China-US ties face challenges in coming decade
US: US-China ties will remain “vexing and challenging” as Beijing's
new leaders face internal stresses due to a slowing economy and
increasing distrust from their people, US diplomats said Thursday. “It
will be the most consequential foreign policy challenge that we will
ever face,” US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told a seminar
held in Washington, speaking about future relations between the two
powers.
China and the United States -- the world's top two economies -- are
both poised on the eve of major decisions about the makeup of their
leadership over the coming years.
Americans vote on Tuesday for the next president, amid a fierce
battle between President Barack Obama -- whose administration has made
Asia the new pivot of its foreign policy -- and his Republican
challenger Mitt Romney.
China's political elite was also jostling for power with the
Communist Party Committee meeting behind closed doors ahead of next
week's larger party congress that will usher in the country's leaders
for the next decade.
The US-China relationship will be “much more difficult than any
relationship that we've had in the preceding years, largely because of
its complexity,” Campbell told the forum organized by Georgetown
University.
“It will be vexing and challenging,” he said, flanked by three of his
predecessors as assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
“My only recommendation, actually my hope for whoever follows in our
footsteps, is that there is a recognition that good China policy is best
done when it is embedded in Asian strategy,” Campbell added.
“Good China policy doesn't mean just going to Beijing. It means
working in the neighborhood, working to ensure that other countries are
with you in dialogue and discussions on issues of mutual concern.”
Winston Lord, an assistant secretary of state from 1993-1997 who
accompanied Richard Nixon when he became the first US president to visit
Beijing in 1972, called it a “sweet-and-sour relationship.” But he
warned that China stood at a crucial threshold in its history.
“If they don't make changes in their economic and political system in
the next decade, I think you could see real instability, which could in
turn lead to a more nationalistic and aggressive foreign policy,” said
Lord, a former US ambassador to China.
Richard Solomon, assistant secretary of state from 1989 to 1992,
agreed saying China was entering “a very difficult period” and there was
a “growing alienation of the society from the party leadership.” “One
way to put it is that the society has outgrown the political system that
brought the revolution,” Solomon said.
Flourishing his cell phone before the audience, he said there were an
estimated 400 million mobile phones now in China.
AFP |
