US-China: A good Bush record
Thomas Christensen, who was deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs in Condi Rice's State Department from 2006-08, has an informative little piece in today's WaPo lauding the improvements the Bush administration has made in the relationship with China.
He writes,
- U.S.-China diplomacy has moved beyond managing problems between the two sides to focus on coordinating responses to problems around the world. That was an important and innovative step for both countries to take. The U.S.-China Senior Dialogue on political and security affairs, led by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte, addresses such global issues. Our regional assistant secretaries of state and their Chinese counterparts also hold intensive discussions. Ten years ago, officials in these positions probably wouldn't even have known each other's names.
Christensen notes the contribution this Washington-Beijing track made to defusing the tensions over North Korea, in particular.
However, he seems a little over-laudatory when he writes that Washington has been working continuously on tamping down Taiwan-China relations by "demanding that the two sides settle their differences peacefully."
How was that compatible with the $6.5 billion arms sale to Taiwan that Washington announced in early October?
Christensen omitted to mention, too, that the early months of the Bush administration were notably not marked by an eirenic approach to China. (See under "Hainan Island Incident.") It was only after that incident got resolved through diplomacy that Bush started adopting a stance toward Beijing that was markedly more cooperative than confrontational.
(Or did that shift happen more evidently after 9/11? Help, anyone?)
Actually, I have a niggling concern that Obama might feel the need to shift back some toward a more shrill and accusatory stance towards China. There are lots of longterm human-rights activists in and associated with his emerging administration. But these are overwhelmingly the kind of activists whose (extremely occidocentric) definition of "rights" focuses much more on civil and political rights than on social and economic rights, and who might for this and a number of other reasons judge it a good idea to start getting accusatory towards China...