China views the United States as a declining power, but at the same time believes that Washington is trying to fight back to undermine, and even disrupt, the economic and military growth that point to China’s becoming the world’s most powerful country, according to the analyst, Wang Jisi, the co-author of “Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust,” a monograph published this week by the Brookings Institution in Washington and the Center for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.

Mr. Wang, who has an insider’s view of Chinese foreign policy from his positions on advisory boards of the Chinese Communist Party and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, contributed an assessment of Chinese policy toward the United States. Kenneth Lieberthal, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings, and a former member of the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, wrote the appraisal of Washington’s attitude toward China.

In a joint conclusion, the authors say the level of strategic distrust between the two countries has become so corrosive that if not corrected the two countries risk becoming open antagonists.

The United States is no longer seen as “that awesome, nor is it trustworthy, and its example to the world and admonitions to China should therefore be much discounted,” Mr. Wang writes of the general view of China’s leadership.

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Historian, author and commentator Professor Timothy Garton Ash talks about China’s growing economic influence in the global economy, as well as the potential rise of a super league of geopolitics in China, the U.S. and the EU.

See more of Timothy Garton Ash’s writing about China via CDT. Read much more of his writing on a variety of topics on his website.

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The rift with China over Syria was thrown into sharp relief Saturday as Beijing mocked an international conference aimed at protecting the Syrian people against a brutal crackdown and accused the United States and Europe of “hiding a dagger behind a smile.”

“In other words, while they appear to be acting out of humanitarian concern, they are actually harboring hegemonistic ambitions,” said the editorial carried by the official Xinhua news agency.

The surprisingly harsh rhetoric dashed hopes that Beijing might be softening in its opposition to international action against the Syrian regime. China and Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the crackdown.

China and Russia were also conspicuously absent at an international conference called Friends of Syria, which is aiming to end the increasingly lethal crackdown by the Bashar Assad regime. On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lashed out at China and Russia, calling their vetoes “despicable.”

Beijing responded quickly to Clinton’s condemnation of the vetoes in the form of a People’s Daily editorial. Reuters reports:

“The United States’ motive in parading as a ‘protector’ of the Arab peoples is not difficult to imagine. The problem is, what moral basis does it have for this patronizing and egotistical super-arrogance and self-confidence?,” said a commentary in the paper that cited the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“Even now, violence continues unabated in Iraq, and ordinary people enjoy no security. This alone is enough for us to draw a huge question mark over the sincerity and efficacy of U.S. policy,” it said.

The Chinese and Western governments were also at odds over Sunday’s referendum in Syria on a new draft constitution, which Clinton called a “cynical ploy.” In response, the official Global Times also jumped into the fray with an editorial criticizing Western countries’ actions on Syria:

The West is wrong to reject any reform undertaken by Syria and demand President Bashar al-Assad step down in order to end the crisis. This will bring about a civil war and lead to more deaths. What the West wants from Syria is not democracy but the overthrow of the regime so as to eliminate Iran’s influence over Syria.

China should stand by Russia and support the vote.

In a globalized world, it’s difficult for a regime to be unaffected by outside influences.

[...] China’s veto this time is just like water that has been poured. Many of the world’s strategic changes originate with China. Now it’s time for China to face them seriously.

Read more about China and Syria via CDT.

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The 58-year-old showed a different style from China’s typically stiff President Hu Jintao. Xi appeared at ease with Americans as he reminisced with people he met in 1985 on an exchange to Iowa and later praised the clean Midwestern air as he hopped onto a tractor.

Xi referenced films “The Godfather” and “Mission: Impossible” and closed his trip Friday by taking in a Lakers basketball game in Los Angeles. His delegation committed to buying billions of dollars in soybeans and letting in more Hollywood movies.

US Vice President Joe Biden, who was Xi’s host and traveled to China last year, said that the two have spent some 20 hours getting to know each other and have spoken of everything “from Confucius to Catholicism.”

“I strongly believe, and I think Vice President Xi does as well, that the honest, sustained dialogue we’ve had this week can and will build a stronger relationship that benefits both our nations and our people,” Biden said.

And the New York Times reports from Los Angeles, his final stop on his U.S. tour:

Xi buffed his regular-guy image on Friday with a visit to the International Studies Learning Center in South Gate, California, just southeast of Los Angeles.

Responding to a high school student’s question during a classroom visit, he said that he liked to read, swim (his favourite sport) and watch US basketball, baseball and football.

