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Tale of two talks in
Beijing
By Yu Bin
Summer in Beijing is known for heat, smog,
and ubiquitous traffic jams. None of this,
however, deters the city from hosting two
important conferences. One is the much-anticipated
fourth round of six-party talks on the Korean
nuclear issue that began July 26; the other was
the senior dialogue on global issues between US
Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick and
China's Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo earlier
this week. The latter was first suggested by
Chinese President Hu Jintao during the November
2004 APEC meeting in Chile and quickly endorsed by
President George W Bush as a forum to engage in
deeper dialogues on long-term, strategic issues
with China.
Both talks have high stakes
for regional security and US-China relations. None
has yielded any tangible results, at least for the
time being. New developments from these talks,
however, show promising signs for the sides to
work out practical solutions for some sensitive
and difficult issues.
The six-party talks
developed some new features in both format and
substance. It is the first round with an
open-ended schedule - as of Friday the talks had
gone 11 days. In contrast, there were three days
for the first round (August 27-29, 2003), four
days for the second (February 25-28, 2004) and
three more for the third round (June 23-26, 2004).
This time, participants are more flexible, if not
necessarily friendlier, toward each other. Unlike
the previous talks, a China-drafted joint document
is being hammered out and is expected to be
released as a comprehensive reflection of the
views of all sides and as a statement of
principles for future talks.
The most
important change this time is that the US and
North Korea take center stage with almost daily,
bilateral, closed-door meetings, something that
rarely occurred during the previous talks. Other
parties also seem to have assumed different roles.
China and South Korea continue their
"facilitating" role to persuade both sides to be
more pragmatic. Russia and Japan are somewhat
marginalized for different reasons: internal
structural weakness for Russia since 1991 and
Japan's obsession with the 1970s abduction of some
of its citizens by North Korea. Regardless,
pragmatism and patience has prevailed in the
fourth round of nuclear talks.
While
Washington was eager for the resumption of the
talks on halting North Korean nuclear programs,
what concerned Beijing more was the issue of
Taiwan's independence, and its impact on relations
with the US. This was one of the central issues in
the Sino-US senior dialogue. Although the visits
to the Chinese mainland by Taiwan opposition
parties' leaders this year temporarily released
the tension across the Taiwan Strait, the island's
drift toward independence has not been
fundamentally arrested, let alone reversed.
For China, Japan also looms larger over
the Taiwan issue for the first time since the end
of World War II, thanks to the US-Japan "2+2"
meeting on February 19. Although the US-Japan
joint declaration contains words such as "peaceful
resolution of the Taiwan issue" and "develop a
cooperative relationship with China", many view
the document as effectively widening the focus of
the alliance from simply defending Japan to
include the Taiwan Strait and China. Meanwhile,
the Pentagon continues to upgrade relations with
the island (the most recent development was to
exchange active duty officers between Washington
and Taipei as de facto permanent attaches). The
Taiwan issue is also set against a backdrop of a
steadily worsening ties between Tokyo and Beijing,
as the region commemorates the 60th anniversary of
the end of World War II, bringing up old wounds
from Japan's occupation of parts of China. Now the
two Asian giants have been maneuvering themselves
not just over the issue of history, territory,
energy and security, but also over Taiwan, once a
Japanese colony for 50 years, to the dismay of
China.
Beyond Taiwan, Beijing is
disheartened, if not disturbed, by the recent
chorus of calls from Washington for Japan to get
tough - both militarily and economically - with
China. In this regard, several trends toward
instability and uncertainty are discernible. One
is the quite unusual popping up of the China issue
in Washington politics during the second term of a
president, which usually means more moderate,
mature and stable bilateral relations after the
initial learning experience in office (for example
with presidents Reagan and Clinton).
Another alarming trend for Beijing is the
politicization of the economic domain, ranging
from the US pressure on China's currency and the
bid for US oil firm Unocal from China's
state-owned CNOOC. The CNOOC bid failed in part
because of political hurdles in Washington in an
area usually having positive and sustainable
developments to offset the more problematic
political and security areas of the bilateral
relationship.
In the midst of politicizing
economic issues, the tension and distrust in the
security area continues, though not without new
trends. One is the "China uncertain" theme -
expressed both by Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld in Singapore on June 19 and in the
Pentagon's annual report to Congress on China's
military on July 19. The report suggested that
China's military spending was much higher than
published figures and that China's military
capability was growing too fast for US comfort.
Rumsfeld's concerns and the Pentagon's
report reflect a general mood of uneasiness with
China's rapid development in the past few years.
After several years of preoccupation with Iraq and
the global war on terror (now being downgraded to
the "global struggle against violent extremism"),
China's surging economic power and global quest
for energy and raw materials are simply
unthinkable, if not unacceptable, for many in the
US.
For years, Washington has had a hard
time defining China's role in a world dominated by
the US - for no reason other than the changing of
the guard in the White House (the Bush
administration replaced Clinton's version of China
as a strategic partner to one of strategic
competitor). It took both the April 1, 2001 midair
collision of an American EP-3 reconnaissance plane
and a Chinese jet fighter off the island of
Hainan, as well as the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks on the US, for the Bush team to
settle on a "candid, cooperative and constructive
relationship" with China. Still, the ensuing "best
relationship in 30 years", as claimed by former
secretary of state Powell two years ago, turned
out to be a brief interlude.
More
recently, Bush remarked that the relationship with
Beijing was "very complex", actually not so
different from China's long-held view outlined by
former president Jiang Zemin in 2001 that the Sino
American relationship contains both competition
and cooperation (Washington Post March 23, 2001
interview). This nuanced view of bilateral ties is
more realistic and sophisticated. Indeed, as host
for the six-party talks, China has effectively and
perhaps irreversibly transcended its
"lips-and-teeth" relations with Pyongyang and put
regional interests ahead even of its own more
narrow national interests.
Meanwhile, the
US is reluctant to identify its high-level
dialogue with China in Beijing as "strategic",
arguing that the term is reserved only for US
allies. Nobody, however, questions the strategic
nature of the dialogue. Regardless of what the
dialogue is called, "the relations between China
and the United States may well determine whether
our children will live in turmoil even worse than
the 20th century or whether they will witness a
new world order compatible with universal
aspirations for peace and progress," as former US
secretary of state Henry Kissinger said in a June
interview with the International Herald Tribune.
In this regard, both the US-China
"strategic dialogue" and the Korean nuclear talks
aim to develop deeper understanding and engagement
in order to avert a full-blown strategic
competition for East Asian by these major powers.
Yu Bin is professor of political
science at Wittenberg University in the US, senior
research associate for the Shanghai Institute of
American Studies, and visiting scholar at Fudan
University in Shanghai. He can be reached at
byu@wittenberg.edu .
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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