Obama Secures China Cooperation on Recovery, Climate
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Pres. Obama has reportedly secured Chinese president Hu Jintao’s pledge of cooperation on global economic recovery, efforts to curb emissions and combat climate destabilization, and nuclear non-proliferation, both in Iran and North Korea. The pledge of cooperation came despite Obama’s demand that China honor the “universal” human rights of its people, alongside differences over how strongly to pressure Iran to guarantee its nuclear pursuits are legal and peaceful in nature.
Sustained, serious cooperation on efforts to reform and improve international banking standards and limit abuses may be key to guarding against Chinese prosperity eroding American prosperity, and helping to prevent a return to risky, predatory behavior at major US banks. China’s banking system has long been assailed in the west for lacking transparency and condoning behavior banned by international economic treaties. Hu’s pledge of recovery cooperation implies progress on removing such inefficiencies an abuses from the Chinese banking system.
Pres. Obama gave a town-hall format talk to a closed-door gathering in which he spoke against censorship and said the freer the flow of information in a society the stronger that society will be. His remarks were censored by Chinese authorities and the comments on censorship were barred from any media distribution within China. One website that posted the remarks was forced to take them down after just 27 minutes.
The episode highlights the serious divide between Chinese and American policies toward the meaning of people’s government. This means specific details of how to tackle Iran’s nuclear programme, or North Korea’s, will be harder to agree on. Beijing has long tended to be sympathetic to the authoritarian urges of the Iranian regime, though it is suspicious of theocratic politics in general, and North Korea is China’s historic ally. China sees attempts to dictate to Tehran what it is permitted to do militarily or economically as a potential threat to its own sovereignty vis a vis international law.
On climate destabilization and emissions reduction, China is a complicated partner: the Chinese government has demanded special freedom to aggressively ramp up carbon emissions, possibly until per-capita levels rival those in the industrialized democracies. But climate scientists say such a scenario would push the world over the brink into irreversible climate change, possibly with catastrophic consequences for billions of people around the world.
China’s pledge of cooperation is being treated with skepticism by those in western industry who believe it is more a ruse to permit China to negotiated strict limitations on industrial rivals, while ignoring emissions capping requirements altogether. For that reason, Pres. Obama’s visit to China is considered to be a vital step toward securing Beijing’s collaboration on a system of transparent international verification of to achieve emissions targets, reductions and related innovations.
On economic recovery, banking reform is key, but the vast trade imbalance between the US and China, which owns trillions of dollars worth of US dollar currency and government bonds, is another crucial negotiating hotzone. China cannot afford to see the US fail to pay in full on time the debt obligations it has with Beijing, but neither can China afford to see the US dollar decline in value or the influx of US consumer cash for goods and services decline.
Both nations are engaged in a complex catch-22, where no part of the puzzle can be let slip, but no part of the puzzle is entirely secure. Cooperation on economic recovery means both nations will seek to serve and protect that synergistic relationship, while cooperating to find ways to protect against its potential pitfalls. For now, Hu is making pledges that China has traditionally been unwilling to honor; the hope is that Pres. Obama has been able to convey the novel problems of these times, and that Pres. Hu has been able to see China’s future in a new, more interdependent, international light.
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