“Of course, we always want more time to ourselves,” Xi said in Mandarin, the language the class was studying. “But to borrow a title from an American film, it’s like Mission: Impossible.” The room broke up in laughter.

Reports of his visit are playing well in China, too, as the Washington Post reports:

Xi seemed at ease around his American hosts, whether climbing into a tractor cab in Iowa or sitting tie-less during the fourth quarter of a Los Angeles Lakers game as he laughed alongside Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

It’s not an image Chinese are used to after the decade-long presidency of the stiff and formal-looking Hu Jintao, who often comes across in photos as a typical Communist Party bureaucrat. And many here noted the difference.

“The Chinese style in official talks for the past 10 years is just repeating what the book says, with no taste or character,” wrote one weibo user, using the name Qianfengqingyin. “Xi Jinping’s remarks during his U.S. visit are quite vivid and new.”

But as Time Magazine’s blog reports, bolstering his own and China’s image was the major accomplishment of Xi’s trip:

The visit, however, was short on substance — not that anyone really expected major policy changes to emerge from Xi’s trip. After all, the 58-year-old son of a revolutionary hero isn’t yet China’s President or Communist Party General Secretary. (The latter is a more important role.) With a delicate political transition and an increasingly confident populace back home, Xi could hardly have been expected to cave on the U.S.-China trade deficit or roll over on China’s currency, which U.S. officials allege is artificially devalued to help Chinese exports. Those agreements that were announced were minor in the scheme of U.S.-China relations, like a pledge by Beijing to open the car-insurance market to foreigners.

Nevertheless, in a country where scaremongering about China is plentiful during a presidential-campaign season, Xi tried to reassure Americans who are uneasy about potential conflict in the Pacific region. “China welcomes a constructive role with the United States in promoting peace, stability and prosperity in the Asia Pacific,” Xi said during a Wednesday luncheon. At the same time, China’s official media highlighted Xi’s efforts to talk tough, including his call “on the United States to adjust its economic policies and structure and remove restrictions on exports to China to address the trade imbalance,” as the state-run China Daily put it. While official Chinese media noted that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden hosted Xi during a State Department lunch, there was little mention of the American’s rather confrontational toast, in which he chided China for intellectual-property theft, foreign-investment obstacles and Beijing’s use of a U.N. veto to block multilateral action in Syria. Instead, the China Daily described the atmosphere at the State Department meal as “relaxing.”

Xi is currently visiting Ireland, where he is taking a page from his visit to Iowa by visiting a dairy farm. Ireland is the world’s largest exporter of baby formula, much of which goes to China.

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From here on, as China’s wealth and power increases, its national challenge will be to start letting itself feel sufficiently reinstated in the congress of great nations that it does not need to wallow in narratives of victimization, or be so militant about grasping symbolic demonstrations of its equality or superiority. The highest stage of evolution for any truly great power is to reach that point where it is possible to transcend the notion of both inferior and superior, the better to cultivate a self-confidence that leads to modesty. This is a lot to ask of China, or any country. Even the United States, the strongest nation on the globe today, has only rarely demonstrated such national maturity.

What made such exemplars out of Meryl Streep and Yo-Yo Ma on that Beijing stage — which fittingly lies just across the street from the Forbidden City, where the Qianlong Emperor reigned over 200 years ago — was their rare deportment toward each other. Instead of one seeking to stand taller than the other or to bolster one ego at the expense of the other, each tried to deflect acclaim from themselves to the other in what ended up being an almost slapstick comedy of competitive humility. Theirs was a stellar example of magnanimity born of accomplishment and confidence. They helped create a wonderful night of artistry, but more important they gave a subtle but powerful demonstration for Chinese and Americans alike of the level to which collaboration built on true equality can sometimes rise.

While a great nation must, of course, seek its own self-interest, it does not need to do so by remaining selfishly unmindful of the interests and accomplishments of other nations. True greatness does not demand endless adoration, but thrives by sometimes deflecting acclaim to others. It was this element that was so heartwarmingly evident in Yo-Yo Ma and Meryl Streep’s joint performance — and, two centuries before, was so missing from Lord Macartney’s visit to the Qianlong Emperor. Alas, it is still all too often missing from U.S.-China relations today.

Watch a video of Streep and Ma’s performance, including their bows at the end:

A Poem Reading with Meryl Streep and Cello with Yo-Yo Ma from Center on US-China Relations on Vimeo.

