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US And China Meet For Defence Talks

From AFP:

US and Chinese defence officials met in Beijing for talks in which the Americans were expected to nudge China towards supporting more pressure on North Korea.

The US delegation led by Michele Flournoy, under-secretary for defence, was also expected to push for closer US-China defence ties following concerns in Washington over Beijing’s expanding military and recent stand-offs at sea.

“China and the US discussing the situation on the Korean Peninsula is a natural thing and we take this consultation very seriously, and hope that we can get positive results out of it,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.
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- June 23, 2009 4:56 AM
US Lodges China Censorship Complaint

The U.S. has lodged a formal complaint to the Chinese government over Green Dam software. From the Financial Times:

The development is a rare direct intervention by the US over internet freedom, which has steadily risen in importance as an issue between the two countries in recent years. US technology companies see it as a back-door way of keeping them out of the Chinese market.

China has ordered PC makers to load internet filtering software from a Chinese company, Green Dam, on all machines on sale from July 1. The order, officially directed at filtering pornography, could give officials far more power to block political content as well.

“We view with concern any attempt to restrict the free flow of information,” said Ian Kelly, a State department spokesman.

[...] The US embassy in Beijing said representatives had met officials at the ministry of industry and information technology and the ministry of commerce on Friday.
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- June 21, 2009 7:24 PM
U.S., Chinese Military Officials To Meet Next Week

From Reuters:

Top U.S. and Chinese military officials will meet next week to discuss North Korea and maritime conflicts with the aim of improving cooperation between Beijing and Washington, the Pentagon said on Friday.

Pentagon policy chief Michele Flournoy will meet with Lieutenant General Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, in Beijing on June 23 and 24, a senior Pentagon official said.

“North Korea will factor in very strongly,” the official said. “We’ve learned that there’s a lot of common interest here in international consensus to moderate North Korean behavior.”
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- June 20, 2009 8:10 PM
China-US Naval Incident Part Of A Rising Trend

From AP:

China has called the latest collision between Chinese and U.S. naval vessels an accident, but many of the elements echo previous altercations that have raised concerns that China’s navy is growing increasingly aggressive in its patrols of the waters off its coast.

In last week’s incident, as before, a Chinese submarine was found to be shadowing a U.S. Navy ship — possibly undetected by sonar equipment being towed behind the American destroyer.

The South China Sea, where the collision occurred and where the U.S. Navy operates amid a complex patchwork of competing territorial claims, is also a familiar backdrop for such incidents.
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- June 16, 2009 12:21 AM
Chinese Sub Smashes US Destroyer’s Sonar: Report

From the Times of India:

A Chinese submarine collided with an underwater sonar array towed by the destroyer USS John S. McCain off the coast of the Philippines, CNN television said, quoting a US official who said it was an “inadvertent encounter.”

The array, used to locate underwater sounds, was damaged in the incident, but the military official said the sub and ship did not collide… In March this year two tense standoffs between US and Chinese vessels in the South China Sea triggered accusations by the United States that China was behaving in an “aggressive” manner.

From the China Daily:

The US Navy did not consider the event a case of deliberate harassment, according to CNN.

In March this year four confrontations between US and Chinese vessels in the waters off China’s coast triggered disputes between the two sides.

China said the U.S. ship violated international and Chinese laws by entering China’s “exclusive economic zone” without authorization and urged the United States to take steps to avoid a repetition.

See also past CDT posts on U.S. relations.
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- June 13, 2009 9:01 AM
At Odds on Emissions, U.S., China Open Talks

From Washington Post:

Senior U.S. and Chinese officials began three days of talks here Monday in hopes of making a breakthrough on climate change, but they remain far apart on the basic issue of who is to blame for carbon emissions and should shoulder the biggest burden for reducing them.

Both countries, which together produce roughly 40 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions, have been making what they say are major efforts in recent years to reduce pollution within their borders, but each accuses the other of not doing enough.

Experts say that unless the United States and China can reach an agreement, it will be difficult to arrive at a new climate change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol at a meeting in Copenhagen in six months.
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- June 9, 2009 2:31 AM
China and U.S. in Cold War-like Negotiations for Truce on Emissions

From New York Times:

For months the United States and China, by far the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, have been warily circling each other in hopes of breaking a long impasse on global warming policy.

They are, as President Obama’s chief climate negotiator puts it, “the two gorillas in the room,” and if they do not reach some sort of truce, there is no chance of forging a meaningful international treaty in Copenhagen later this year to restrict emissions.

As a senior American team arrived in Beijing on Sunday for climate talks, the standoff was taking on the trappings of cold-war arms control negotiations, with gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions replacing megatons of nuclear might as a looming risk for people across the globe.
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- June 7, 2009 8:35 PM
Q&A with Reps. Pelosi and Markey (Updated with Chinese Transcript)

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chair of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee Ed Markey sat down for an exclusive Q&A with CDT during their eight-day trip to China this month. We will post a full Chinese transcript of the interview shortly.

