Is President Obama “advertising weakness” in Asia? Conservative critics, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have accused Obama of practicing a destructive “diplomacy of deference” in which American supremacy overseas is weakened by inept public diplomacy. Obama’s bow to the Japanese emperor, his handshake with Myanmar’s prime minister at the APEC conclave in Singapore, and his town hall meeting with university students in Shanghai are exhibits A, B and C, according to this analysis.
A bow and a handshake are unlikely to inspire either the Japanese or Myanmar military to invade the U.S. anytime in the foreseeable future. But by focusing on President Obama’s town hall in Shanghai, American hawks may have, inadvertently, stumbled upon what is in truth a serious concern: Chinese students. They may sport trendy eyeglasses, wear day-glo sweaters and carry Hello Kitty notebooks, but in fact they constitute one of the most destructive political forces in recent history. In countless Cold War engagements, the American military and the CIA — and forces of Taiwan, India, Vietnam and Russia — could not bring down a single Chinese Communist government. Chinese students, however, have trashed several. They captured and cruelly killed most of China’s revolutionary leadership in the Great Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, and their demonstrations in Beijing brought down two of the most powerful post-Mao reformist party leaders: Hu Yaobang (1987) and Zhao Ziyang (1989).
Chinese leaders know their history and are very careful in their interactions with Chinese students. The fact that the Shanghai Town Hall students were hand-picked from elite universities and the Communist Youth League, as Western news reports pointed out, predicts very little about their future behavior. The Cultural Revolution and the student protests in the 1980s were led by students from China’s top universities, many of whom were also Youth League members. Chinese students have dared to protest against Chinese governments precisely because they feel they have both the duty and the right to control the future of Chinese society. Chinese leaders have found it hard to crack down on students who are not only the future of China’s leadership, but also often their own daughters and sons.
So in the end it was simply an initial conversation between a popular American leader and the next generation of Chinese leaders, rather than a strategic move in a grand chess game of diplomatic negotiations between the current superpower and the emerging superpower. Here, American conservatives most likely wanted President Obama to tell China’s future leaders how to change Chinese society, to adopt an American political and economic model, and to follow America’s lead in global affairs. If he had done so, it is very likely the students in Shanghai would have laughed at him, much as Peking University students reportedly laughed at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in June when he tried to reassure them about the long-term value of the U.S. dollar.
The American government’s lack of credibility with China’s future leaders is not surprising, given that many of the Chinese students in the room were very familiar with American media and a wide range of political issues. Many of them have parents or family members who have lived in the United States, and will eventually attend graduate school here. President Obama was, therefore, speaking to a room full of people who could in the near future be paying his salary. If past trends are true in the future, however, many of them will eventually return to Shanghai and take up positions in academia, industry and government.
In his conversation, President Obama avoided talking about the current economic, political and security disputes with China. He addressed the long-term problems in U.S.-China relations that the people in the room would themselves face in 20 years time, as China’s future leaders. The first two of the eight questions he received asked about his general impressions of China. He turned his answers into statements about the importance of cooperation between the Chinese and American people on controlling climate change. Unlike current problems between China and America, which can largely be solved by negotiation and reallocation of resources on both sides of the ocean, controlling climate change will require long-term cooperation and coordination to insure that both Americans and Chinese are aware that each is shouldering its fair share of the burden of transitioning to more sustainable means of economic growth. Without mutual trust there will be mutual shirking. Such trust will itself be a grand experiment, a merger of Western and Eastern societies unparalleled in history.
Nobody today can say exactly how the American and the Chinese people may come to trust each other such that they both cut back on the ways they waste energy and foul the environment. But it is clear that such trust will require a sustained conversation between Americans and Chinese, something a 48-year-old American president is both capable of initiating and maintaining: The young Chinese in the room must have known this intuitively. And it is also clear that such a conversation should begin with a smile, and that smile should not be met with derisive laughter. So far, so good.
Steven W. Lewis is the Baker Institute’s fellow in Asian studies and faculty adviser for the Jesse Jones Leadership Center Summer in D.C. Policy Research Internship Program. He is also a professor in the practice and an associate director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies, as well as an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Sociology, at Rice University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies, one of China’s top policy think tanks and a research partner of the Baker Institute.