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Xi, who is expected to become president in 2013, made clear that China wants a deeper relationship with the United States and even welcomes its engagement in the Asia-Pacific, as long as it respects China’s interests and concerns in its own neighborhood.

“It was a scripted trip without surprises,” said Jeff Bader, East Asia policy director during the first two years of the Obama administration. “He obviously wasn’t here to make policy, or make decisions or alter positions on issues. He is not the No. 1 yet and he doesn’t want to prejudice his chances of being No. 1.”

But while Xi, 58, has said little new — and did little to narrow the gaping differences that exist between the U.S. and China on issues such as human rights — he made a conscious effort to appear less remote than the stiff and aloof Hu.

“He’s more interactive than past Chinese leaders. He looks you in the eye, and you feel he’s conversing with you,” said Bader, who spoke briefly with Xi on Wednesday.

The Telegraph reports that beneath the friendly gestures, Obama may have been sending a stronger message to China’s future leader:

It was a full turn-out in honour of the man who will take the reins of power in Beijing this autumn, with Joe Biden, the vice president, supported by the US secretaries of state, defence, treasury, agriculture and commerce as a symbol of the breadth and importance of the US-China relationship in this, the “Asian” century. But, as the British pianist Sam Haywood played Gershwin and Chopin, it was not hard to detect the note of discord that jangles through that relationship. Disputes range from China’s undervalued currency, to trade practices, human rights abuses and the pressing security questions of Iran and Syria.

Mr Obama stayed within the realms of diplomacy, but his thinly veiled message to Mr Xi (pronounced “Shee”) in the Oval Office was that China needs to do more to reassure the world that it will be a force for good in the coming decades. In Chinese eyes it will have sounded dangerously close to the lecturing that so rankles in Beijing, but Mr Obama – looking at the cameras, not at his guest – was clear that China must trade by the same “rules of the road” as the rest of the world, recognise the “aspirations and rights” of ordinary Chinese, and live up to the “increased responsibilities” that come with expanding power and prosperity.

In the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash writes that it is impossible to predict what type of leader Xi will be and that observers who foresee a reformist agenda may be getting ahead of themselves:

As you would expect, the available evidence is thin and inconclusive. The fact that Xi suffered personally in the Cultural Revolution (“I ate a lot more bitterness than most people”), the reformist communist sympathies of his father, his evident pragmatism, the discovery that he has a sister in Canada, a brother in Hong Kong and a daughter studying under a pseudonym at Harvard: all this suggests someone who might push forward essential political reforms at home and be equipped with a better understanding of the west.

The fact that he has risen to the top by carefully staying on the right side of all the main groups in the communist establishment, his close ties to the People’s Liberation Army, his remarkable outburst in Mexico in 2009, denouncing “some bored foreigners, with full stomachs, who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us“: these straws point to a potentially colder wind from the east.

Every little phrase and gesture in his current American trip will be pored over with neo-Kremlinological zeal, to identify him as either great reformer or hardnosed realist. Or, inevitably, “enigmatic”. As with Gorbachev, western leaders may get hints of the personality now, but we won’t really know until he’s firmly in the saddle, which means 2013 at the earliest.

Xi is now in Muscatine, Iowa, paying a visit to a family he stayed with on a previous trip in 1985 and to discuss agricultural trade. Iowan farmers are maneuvering to have Xi get a taste of their crops, and his official dinner tonight will feature a wide, and not very healthy, range of Iowan foods. From Bloomberg:

“It’s a celebration of Iowa foods, but this menu is over the top in terms of calories and the amount of food,” Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, said in an interview. “There’s very little chance you’re going to walk out without eating all your day’s calories in one meal.”

The menu features two meat entrees — bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin with cider and green peppercorns, and Angus beef tenderloin with a demi glaze and onion ring. Xi and his fellow guests will get a choice of three desserts, including crème apple pie cupcake topped with Iowa maple syrup frosting, blue cheese drizzled with Iowa honey, and mini Iowa sweet corn cheesecake.

[...] The dinner reflects food grown and raised in a state where residents are more likely than most Americans to be obese and overweight — and to eat fewer fruits and vegetables, according to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

After Iowa, Xi will travel to Los Angeles where he will meet with Governor Jerry Brown and attend an L.A. Lakers game.

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In White House talks, Obama sought to reassure Xi that Washington welcomed China’s “peaceful rise” but made clear that tensions remain in a growing economic and military rivalry between the two countries.

