HONG
KONG - Are wind farms in the US state of Oregon
part of a secret Chinese plot to take over America?
Are other Chinese machinations - currency
manipulation, intellectual-property theft and the
dumping of cheap goods on US shores - also key
components of this dastardly scheme?
As a
threat both internal and external, China - largely
ignored in the 2008 US presidential campaign in
which, embracing themes of hope and change,
then-senator Barack Obama, a Democrat, defeated
Republican rival John McCain - has returned to the
political stage in 2012 in what has become its
customary role as scapegoat for America's
diminished status in world affairs.
The
November 6 US election comes just two days before the
Chinese Communist Party
convenes its 18th National Congress in Beijing to
determine a once-a-decade leadership change. A new
CCP general secretary and elite Politburo Standing
Committee will be selected at this congress, and
no doubt the China-bashing US presidential
campaign will be a hot topic of discussion behind
closed doors.
Indeed, the time is ripe for
dangerous misunderstanding and miscalculation in
both Beijing and Washington.
It was
Obama's Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, who
got the anti-China party started in the US when he
vowed to label China "a cheat" and "a currency
manipulator" the first day he takes office as the
45th US president. It is a promise he has repeated
ad nauseam over the course of the long campaign
and in the three televised presidential debates,
the last of which, focused entirely on foreign
policy, took place on Monday night in Boca Raton,
Florida.
Again, on Monday, Romney pledged
to get tough on China (not to mention Syria, Iran
and any other nation that dared not to bend to
Washington's will) and to restore America's
exalted place in the world. The implication, of
course, is that Obama has let Beijing have its way
over the past four years at great economic and
diplomatic cost to the US.
After a flat
performance in the first debate between the two
candidates, held on October 3, the president has
come back aggressively, boasting on Monday night
of trade complaints against China that his
administration has filed with the World Trade
Organization (WTO) and of tariffs imposed on
imported Chinese tires that saved more that 1,000
jobs, many of them in the state of Ohio, a
so-called swing state key to the president's
re-election.
During the second debate, by
far the feistiest of the three, Obama accused
Romney of hypocrisy on China, charging that the
former Massachusetts governor, a multimillionaire
businessman, is himself heavily invested in
Chinese companies that build surveillance
equipment allowing the authoritarian government in
Beijing to spy on its own citizens.
Rounding on his opponent, Obama said:
"Governor, you're the last person who's going to
get tough on China."
Beyond dragging
Beijing before the WTO and slapping punitive
duties on Chinese imports, the Obama team likes to
point out that the president has also blocked the
purchase of wind farms in Oregon by a Chinese
company, Ralls Corp, claiming the sale would
threaten national security. The specific reason
given: The farms are too close for comfort to a US
naval facility whose defenses could be
compromised. By wind farms?
That's how
silly things have become. Romney may have started
the cheap theatrics by raising the issue of an
undervalued Chinese currency, the yuan - which has
actually appreciated by 11% against the US dollar
over the past four years - but the Obama
administration's action against Ralls sets Sino-US
relations back two decades - it was that long ago
that national security was used by a US president
as justification to block a Chinese company from
investing in the country.
As for those
1,000 jobs saved by the Obama tariffs on imported
Chinese tires, before Americans applaud they
should also consider that they are now paying a
much higher price for their tires.
The
reaction in Beijing to all this political
pandering and scapegoating is, understandably, one
of being peeved. Already firm in their belief that
the top unstated foreign-policy goal of any US
president, Democrat or Republican, is to contain
China's rise as a world power, Chinese leaders
view the histrionic distortions and half-truths of
a close and bitterly contested presidential
campaign now entering its frantic, final two weeks
as further proof that the US cannot be trusted as
a partner in global affairs.
A recent
report by an intelligence committee in the US
Congress recommending that US companies avoid
doing business with Chinese telecommunications
giants Huawei and ZTE, both of which are keen to
purchase US assets, has only served to deepen that
conviction.
The uproar caused by the
report is reminiscent of the congressional
apoplexy stirred in 2005 by a China National
Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) bid to take over the
California energy company Unocal; as opposition in
Congress grew increasingly shrill, CNOOC withdrew
its bid, but it has raised red North American
flags again this year with a US$15.1 billion offer
to buy Canadian oil and gas explorer NEXEN.
Rather than retaliate for the predictable
provocations of a US election year, however,
China's leadership should take a long, deep breath
and then - on November 7, the day after the
election, on which (poof!) all this nasty
anti-China rhetoric should magically disappear -
exhale and go back to establishing business as
usual with whoever is the American president.
After all, Chinese leaders have seen this movie
before - multiple times - with different actors
playing similar roles.
In 1992, only three
years after then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping
had ordered People's Liberation Army tanks into
Tiananmen Square to bring a bloody end to a
months-long pro-democracy movement, challenger
Bill Clinton assailed president George H W Bush
for having "coddled dictators". Clinton went on to
win that election and to be re-elected to a second
term in 1996. Years later, as Bush's son
George W was mounting his 2004 presidential
campaign for re-election, his rival, Senator John
Kerry, accused his administration of encouraging
US companies to outsource jobs to China, an
accusation Romney has leveled at Obama during the
current campaign.
So the beat goes on. But
so does the reality of the ever-more symbiotic
relationship between Washington and Beijing.
As Obama and Romney bicker about lost jobs
to China and cheap Chinese imports squeezing out
American-made products in the US market, why
doesn't some debate moderator halt the misleading
exchange to point out that 1) a lot of putatively
red-white-and-blue American companies choose, no
matter what a US president might say, to
manufacture their products in China, and 2) a lot
of so-called "Chinese imports" are actually
American products assembled in China and then
shipped to the US?
It might not make for a
very appealing sound-bite, but it is nevertheless
true: when Americans load up their shopping carts
at Walmart or purchase the latest iPhone or Nike
shoes, they are often buying products designated
as "Chinese imports" because they were made in
China, but the profit from those sales is going to
US companies while cheap labor costs in China keep
prices low for American consumers.
Let's
have a debate about that.
The US trade
deficit with China is another great source of
obfuscation. If you listen to most politicians in
Washington on either side of the political divide,
Sino-US trade relations are an entirely one-sided
deal, with Chinese goods flooding the open US
market while US goods are blocked from entering
China.
Actually, US exports to China have
nearly doubled in the past five years - from $62
billion to what is projected to be $120 billion
this year.
Yes, China's $480 billion in
imports to the US in 2012 is four times that
amount, but China is now completing an industrial
revolution like the one the US went through 150
years ago. Of course, goods coming out of China
are going to be cheaper than those made in the US;
that's why so many American companies like Apple
and Nike are manufacturing there.
Let's
debate that.
On second thoughts, let's
cease debating altogether, choose a US president
on November 6 acknowledge a new Chinese leadership
as that week unfolds and then close the political
theater and get back to common sense and the
reality of Sino-US relations.
These two
nations have never been so intimately, if
uncomfortably, intertwined. China needs a
rejuvenated US economy with a robust market for
its goods; the United States needs China to take
good care of the $1.153 trillion in US Treasury
debt held by Beijing - that alone makes any
thought of a trade war with China unthinkable.
Although they are loath to admit it, both
American and Chinese leaders are well aware of
their mutual dependency. With the US presidential
election and China's generational leadership
change just ahead, however, the danger is that
those leaders might not just say stupid things;
they might actually act on them.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based
teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing56@gmail.com Follow him on Twitter:
@KentEwing1
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