Baker Institute panel weighs current U.S.-China relations

Baker Institute panel weighs current U.S.-China relations

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

China’s emergence as an economic heavyweight has coincided with growing self-doubt in the United States to make for a combustible summer that features the Beijing Olympics and the U.S. presidential election. Experts on China and U.S. politics weighed in on the status of U.S.-Chinese relations at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy April 17.

Experts on China and U.S. politics weighed in on the status of U.S.-Chinese relations at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy April 17. From left are Steven Lewis, director of the Transnational China Project; Hans Stockton, associate professor at the University of St. Thomas Center for International Studies; Jacques deLisle, the Stephen Cozen Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania; and Frank Jones, counsel from Fulbright and Jaworski.

The world’s attention will be on China because of the Olympics, said Jacques deLisle, the Stephan Cozen Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, who was one of the panelists at the Baker event. That attention can “cut both ways,” he said, since the Chinese government will seek to benefit from the publicity while its opponents (like Tibetan exiles, Falun Gong supporters and anti-communist activists) will try to use the spotlight to embarrass Beijing.

Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and frequent commentator on U.S. politics, appeared in a live webcast from Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the program. He laid out the unhappy mood among U.S. voters this year and explained that criticism of China has become part of the populist response. “China has become a convenient target for political candidates,” he said.

However, after the two U.S. party conventions conclude (shortly after the end of the Beijing Olympics in August), Ornstein said he expected the candidates to cool some of their populist rhetoric, and the eventual election winner will likely focus more on the U.S. national interest, which must to some degree include cordial relations with China.

Hans Stockton, associate professor at the University of St. Thomas’ Center for International Studies, spoke about the “duality” of U.S. views on China. On the one hand, he said, U.S. leaders condemn Chinese behavior toward domestic dissidents, Tibetan nationalists and Taiwan. But U.S. consumers continue to buy Chinese goods, driving up the U.S. trade deficit, with little disincentive from the U.S. government.

Responding to a topic raised during Ornstein’s webcast, Stockton turned around a question on how China could improve its image in the United States to ask: What would the United States have to do to improve its image in China?  The list of reforms — including backing off criticism of China’s human rights position, dropping calls for China to devalue its currency and pulling back on support for Taiwan — would be politically unacceptable to U.S. politicians, Stockton said. Observers of U.S.-Chinese relations should bear this in mind, he suggested, when wondering why Chinese negotiators won’t meet U.S. officials “halfway.”

Addressing the question of China’s leadership, Steven Lewis, director of the Baker Institute’s Transnational China Project, described a “fair amount of predictability” in who will assume positions of power in the future. Explaining a new mandatory retirement rule for the Chinese hierarchy, Lewis said, “It’s very likely that the people who are in the Politburo now — at least several of them — will be the next leaders. So we need to think about that and cultivate them.”

Lewis also noted the growing role of individual Chinese in the world economy, which will have an obvious impact on the U.S. economy. He urged Americans to keep in mind “the perceptions, the psychology, of individual Chinese and not just what the Chinese government says and does.”

Finally, Lewis pointed out that most Chinese (in contrast to the general public in places like Africa and Latin America) still support the neoliberal economic model. So nightmare scenarios of a future clash between the United States and China may be tempered by a shared economic ideology, he said.

The National Committee on United States-China Relations co-sponsored the China Town Hall. The panel discussion was co-sponsored by the Houston Forum, the Baker Institute and the Center for International Studies.