Tenui segnali di progresso nelle relazioni Usa-Cina/A parole, Hu è per una maggiore cooperazione con gli USA
– I cinesi hanno cercato di presentare la visita negli USA del presidente, Hu Jintao, come un nuovo inizio delle relazioni sino-americane, dopo un 2010 irto di attriti;
● Hu ha auspicato maggiore coordinamento con gli USA nelle attività nell’area S-E Asia e Pacifico, una regione in cui entrambi i paesi hanno forti interessi e in cui la crescente influenza e presenza militare della Cina ha provocato tensioni tra di essi.
o Lo scorso hanno l’inasprimento delle dispute territoriali della Cina con i paesi dell’area, tra cui Giappone, Filippine e Vietnam, hanno spinto diversi governi a chiedere agli Usa un maggior impegno militare e politico nella regione.
o I militari e alcuni leader politici cinesi sono stati irritati dall’offerta di mediazione americana e dalla dichiarazione della segretario di Stato Clinton sul diritto all’indipendenza dei paesi della regione.
– La Cina ha chiesto cooperazione e coordinamento con gli Usa su vari temi: dal Doha Round sui negoziati commerciali, alle iniziative contro le modificazioni climatiche e per l’energia; auspicati maggiori scambi culturale, di affari e di studenti; più stretta cooperazione militare, più progetti congiunti per l’agricoltura, l’esplorazione spaziale, l’energia etc.
– La Cina ha per la prima volta espresso pubblicamente preoccupazione sugli impianti di arricchimento uranio del Nord Corea; Hu ha dichiarato che c’è ancora molto da fare in Cina per i diritti umani.
– Nessun progresso significativo su tempi più sostanziali:
o la rivalutazione dello yuan, le facilitazioni agli investitori americani in Cina, l’avvio di un dialogo tra le rispettive forze armate.
o la vendita di armi americane a Taiwan, il sostegno al Dalai Lama; la “sfiducia strategica”, il timore cioè che gli Usa stiano cercando di accerchiare la Cina per impedire che si rafforzi.
– L’incontro è servito agli USA per far sì che le relazioni non peggiorino e che l’instaurarsi di una relazione più personale con Hu, utile per cinesi e americani nei prossimi due anni, quando le battaglie per la scelta del presidente in entrambi i paesi rischiano di bloccare lo sviluppo delle relazioni.
– Alla Cina è servito per presentarsi come partner alla pari con gli Usa, ottenere per Hu il riconoscimento di grande statista internazionale.
– Le valenze politiche dell’incontro interne ai due paesi
o Per Hu frenare le forze politiche cinesi più assertive in politica estera e che hanno cercato di paralizzare le relazioni con Usa e i vicini paesi del Pacifico.
o Questa assertività – basata lo scorso anno sul nazionalismo e sulla convinzione che gli Usa sono in declino – ha creato forti difficoltà a Hu e al primo ministro Wen Jiabao.
Obama, a seguito della serie di dichiarazioni sue e del suo gabinetto rimarcanti le divergenze con Pechino (su valuta cinese, lentezza nella battaglia anti-pirateria su software e proprietà intellettuale americani, diritti umani, rifiuto a negoziare con il Dalai Lama), si è procurato una reputazione di maggiore fermezza nella sua politica verso la Cina, che può piacere ai conservatori ed a qualche liberale.
The Caucus – The Politics and Government blog of The New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
– President Hu Jintao of China called for closer cooperation with the United States in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim in a speech on Thursday, offering an olive branch in a region where China’s increasing influence and military presence have roiled relations between the two powers.
– Speaking to leaders of American business and foreign-relations organizations in Washington, Mr. Hu said that the Pacific Rim was where Washington and Beijing had the greatest range of overlapping interests, and he called closer coordination of American and Chinese activities there “crucial to the regional situation and our bilateral relations.”
– “We should stay committed to promoting peace, stability and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region,” he said, “and turn the Asia-Pacific into an important region where China and the United States work closely with each other on the basis of mutual respect.”
– China’s territorial disputes with several nations in the region, including Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, grew more fractious last year, prompting many of the region’s governments to ask the United States to step up its military and political involvement there.
– The American response — an offer to mediate the disputes, and a blunt statement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about the need for states in the region to retain their independence — in turn angered the Chinese military and some leaders in Beijing, who saw the moves as intended to check China’s growing influence.
– Mr. Hu’s speech was laced with calls for China and the United States to cooperate and coordinate their actions on many global issues, from the Doha round of world trade negotiations to climate change and energy-conservation initiatives. He also called for a sustained effort to improve bilateral relations with more cultural, business and student exchanges, closer military cooperation and more joint projects in agriculture, space exploration, energy and other fields.
“The development of China-United States relations in the final analysis hinges on the broad support and active involvement of people from all walks of life in both countries,” he said.
