HONG KONG - Bush-bashing - that thriving international industry which over the
past eight years has crossed borders, cultures, races and the economic divide -
will lose most of its sporting appeal when US President George W Bush hands
over to his successor, Barack Obama, on January 20.
There will no doubt follow another global wave of celebration and surge of hope
as America's first African-American president, who has promised to restore the
country's tattered image abroad at the same time that he fixes the economic
mess he has inherited from the Bush team, takes the helm in a much-anticipated
inaugural address.
But, once all the inaugural parades and parties have ended and
celebrities such as Halle Berry and Steven Spielberg have flown back to their
Hollywood palaces, life is going to get complicated - for Americans and for
everyone else. For one thing, the world will have lost its favorite scapegoat.
Global warming? Blame it on Bush. Rising incidents of terrorism? Clearly
prompted by hatred of Bush. War and famine? Somehow exacerbated by Bush. The
financial meltdown? Bush let Wall Street run wild.
If not for these eight misbegotten, calamitous years of the Bush
administration, the state of the world would be just fine as we begin 2009,
right? Wrong.
Indeed, as the daunting challenges of an Obama presidency start to hit home,
Chinese leaders may be forgiven for some feelings of nostalgia for the outgoing
US president. Bush may have fumbled in Afghanistan and miscalculated badly in
Iraq and in the "war on terror" in general, all the while alienating
traditional European allies. But for the most part, his presidency has been a
boon for China, which has continued its relentless rise as a world power under
his largely congenial watch.
On New Year's Day, Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao exchanged warm,
congratulatory messages marking the 30th anniversary of diplomatic ties between
the US and China. After the success of Mao Zedong's communist revolution in
1949, the US had recognized Taiwan, to which the defeated nationalists fled, as
China. The historic 1972 visit to Beijing by then-president Richard Nixon made
diplomatic ties possible seven years later.
From a Chinese perspective, Bush has been a good steward of the Sino-American
relationship. Consider, for example, the Strategic Economic Dialogue the two
countries began in 2006 under Bush's secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson,
the former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs and a long-time friend of
Beijing. One key, if unspoken, agreement of these talks was that the US would
mostly look the other way as China manipulated its currency, the yuan, to fuel
its export-driven juggernaut of an economy, which has averaged double-digit
growth during Bush's tenure.
The Bush administration also blinked as the central government continued to
trample on human rights in China. The crackdown was particularly apparent
during the buildup to last summer's Olympic Games, when Beijing did its best to
eliminate any possibility that its international coming-out party would be
marred by the embarrassment of political protests.
The violent response to last March's bloody riots in Tibet was the most visible
example of the central government's heavy hand. Outside the international
spotlight, however, human-rights activists and even ordinary citizens
petitioning their government to address grievances concerning land grabs and
corrupt local officials were routinely rounded up and locked up in the past
year - with barely a squeak of objection from the Bush administration.
While other Western leaders such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed
reservations about attending the opening ceremony of the Olympics, Bush always
was and continued to be a great supporter of China as Olympic host.
The Bush White House has also seen China reach deeper into Africa for raw
materials while at the same time cozying up to some disreputable regimes - for
example, those of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan and President Robert
Mugabe of Zimbabwe - with a no-strings-attached policy that prompted only muted
concern from Washington.
Likewise, the significant expansion and modernization of China's military
machine drew only polite expressions of concern and calls for greater
transparency from the US Department of Defense. Military spending is up nearly
18% over the last two years and has averaged double-digit growth during the
Bush administration. Officially, China laid out US$59 billion on its military
last year, but the Pentagon estimates that the real figure is much higher,
perhaps twice that, making China's military budget second only to that of the
US.
That said, China still offers little military threat to the US, which has a
US$611 billion budget for the next year. But China's military ambitions are
becoming increasingly clear. Its space program, of course, has profound
military implications, and Beijing's recent decision to deploy two destroyers
and one supply ship to the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, as part of
an international fleet to protect commercial vessels against pirates in the
area is another important development. This is the first such deployment by
China since Admiral Zheng led naval expeditions for the Ming dynasty in the
15th century.
The announcement last month that Beijing plans to build as many as four
aircraft carriers by 2020 is yet another reminder of China's military
aspirations, which the US has regarded with a wary eye but done nothing to
thwart.
On the sticky political issue of Taiwan, Bush officials have also been notably
accommodating to Beijing, eschewing former pro-independence president Chen
Shui-bian, who is now in jail on graft charges, and embracing the current
president, Harvard-educated Ma Ying-jeou, whose election last year has led to a
major thaw in Beijing-Taipei relations.
All-in-all, China has had much to be thankful for during the Bush years. Even
the president's biggest mistake, the war in Iraq, worked to Beijing's
advantage, stretching America's military capacity and weakening its
international reputation as China's continued to rise.
In return for its accommodation of Chinese interests, Washington won some
concessions. Beijing pledged to share data on food safety after tainted Chinese
exports caused death, injury and illness in the West. There was also an
agreement to allow foreign mutual funds to invest in China's stock market.
Moreover, although the yuan remains significantly undervalued, Beijing has
allowed it to rise 21% against the US dollar since 2005, keeping the
China-bashers in the US Congress at bay.
In the diplomatic arena, Bush officials received lots of help from the Chinese
in the six-party nuclear disarmament talks with North Korea - which,
predictably, failed anyway.
Most importantly, however, the Chinese, using their huge chest of foreign
currency reserves, chose to underwrite America's enormous debt with the
purchase of $653 billion in US Treasury securities, making China by far the
world's largest holder of these securities and the chief de facto lender for
America's wild spending spree.
Of course, the fact that a lot of this spending went to buy Chinese-produced
goods made the investment attractive to Beijing. It also created a locked-in
mutual economic dependency that has rendered ideological and political
differences far less important than in the past. The Bush presidency has been a
reflection of this new reality in Sino-American relations.
Now, however, the world's most important bilateral relationship is threatened
by the global recession, and an Obama presidency creates additional
uncertainty. With both economies slumping, trade tensions, always beneath the
surface, may rise again. And, once the Sino-American economic symbiosis is
broken, ideological and political tensions could easily heat up.
A Democratic president working with a Congress also controlled by Democrats is
much more likely to listen to US companies and labor unions preparing trade
complaints against Beijing and to raise tariffs on Chinese imports and charge
Beijing with currency manipulation (especially now that the yuan's rise against
the dollar has stalled).
An Obama administration is also far more likely to call Beijing on human-rights
violations. Obama's presidential campaign was based on a stirring promise of
change. But this could mean change the Chinese leadership does not want to see.
Beijing continues to hold a key card in the trade game - that US$653 billion in
US Treasuries - but Chinese leaders may soon find themselves looking back with
fondness on the Bush years.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
