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Is Kerry the lucky charm for Sino-US relations?

By Liu Weidong: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, February 8, 2013

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Mopping up [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

Sino-U.S. relationship in the coming four years

Having worked with China for four years, the Obama administration has already established its basic policy on China and during his second term, this policy is very likely to continue. After Obama successfully took up office once again, the basic structure of the Sino-U.S. relationship indeed has not shown any obvious changes.

On a positive note, both powers will have to deepen their cooperation in international affairs, with China playing an increasingly bigger role on the world stage. Economic and trade relations between the two are already interwoven and aside from traditional barter transactions, the both can achieve further progress in mutual investment fields.

In the "safety" area, where room for teamwork is limited though, China and the U.S. have improved their cooperation on the North Korea nuclear issue, enhanced dialogues between military forces, and expanded their cooperation scale into "non-safety" areas. All these demonstrate a positive tendency.

Yet, these positive aspects cannot hide the existing latent conflicts and risks. This protrudes in three layers: Structural contradiction, daily conflicts and unanticipated challenges. The first layer had two aspects. One is that China and the U.S. hold different values and ideologies, as well as have different languages. The other one is that both are entering a special time in which one is getting stronger and the other weaker. The conflict mentality between the established hegemony and the rising one will increase and cannot be resolved within a short period of time.

Daily conflicts include specific bilateral or multilateral conflicts in political, safety, economic, trade and cultural areas. Their different understandings of the Taiwan issue, human rights issue, trade imbalance, for example, have given rise to frequent conflicts between the two sides.

Unanticipated challenges refer to those that happened accidentally but did serious damages to bilateral relations. Such challenges included the bombing of China's embassy in Yugoslavia, and the plane crash in the South China Sea Incident.

It is difficult for Obama to avoid these conflicts and risks in his second term. After he won the 2012 election, it was widely speculated he would be tougher in his diplomacy, continue to push his "rebalance" strategy, the core of his Asia-Pacific target, and improve his defensive strength against China. With this in mind, Kerry's role as Secretary of State might have the following three influences on Sino-U.S. relations:

First, general Sino-U.S. relations are stable, and changes in personnel will have little impact on this. Jeffrey Bader, Obama's former chief advisor on China policy, said that he would rather use the words "competition" and "cooperation" to summarize Obama's China policy.

Second, the U.S. will continue its Asia-Pacific and China policies. The role of the new Secretary of State is to execute the decisions instead of amending them.

Finally then, when an individual enters into cabinet, their views are no longer independent and so Kerry will have to be more cautious than he was as an independent Senator.

Even so, we still have reason to be optimistic on the Sino-U.S. relations with the new Secretary of State. This is not only because Kerry's consistent style and attitude is perhaps more welcomed by China than Clinton's, and perhaps more beneficial to a stable bilateral relationship, but also because Kerry's diplomatic behavior may receive less restraints from Congress due to trans-party influences. Since Hillary Clinton was deemed out of line by China due to her statements regarding certain issues, we might see Kerry be more a more steady and practical force in the coming four years. Time will tell.

The author is a researcher with the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

This article was first published in Chinese and translated by Li Bin.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.

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