Q&A with Reps. Pelosi and Markey in China from China Digital Times on Vimeo.

The Chinese transcript of the Q&A follows (translated by Shilin Jia):
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- June 5, 2009 3:00 AM
China Lashes out over Gitmo Prisoner Request

China is pressuring the Australian government not to resettle 10 Uighurs from Guantanamo Bay. Steve Holland reports for Radio Australia, via ABC News:

The Australian Government is facing a diplomatic quandary after China publicly opposed a US request for Australia to accept up to 10 Chinese Uighurs detained in Guantanamo Bay.

[...]China has reiterated its stance on those detained in Guantanamo Bay in a statement to Radio Australia.

“The Chinese terrorist suspects held in the Guantanamo Bay are members of the terrorist group East Turkestan Islamic Movement, thus should be handed over to China for proper handling according to law,” the statement said.
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- June 2, 2009 1:02 PM
Pelosi Pressured to Avoid China Dissidents

From the United Press International:

Beijing quietly pressured U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to curtail meeting with dissidents on last week’s trip to China, sources say.

Quoting people familiar with the situation, the Washington publication Politico reported that Chinese diplomats in Washington discreetly urged Pelosi to not show up the country’s leadership by loudly criticizing Beijing’s human rights record as she has done in the past.

Despite the pressure from Beijing, Pelosi did meet with human rights leaders in Shanghai and Hong Kong during her week-long trip that ended Sunday, but it was a far cry from the militant stance in support of dissidents she displayed in a 1991 visit, when she unfurled a pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square, Politico reported.
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- June 2, 2009 12:38 AM
Treasury’s Geithner: Durable Economic Stability

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spoke to reporters on his way to Beijing on Saturday, the first day of his highly-anticipated first visit to China. From MarketWatch:

“We are seeing more durable stability in the economy and the financial system is substantially in better shape,” Geithner told reporters Saturday en route to Beijing, his first trip here since taking office in January. “But we have a ways to go, and we need to keep working in the U.S. and with other major economies to restore conditions for a sustainable recovery.”

[...]“I will of course make it clear that we are committed to a strong dollar, that we are committed to bringing our fiscal deficits down over the medium-term to a sustainable place,” the Treasury chief told the Chinese press, according to a transcript Treasury first provided U.S.-based reporters on Saturday. “We believe in a strong dollar. A strong dollar is in the U.S. interest.”

Geithner added in that briefing that the Federal Reserve is “completely committed to keep inflation low and stable over time.” The U.S. “will do anything we need to do to make sure that we bring down our fiscal deficits and improve the strength of the US economic fundamentals,” he said.
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- May 31, 2009 3:27 PM
All Eyes on U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner’s First Trip to China (Updated)

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner arrived in China this weekend, where he will meet Monday and Tuesday with some of China’s highest officials, including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. These are unusually high-level talks, according to Business Week:

Geithner travels to China for the first time this weekend. He’s scheduled to visit with a string of Beijing leaders, including President Hu Jintao. As a reality check for the significance of this reception, imagine that Wang Quishan visited Washington next week. Wang, who as China’s vice premier is Geithner’s counterpart, would certainly see Geithner, and doubtlessly Larry Summers, head of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. But would he get a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden? How about Obama himself? Probably not. Yet in addition to Hu and Wang, Geithner is scheduled to meet with Chinese Premier Wen Jiaboa.

The Chinese will have to explain why they are so interested in Geithner. But an interesting subtext is that it is Geithner who delivered the administration’s most stinging, high-level remark aimed at China. In his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Geithner said in reply to a written question that China is deliberately suppressing the value of the renminbi, the country’s currency. Geithner’s staff later said the reply was a mistake, yet it attracted much attention, and he had much explaining to do for weeks after – China is by far the largest international holder of U.S. debt, and may be relied on to finance much of Washington’s deficit for years to come.

In contrast to his combative tone during his confirmation hearings, analysts expect that Geithner will not raise the issue of currency revaluation on this trip. Instead, he will encourage China’s leadership to transition its export-led economy to one supported by domestic consumption. From The Wall Street Journal:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner heads to Beijing this weekend to urge Chinese leaders to fundamentally alter the export-oriented economy that has created years of trans-Pacific trade tensions.

[...]That means encouraging Beijing to offer more generous health-care, retirement, welfare, educational and other benefits in order to persuade the average Chinese citizen that spending now doesn’t mean starving later.

[...]That will also require, in the U.S. view, allowing China’s currency to move more freely against the dollar. But Mr. Geithner is unlikely to hector Beijing about the yuan very much during this visit.

