International Law

Another US-China Diplomatic Layer?

By Stan

Still going through my Inbox from the holiday (238 articles flagged so far for later reading!), but this is worth a quick post:

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has decided to launch a new comprehensive strategic dialogue with China that includes high-level discussions on political, economic and security issues, it was learned Sunday.

"We believe that comprehensive bilateral exchanges at the senior-most levels are vital to the creation of a more positive, cooperative relationship between the U.S. and China," a ranking State Department official told The Yomiuri Shimbun.

Several sources familiar with the matter said previous ministerial-level and lower-level discussions had been unable to bring about political decisions on the Chinese side. The Obama administration would like to upgrade the bilateral discussions to periodic dialogues through mutual visits by Vice President Joe Biden and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, the sources said.

I’m in favor of anything that works. However, it seems like there has been a lot of blah blah blah in recent years, particularly with the SED. As the article quoted above points out, you can argue this stuff either way. The folks that instituted the SED claimed that a focus on econ issues was important - fair enough. Now some others are saying that the bilateral relationship is complex and that a more comprehensive dialogue is called for — again, hard to argue with that.

I am a cynic, and sometimes it is hard to see all of this as anything more than one administration trying out something new simply because the efforts of the past administration proved ineffective. I suspect that it is not always the structure that is the problem, it is the players and their motivations, and the reality of the situation. A new dialogue will not change the fact that some of these bilateral problems (IP enforcement comes to mind) are going to be extremely difficult to fix. Doesn’t matter who is sitting at the table talking about it.

I’ll leave this on a positive note, though. If Biden can come over here on a regular basis and actually get Grandpa Wen to make specific promises about anything, then it would become much more likely that progress will be made. I don’t expect that to happen, but you never know.

Full post as published by China Hearsay on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).