The economic dialogue between U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and their Chinese counterparts has not yielded major results, the Washington Post reports:
At the 2nd annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue, Chinese and American officials signed seven memorandums of understanding on issues such as shale gas development in China and supply-chain security. But on the bigger issues, China did not seem to budge.
Despite what Clinton termed “productive and detailed discussions” about the crisis in the Korean Peninsula, for example, China has declined to accept the results of a South Korean report that implicates North Korea in the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship March 26.
China has increasingly shown its assertiveness on issues in Asia. That stance, along with the increasing tension on the Korean Peninsula, could benefit the U.S. strategic position across the region, analysts say, as countries such as Japan and South Korea draw closer to Washington as a hedge against China’s newfound strength. Even former U.S. enemies such as Vietnam and nonaligned states such as Malaysia, which for years had adopted a lukewarm view of the United States, have moved closer to Washington — in part because of China’s rise.
