Asking China to act like the US

A fundamental tenet of foreign policy says that nations will seldom voluntarily act against what they have determined, for whatever reason, to be their own national interest. Somebody needs to tell that to the United States when it comes to China, many foreign policy experts say.

A key part of America’s relationship with China now turns on a question that is, at its heart, an impossible conundrum: How to get Beijing to make moves that its leaders don’t think are good for their country? From economics to climate change to currency to Iran and finally culminating with North Korea last week, America has sought to push, prod and cajole China, to little or no avail.

Beijing has resisted letting its currency rise because it depends on the cheap yuan to drive its export-heavy economy. China has balked at stiff sanctions to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions because it needs access to Iran’s oil and gas fields to fuel its own growth. Beijing doesn’t want to curb carbon emissions because its ability to lift hundreds of millions of people into the middle class over the coming years is directly linked to its increased use of energy.

And, finally, Beijing has recoiled at reining in its unruly neighbour to the east, because it doesn’t want to destabilise North Korea’s secretive, hermit regime to an extent that could lead to the government’s collapse and the North’s eventual reunification with South Korea. “China isn’t 100 per cent on board with US efforts,” said Andrew Oros, an Asia expert at Washington College because Beijing is “concerned with the idea of a unified Korea with US troops stationed there.”
But the conundrum extends far beyond last week’s double Korean-peninsula whammy, which involved not only North Korea’s deadly shelling of a South Korean military installation, but also the disclosure of a just-completed centrifuge plant that could one day enable North Korea to enrich uranium into nuclear fuel and add to its arsenal of 8 to 12 nuclear weapons. All of that led to the broad effort from the Obama administration to enlist China to rein in Pyongyang.

So far, China is not biting, and will not bite, on either North Korea or the host of other issues, some experts say, until the US changes not only its tactics, but the entire way that American governments view Beijing.

Some Obama administration officials say that they are aware of this shift, and have begun to adapt their strategy toward China accordingly. Obama’s recent trip to India, in which he endorsed India’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, should be viewed not only in the context of America and India, a senior administration official said, but America and China as well.

Likewise, Obama’s decision to accelerate the deployment of an American aircraft carrier group to the Yellow Sea for joint exercises with South Korea was meant in part to drive home a message to Beijing. Aware that China doesn’t like any kind of display of American military might in its backyard, Obama administration officials are hoping to change Beijing’s cost-benefit analysis until it decides that restraining North Korea is a lesser evil than seeing more American sailors playing war games outside its door.

“That’s not a threat,” the administration official said. “It’s a reality.”

China pushes back

But in the past three weeks, the United States has seen, in rapid-fire succession, China’s own determination to push back against American demands. At the Group of 20 leaders summit meeting in Seoul on Nov 11, Obama tried to get the world to come down hard on China for its devalued currency, and saw Beijing turn the tables. Instead of America leading the world in hectoring China, Beijing led the world in hectoring the United States for a recent “quantitative easing” move by the Federal Reserve that international critics said had artificially lowered the value of the American dollar.

Coming so soon after the G-20 debacle, the North Korea impasse demonstrates the limits of American attempts to bend Beijing to its will, and a new reality that is emerging: a Sino-American relationship that, foreign policy experts say, must be carefully calibrated to balance American demands against what Beijing can be realistically persuaded to do.

Rothkopf, for his part, argues that it will take more than pressure to get Beijing to yield.