An Old Presidential Predicament: China Proves Tough to Influence

tsfrank

An Old Presidential Predicament: China Proves Tough to Influence

By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: April 21, 2006

WASHINGTON, April 20 — Just about every American president since Richard M. Nixon has confronted the fact that his influence over China is far more limited than he once hoped. President Bush is now facing that reality midway through his second term, at a moment when the Chinese clearly sense his weakness.

Mr. Bush's predicament was on display during his encounters on Thursday with President Hu Jintao, in which Mr. Bush made it clear that the status quo was unacceptable — that America's $200 billion annual trade deficit is \"unsustainable,\" that Iran needs to face sanctions to force it to halt its nuclear program, and that China must \"use its considerable influence\" to make sure North Korea is disarmed.

Mr. Hu acknowledged that each of those issues needed attention, but deflected every effort to commit China to concrete action. It was the fifth time that the two men have met in the past year. The mood was friendly, yet the tension was unmistakable.

\"Each side leaves with frustrations, and you could particularly hear that in President Bush's tone,\" said Kurt Campbell, an Asian expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The United States was unhappy with progress on issues critical to the American agenda; the Chinese were unhappy that Mr. Hu has rarely been out of the earshot of protesters.

Arriving in Seattle earlier in the week, Mr. Hu was greeted as the leader of a huge and growing customer. In Washington, Mr. Bush referred instead to China as a \"stakeholder,\" a word intended as a message that it must use its power for more than commercial gain. Mr. Bush made clear that in his view Beijing must stop regarding places like Iran and Sudan as suppliers of the oil China needs to fuel its growth, and start regarding them as international problems that China needs to help solve.

During his 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush described Beijing as a \"strategic competitor\" whose ambitions for global influence must be contained. Now he prefers to say America's relationship with the Chinese is \"complicated,\" reflecting a conversion that he took a step further on Thursday to declare that \"China and the United States share extensive common strategic interests.\"

Perhaps that should have been no surprise. Like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton before him, Mr. Bush came to office convinced that if he set tougher rules about engaging China, the Chinese would change their behavior. They quickly came to abandon that view.

\"A number of presidents since Nixon have come to office with negative views of the Chinese,\" said Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Bush's father. \"They always end up supporting the thrust of the policy established by President Nixon,\" one of engagement.

But for this President Bush, whose first dealings with the Chinese involved recovering American airmen whose spy plane was forced down off the Chinese coast, it has been a slow transition, and an unhappy one.

And now, some members of his administration concede when promised anonymity, Mr. Bush needs a breakthrough in the relationship — on North Korea, where China has the most influence, or Iran, where it is a major oil customer, or on the trade deficit that has grown so large, with no end in sight.

He appears increasingly unlikely to get that breakthrough.

Mr. Bush clearly thought his biggest opportunity was on the Korean crisis, where he decided to engage all of North Korea's neighbors, with the Chinese as host, in an effort to convince Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, that he has no choice but to give up a small arsenal of nuclear weapons. Those talks have stretched on for more than two years.

Mr. Bush frequently notes that the Chinese share his goal of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, and Mr. Hu affirmed that on Thursday. But the reality, officials acknowledge in background conversations, is that the Chinese are not unhappy with the status quo, because the last thing they want is chaos on their border with North Korea, or a collapse of that government.

Iran has proved only slightly less frustrating for Mr. Bush. Again the Chinese say they share the long-term goal of making sure Tehran does not get a nuclear weapon, but they have opposed any use of sanctions, or even discussion of a military option if diplomacy fails. So when Mr. Bush raised the possibility of pressing Iran by using a section of the United Nations Charter that allows for enforcement, Mr. Hu stayed silent.

Mr. Hu has given slightly more on the issue of freeing China's currency so that its value rises, a way of curbing the trade deficit because the price of Chinese goods would gradually rise. But it has been a painfully slow process, leaving Congress frustrated and threatening to take action.

Mr. Bush had hoped for better. When Mr. Hu took office, one of Mr. Bush's top foreign policy advisers said that since the two men were of the same generation, they should be able to communicate easily.

Mr. Hu was viewed as a technocrat, not an ideologue; a reformer willing to acknowledge, as he did Thursday, that his country's modernization had to be accompanied by some level of democratization.

But he has made clear to Mr. Bush that his focus is on keeping the peace at home, where economic change to a more market-based economy has been wrenching. And so for the Chinese, the status quo works: China is growing, its influence in Asia is expanding, its military ascendancy along the coast facing Taiwan is striking, and its economy is on a path toward overtaking Japan's.

Mr. Hu apparently no longer feels, as past Chinese leaders did, that he must come to the United States bearing gifts. And the Chinese, ever sensitive to questions of status, made clear they felt slighted by Mr. Bush's decision not to offer up a full state dinner for the leader of 1.3 billion people; instead, Mr. Hu got lunch.

And in return, Mr. Bush got vague promises that China would continue doing what it is already doing — at its own pace.