China - We need to spend less time on dialogue ... as we held seemingly never-ending discussions, Beijing’s behavior deteriorated

Talking to a China in Disarray

by Gordon G. Chang

The Obama administration is nothing if not persistent when it comes to wooing the Chinese. Beginning Wednesday, American officials are hosting their Beijing counterparts for the fifth round of the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington.

The large get-together—hundreds of officials on each side have attended previous sessions—comes a month after the “shirtsleeves summit” between President Obama and Xi Jinping, China’s newly installed supremo. That event, despite high hopes on the American side, proved to be a bust. At the time, then National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, in his post-summit press briefing, put his best face on what happened, but he inadvertently revealed how bad things went when he spent almost all his time telling us what Obama said to Xi, omitting what Xi told Obama.

The failure of the informal gathering in June should have been a warning. The thinking behind last month’s event was that the formality of past summits made meaningful conversation difficult. Administration officials believed the relaxed setting—in Rancho Mirage, California, at the Annenberg estate—would help Obama and Xi put relations on a better path.

Since Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, the US has talked to China in every conceivable format, formal and informal, bilateral and multilateral, secret and announced. During the previous administration, the number of ongoing bilateral forums reached 50. Today, there are more than 90 of them.

Yet as we continued to talk in all settings, relations became even more strained. And as we held seemingly never-ending discussions, Beijing’s behavior deteriorated.

We need to ask ourselves why. The problem for the administration is that China’s external policies are now being driven by internal trends. For one thing, the Chinese economy has hit an inflection point and is evidently on a long downward slide. This has consequences because, without prosperity, the Communist Party’s only remaining basis of legitimacy is nationalism. Militant nationalism, unfortunately, is now the defining feature of Beijing’s approach to the world.

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