Many political analysts have emphasized the importance of future U.S.-China relations for the Obama administration, underscoring China’s role in the U.S. economy and its influence on world affairs. China specialist Perry Link of the University of California at Riverside offers further words of advice: see China as being more than its leaders, and consider it as being greater than the Washington conceptions and policies that attempt to describe it. From The New Republic:
How will the Obama presidency approach China? Two especially big questions stand out, and those two are related.
One question is whether an Obama administration can be the first in more than 50 years to think of China as a bigger, more complex thing than the Chinese government alone. The other is whether it can get beyond the coterie of “China policy managers” in and around Washington who have “educated” (their word) every president since Jimmy Carter in why and how to be sensitive to China’s rulers.
No one denies that China’s rulers are powerful men, and it would be folly to ignore them. But when the words “China” and “Chinese” come to refer only to the Beijing super-elite and their policies–and Washington policy lingo has long made this a habit–the result is boxed-in thinking and narrowly based policy. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is reported to have been the lead person on China policy in the Bush administration since 2006. Paulson “engages China” frequently–by which he means holding small meetings with representatives of China’s rulers (in English, by the way, since he doesn’t know Chinese) on trade relations, currency regulation, and WTO rules.
