criticisms of Beijing, and some have called for the State dinner to be cancelled.
The dinner will go ahead. Obama nevertheless has been debating how and when to respond to China’s cyberattacks, with a decision delayed only until Xi has gone home.
So what we have is a Chinese leader trying to avoid looking weak by acting tough, and an America in the midst of a presidential campaign marred by ugly hyper-nationalism and with senior officials debating the need to challenge China on several fronts. One might wonder why this summit is being held at all — with so little optimism that anything meaningful will result.
Keith B. Richburg was foreign editor of The Washington Post from 2005 to 2007 and served as the paper’s bureau chief in Manila, Nairobi, Hong Kong, Paris and Beijing.