With a broader dialogue involving every facet of both societies, he said, “more and more people will become supporters of stronger China-United States relations and get actively involved in this worthy cause.”
By MICHAEL WINES
– WASHINGTON — The Chinese have striven to lend this week’s state visit by President Hu Jintao the aura of a fresh start, from feel-good displays of friendly Chinese in Times Square to a Washington newspaper insert that declared on Wednesday that his meeting with President Obama could open a new chapter in a relationship between the world’s two economic giants that had been troubled.
– That much is doubtful. But for the first time in months, the two leaders may at least have started reading from the same book.
– After a 2010 notable mostly for Chinese acrimony toward the United States and its policies, Mr. Hu came to the White House not only saying that constructive relations between the two powers were essential, but also offering some modest concessions to demonstrate it. In a joint statement issued Wednesday,
– the Chinese for the first time expressed public concern over North Korea’s recent disclosure of a modern uranium-enrichment plant, a small but ardently sought step in American efforts to press Kim Jong-il to roll back his nuclear weapons program.
– More surprising, perhaps, Mr. Hu said at a White House news conference that “a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights,” an unusual admission for a government that recently called the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to one of its dissidents a Western plot to embarrass Beijing.
Words, of course, are easier than deeds. “I don’t equate new rhetoric with new reality in China,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution scholar who was President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser on China issues. “But at least new rhetoric is better than nothing.”
– So, in a sense, were the events of Wednesday. Neither side made any significant progress, much less any breakthrough, on the larger problems that have bedeviled relations ever since Mr. Obama made his state visit to Beijing in November 2009. On the American side, that includes revaluing China’s currency, leveling the playing field for American investors in China and establishing a serious discourse between the nations’ militaries.
– For the Chinese, the biggest thorns include American arms sales to Taiwan, its continued support of the Dalai Lama and what a Chinese journalist at Wednesday’s news conference called “strategic mistrust” — the fear that the United States is seeking to encircle China and suppress its rise.
Still, each side came away from the meeting with something it could point to as an accomplishment, however modest.
– The White House had set out to keep relations from sliding even further downhill, and to establish a more personal relationship with Mr. Hu that could sustain ties during the next two years, when the political realities of choosing leaders in both countries will work against any significant improvement.
– Mr. Obama appears to have gotten that. For his part, Mr. Hu was, by American accounts, fixated on engineering a state visit that would portray China as an equal partner with the United States, and China’s president as a successful, internationally recognized statesman. He got that, too.
– Both leaders should also reap domestic political benefits from their meeting. Mr. Hu’s enhanced stature, American analysts say, should help him tamp down political forces that have driven a more aggressive foreign policy and hamstrung relations with the United States and China’s Pacific neighbors in the last year.
– Mr. Hu and China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, “realize this assertiveness based in the last year on nationalism and the belief that the U.S. is declining has gotten them into deep trouble,” said Joseph S. Nye Jr., the former dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a State Department and Pentagon official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Mr. Nye was in Washington for a luncheon with Mr. Hu at the State Department. “They think a summit which could be played as a success can give them ammunition to quiet down this rumbling below in the ranks.”
– For his part, Mr. Obama comes away from the visit with a new reputation for toughness in his China policy, something that is likely to please conservatives and some liberals alike.
– In the past week, the president’s cabinet members loosed a fusillade of speeches intended to lay out the administration’s differences with Beijing for all to see. And at Wednesday’s public sessions with Mr. Hu, Mr. Obama repeatedly raised concerns about China’s currency, its foot-dragging in stopping the pirating of American software and other intellectual property, its poor human rights record and, boldest of all, China’s refusal to talk to the Dalai Lama.
– Critics on Mr. Obama’s left have accused him of soft-pedaling human rights since the start of his presidency, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton played down the need to raise rights concerns in public during a visit to Beijing. This time, Mr. Obama invited human rights advocates to the White House for a meeting on China in the days before Mr. Hu’s arrival, and raised the issue from the beginning on Wednesday, in his remarks welcoming Mr. Hu to the White House.
– Mr. Obama also had a “very serious” discussion on human rights with Mr. Hu during a private dinner in the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Lieberthal said.
“The administration feels this is about managing a very complicated and very important relationship — and I stress ‘managing,’ ” he said. “This is not a relationship where everything is going to come out right.”
Whether baby steps on human-rights language and other issues will show staying power after Mr. Hu returns to Beijing and the cauldron of domestic politics is an open question, Mr. Lieberthal and other experts said. But for now, “progress is progress,” said Nina Hachigian, a veteran analyst on United States-China relations at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic-leaning research group. “And even if it’s incremental progress, it’s better than no progress at all.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
An earlier version misidentified Joseph S. Nye Jr.’s position at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is the former dean of the school, not the current dean, though he remains on faculty there.