Mutant Palm

The outlines of the Obama Administration’s China policies are starting to come into focus. First was the mention of China on the new Whitehouse.gov:

Seek New Partnerships in Asia: Obama and Biden will forge a more effective framework in Asia that goes beyond bilateral agreements, occasional summits, and ad hoc arrangements, such as the six-party talks on North Korea. They will maintain strong ties with allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia; work to build an infrastructure with countries in East Asia that can promote stability and prosperity; and work to ensure that China plays by international rules.

That was a bit more forceful than “responsible stakeholder”. Now incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has mentioned in his confirmation hearings that China is “manipulating” its currency. To be clear, Geithner was quoting Obama’s campaign rhetoric and did not state policy.

“President Obama — backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists — believes that China is manipulating its currency,” Mr. Geithner wrote. He stopped short of charging that China is manipulating its currency intentionally to gain an unfair trade advantage, as the 1988 law requires for an official citation of currency “manipulation.”

The statement was in response to a question from Chuck Schumer - everyone in China ought to understand how he rolls. Little noticed so far, however, has been Hillary Clinton’s choice of Kurt M Campbell for assistant secretary of East Asian Affairs. A former assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia and the Pacific during the Clinton Administration, Campbell has been fairly visible in the media, writing about the schism between sinologists, a semi-regular column in the Taipei Times, and frequent appearances on NPR. He appears to be a defense-oriented centrist, supporting multilateral talks in Korea and maintaining the American strategic position in the Pacific. He’ll be worth watching in the future.

Photo by January20th2009 @ Flickr.

Since everybody is talking about it, I have a question: if the Chinese state media are supposed to be such masters of message control, how come they didn’t think to use a 10 second delay? Or a full minute? It’s not like there’s much competition on the airwaves. And how prepped are their messengers? The anchor is panicky and I swear the analyst gulps. They’re spending 45 billion RMB to extend this around the world?

Less than 24 hours ago, George W. Bush became a Former President and for a while now there’s been the traditional tenure evaluation and the search for whether anything will positively contribute to his legacy. AIDS in Africa has been bandied around, and so has the U.S. - China relationship. January 1 was the 30th anniversary of formal bilateral ties between the two nations, and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said the “relationship has never been better”, particularly holding out anti-terrorism as an example. Under Bush, the U.S. and China have certainly had good relations, surprisingly so considering the Hainan Incident and Bush’s stance towards China in the “Pre-9/11 world”, particularly involving missiles and Taiwan.

But Americans, particularly of certain political bents, might want to consider other ways Bush has moved the U.S. closer to China. Under Bush, the United States has detained Xinjiang Uighurs as enemies of the State, and then subjected them to interrogation procedures (insert personal definition of the word ‘torture’ here) derived from Chinese manuals in order to prepare them for interrogation by Chinese officials. As China Matters puts it, “In summary: we used Chinese torture techniques to soften up Chinese prisoners for Chinese interrogators.”As if that wasn’t enough, it appears that at least one released Uighur detainee has been listed by the Pentagon as “returning to the fight” against America for writing an op-ed to the New York Times.

How very close to China that feels. I can’t help but wonder if those dissidents and activists who lobby the U.S. president and Congress to bring change to China, many of whom personally know what Chinese detention is like, ever express concern in private that their adopted country was slipping into the same behavior as the country they seek to reform. They didn’t out in protest publicly, either.

There are other ways that the Bush administration has inched the United States closer to some of the policies of the PRC. Although American critics of China can be unbearably shrill and self-righteous at times, it seems to be true that China has 50 Cent gangs and other “CONTROL 2.0″ schemes for “public opinion guidance”. So then, what are we to make of U.S. Air Force “counterblogging” tactics? If China’s alleged “grains of sand” strategy is so nefarious and dastardly, what of the Pentagon’s Minerva Initiative, which was inaugurated with Defense Secretary Gates asking academics to gather documents in other countries that could help intelligence services? What about the bribed newspaper columnists, the media military analysts briefed by the Pentagon on talking points, and Barry McCaffrey’s One Man Military-Industrial-Media Complex? And I nearly forgot the ongoing campaign to listen to all our phone calls. [UPDATE: and I did forget that the NSA and the Chinese government both want new UN measures to enable easier tracing of anonymous users on the Internet.]

Of course the U.S. and China have vastly different political structures. Of course there is a fundamental difference between a system where a current officeholder conducts himself this way, and a system where the office itself functions this way. And yet, if you are going to oppose such things on principle, then the U.S. has violated those principles, just as any country must be said to have done when it behaves that way.

It will be easy for many, should the Obama Administration live up to their expectations, to dismiss these events as an aberration, and focus only on the structural differences between the U.S. and Chinese governments. Those differences are real, and worthy of attention. But there is a lesson here that the U.S. and China are not on separate planes of political existence. Neither is uniquely exceptional, but rather both are susceptible to the same petty tyranny and insanity that can befall any nation. It would be helpful to remember that.

Photo via amatern @Flickr.