Read more about the expected agenda for Geithner’s China talks on The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal blog.

Greg Robb at MarketWatch reports in-depth on the political backdrop for Geithner’s visit - the complicated and often uncomfortable relationship between the world’s two largest economies in the current global recession:

The theory went that with the U.S. consumer tapped out, China would focus on building up its own domestic consumer market. But experts say this hasn’t happened, at least to the extent required.

Instead, Chinese exporters have doubled down on the return of the U.S. consumer and have increased their capacity. Exporters appear to have political muscle in China to block meaningful reform.

At the same time, the U.S. budget deficit is projected to reach record levels for the next several years.

“We’ve got to hope China still has an appetite for our debt,” given the “ocean of red ink” coming down the road, said [Timothy Adams, who also served in the Bush Treasury].

See also the Telegraph for an editorial on the inevitable growing pains of restructuring the China-U.S. economic relationship.

Update #1: This article from The China Post offers more in-depth analysis of the strength of Geithner’s bargaining position and the deal he intends to push:

Though the crisis has given Geithner a weak hand, treasury officials said he will seek to push this bargain:

The U.S. will work to reduce its budget deficits once the crisis ends, urge Americans to save more and shrink the trade deficits. To replace diminished U.S. spending, the Chinese will be asked to step up spending and stop saving so much. The administration says this can be done if Beijing improves pensions and health insurance so Chinese households don’t feel pressured to save so much.

Geithner is expected to point out that U.S. consumers already are rebuilding their retirement savings. The Chinese have pledged to redirect their economy to boost domestic growth. But many private economists question how serious China is about it.

Analysts said they expect Geithner and the Chinese to pledge to do all it takes to end the recession. Both sides know any hint of discord between the world’s largest and third-largest economies probably will unsettled [sic] financial markets.

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- May 30, 2009 1:41 PM
US Bill to Punish China Faces an Uncertain Future

Growing U.S. dependence on China in such grave matters as pressuring North Korea to return to disarmament negotiations and stabilizing the world economy may make the Obama administration hesitant to confront America’s largest creditor over what some U.S. lawmakers believe to be an undervalued yuan. From the Taipei Times:

As the US economy slumps, lawmakers have renewed a push to punish China for what they see as currency manipulation that costs US jobs. Their prospects appear bleak at a time when the US is seeking Chinese help in confronting crises around the world.

In the aftermath of North Korean nuclear and missile tests, the administration of US President Barack Obama wants China, a veto-holding permanent member of the UN Security Council, to use its leverage as North Korea’s only major ally to push Pyongyang to return to nuclear disarmament negotiations.

[...]Another reason the Obama administration probably will oppose currency legislation is China’s role as the biggest holder of US government debt, Republican Representative Ed Royce said.
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- May 30, 2009 11:48 AM
Speaker Pelosi in China, Emboldens Protesters

AP has the latest on Nancy Pelosi’s visit to China, and petitioners who rallied to greet her in Beijing:

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, long a fierce critic of Beijing, toured China’s financial capital on Monday on a visit focused on environmental issues rather than human rights, though her presence emboldened protesters.

Pelosi took a low-key approach as she prepared for meetings in Beijing just days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy protests.

[...] Still, the leading Democratic lawmaker’s reputation as a strong human rights defender galvanized petitioners in Beijing, where several hundreds gathered Monday morning near the capital’s South Railway Station to air their grievances. Dozens of police stood guard and most protesters were kept behind police lines.

While many complaints were about individual cases, photos posted on the Chinese-language Web site Boxun.com, a U.S.-hosted Web site banned in China, showed one group of demonstrators holding up a black-and-white cloth banner that said: “Welcome Pelosi. Pay close attention to human rights. SOS.”

Speaking to U.S. business figures Monday in Shanghai, Pelosi noted her commitment to human rights issues over the years.

The following video of the petitioners’ protest is from AP:

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- May 25, 2009 10:03 PM
U.S. Appeals to China to Help Stabilize Pakistan

The Obama administration is calling on China to provide training and military equipment to aid Pakistan in their fight against domestic militants, the Los Angeles Times reports:

The proposal is part of a broad push by Washington to enlist key allies of Pakistan in an effort to stabilize the country. The U.S. is seeking to persuade Islamabad to step up its efforts against militants, while supporting the fragile civilian government and its tottering economy.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, has visited China and Saudi Arabia, another key ally, in recent weeks as part of the effort.

The American appeal to China underscores the importance of Beijing in security issues. Washington considers China to be the most influential country for dealing with isolated, militaristic North Korea. Beijing also plays a crucial role in the international effort to pressure Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

A post on the Reuters blog looks at the implications of this development for India.
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- May 24, 2009 10:21 PM