Xi’s White House visit was the centerpiece of a U.S. trip that may help the Chinese vice president boost his international standing and show he is capable of steering his country’s crucial relationship with Washington for the next decade.

Obama sought to balance his desire to make a good start with Xi with the political need to look firm with Beijing in an election year when American voters’ anti-China sentiment is running high.

“We have tried to emphasize that because of China’s … extraordinary development over the last two decades, that with expanding power and prosperity also comes increased responsibilities,” Obama said as he sat with Xi in the Oval Office.

BBC also reports on Xi’s earlier meeting with Vice President Biden, Xi’s host in the U.S., and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Earlier in the day, Mr Xi met Mr Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the White House’s Roosevelt Room.

Mr Biden said that while “we are not always going to see eye to eye”, both nations would speak “candidly” about their differences.

Mr Xi will meet Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, too. On Wednesday, he is due to travel to Iowa to meet his hosts from his first visit to the US in 1985 when he was a county official.

He will then fly to Los Angeles, California, to meet business leaders and reportedly attend a Lakers basketball game on Friday.

Footage from the Biden meeting is from Bloomberg:

See the full Bloomberg report on the meetings. Foreign Policy also provides more details about State Department lunch for Xi and about the conversations between him and Biden.

As pro-Tibet protesters rallied outside the White House after hanging a banner from the Arlington Memorial Bridge, Obama and Xi discussed human rights with the Chinese Vice President defending his country’s record. From AP:

Xi defended the communist-governed country’s rights record over the past 30 years, but added: “Of course there’s always room for improvement on human rights.”

Xi’s comments, made at a State Department luncheon after meeting Obama at the White House, were similar to those made by President Hu Jintao — the man he is slated to replace as Communist Party this leader this fall — during a state visit to Washington a year ago.

Underscoring the sensitivity of the rights issues among China’s critics, a few hundred protesters marched outside the White House, waving Tibetan flags and calling for a free Tibet. They held signs proclaiming, “Xi Jinping: Tibet will be free.” They shouted “Shame on Chinese government” and “Stop lying to the world.”

Read more about Xi Jinping, including recent profiles published on the eve of his U.S. visit, via CDT.

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Watch also a discussion hosted by the Asia Society’s Orville Schell with Mike Chinoy, Richard Bernstein and Bruce Dunning about their experiences reporting from China in the early days after China allowed foreign correspondents to work from the country.

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Premier Wen Jiabao was by turns “grouchy” and constructive as he responded to the concerns aired by almost all of the leaders attending the East Asia Summit, said one of the administration officials, who spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One as Mr. Obama returned from an eight-day diplomatic swing around the Pacific Rim.

The meeting, at the end of the summit, capped a week during which Mr. Obama moved quickly, and on several fronts, to restore the influence of the United States in the Asia-Pacific region after years of preoccupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. He announced that 2,500 Marines would be stationed in Australia; opened the door to restored ties with Myanmar, a Chinese ally; and gained support for a regional free-trade bloc that so far omits Beijing.

The announcements appeared to startle Chinese leaders, who issued a series of warnings that claimed the United States was seeking to destabilize the region.

Xinhua, meanwhile, has published an opinion piece arguing that the Philippines, one country with whom China is embroiled in a territorial dispute over portions of the South China Sea, is not important enough for the U.S. to risk its relationship with China over:

As to some of the foul-mouthed Philippine officials, their performance has thus far been taken as an echo posture to Washington’s “Return to Asia” strategy.

But people cannot help but wonder how much the South China Sea issue virtually means to the U.S., and what is the true significance of the Philippines’ high-pitched claims over the sea.

First, it is an unwise move if it insists on playing a meddling hand in the South China Sea disputes. Some analysts take it risky that Washington would stake its prestige on a remote and strategically third-rate ally when it provokes a clash with a neighboring far stronger nation, whom the U.S. has been increasingly counting on to recover its dislocated economy, combat terrorism and shared challenges, and deal with a host of global problems.

A couple of months ago, Prof. Lyle Goldstein painted a doleful picture in the Foreign Policy magazine. He said if U.S. leaders heed his advice, they should shed most commitments in Southeast Asia, which he portrays as a region of trivial importance situated adjacent to an increasingly powerful China. He maintained that “Southeast Asia matters not a whit in the global balance of power.”

For more on the U.S. role in the South China Sea dispute, see previous CDT posts including, “What to Make of US Military Presence in the Asia Pacific” and “Tensions Rising on the South China Sea.”

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