367) A águia e o dragão: convivendo às turras...

Os EUA deveriam acolher a China no "brave new world" da globalização. Mas, como eles são um pouco obtusos, vão acabar hostilizando-a, em seu próprio detrimento, pois vão ficar preocupados com segurança militar, quando a China está mesmo é preocupada com o bem-estar de seus milhões de pobres...

In Candor From China, Efforts to Ease Anxiety
By JOSEPH KAHN
The New York Times, April 17, 2006

BEIJING, April 16 — China and the United States have engaged in public disputes about trade, human rights, military spending and energy security, but for just a moment late last year, their leaders put briefing books aside and agreed to talk privately.

With an aura of candor described as unusual for Chinese leaders, President Hu Jintao told President Bush that fighting political corruption, rural unrest, a widening wealth gap and severe pollution consumes nearly all his time. He said domestic problems left China with neither the will nor the means to challenge America's dominance in world affairs, according to two Bush administration officials who were told about the session.

The overture — described as having improved Mr. Hu's ties with Mr. Bush despite the Chinese leader's generally aloof style — is part of a Chinese effort to reduce, or at least to deflect, American anxiety about the country's growing economic, political and military power.

When Mr. Hu travels to Washington this week for his first White House visit as China's top leader, the question will be whether the improved chemistry between the heads of the world's richest nation and its fastest rising rival can enhance a relationship that seems to be stuck somewhere between tentative stability and stormy tension.

"At the top level, the two have become frank and pragmatic in discussing the major issues between them," said Michael Green, the former director of Asian affairs at the National Security Council who is now at Georgetown University. "But China is also trying to expand its influence in the world at the expense of the U.S., which is not something we are going to give them a pass on."

Mr. Bush, in his second inaugural address, promised to confront "every ruler and every nation" that resisted the tide of freedom. But frustratingly for an administration that has painted the world with such broad brush strokes, the relationship with authoritarian China has tended to resist breakthroughs.

Unlike the "Ping-Pong diplomacy" that led to Richard Nixon's historic handshake with Mao in 1972, the incremental talks on the main issues that divide the two nations have seemed to leave officials fatigued. Those issues include the control of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea, China's support for several resource-rich dictatorships that are hostile to the United States, its gaping trade surplus and poor human rights record, and the always delicate question of American backing for Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its sovereign territory.

The two countries have, arguably, become each other's biggest long-term threat. But both sides also strive to avoid confrontation. Their political, diplomatic and economic ties are too intertwined for either side to pursue unilateral solutions.

"The responsible elite in China has no intention of picking a fight with the U.S.," said Jin Canrong, an expert on the United States at People's University in Beijing. "But no one has much hope that the two countries can develop deep feelings of trust, either."

Few expect that Mr. Hu will dispel that unease during his four-day visit. But this Chinese leader is seen as having come around to the idea that China's overall foreign policy objectives depend on a benign relationship with Washington. Chinese officials say he is eager to have his maiden trip to the United States perceived as a success.

Mr. Hu, 64, emerged from the inner depths of the Communist Party to assume the top leadership positions in 2002. He remains a colorless conservative even by China's buttoned-down standards. He governs sternly and secretly, almost never grants interviews, and has overseen an unrelenting crackdown on journalists, lawyers,and religious leaders who defy one-party rule.

Unlike his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who was regarded as pro-American in the Chinese political context, Mr. Hu initially worked harder to cultivate close ties to France, Germany, Russia and Southeast Asian countries. Last year he also ordered a "smokeless war" against "liberal elements" in Chinese society that he believes are openly or covertly supported by the United States, according to several officials and journalists told about his internal remarks.

American officials said that in the yearlong negotiations over Mr. Hu's trip, the Chinese side focused mainly on pomp and protocol, down to the television camera angles on the South Lawn of the White House. The two sides argued for months over whether Mr. Hu's trip constituted a formal state visit, until they agreed to disagree.

The Bush administration, wary of empty summitry, decided to call it a "working visit." Mr. Bush and Mr. Hu will have lunch at the White House, but no state dinner. Beijing still insists it is a state visit, an honor all of Mr. Hu's predecessors received on their first trip to the White House.

"Hu has two priorities — to make sure relations with the U.S. are not a big problem, and to make sure he doesn't lose face," said a senior Chinese academic who asked not to quoted by name when talking about the Chinese leader. "Of the two, I think the second one is more important to him."

But Mr. Hu's earlier assurance to Mr. Bush that China's domestic problems were what preoccupied him most were clearly part of a new effort to address, if not necessarily resolve, those core tensions.

In a burst of checkbook diplomacy earlier this month, Mr. Hu dispatched China's largest-ever buying delegation to the United States, which committed to purchase $16.2 billion in American aircraft, agricultural products, auto parts, telecommunications gear and computer software. A negotiating team led by Wu Yi, China's vice prime minister, also agreed to undertake a broader crackdown on piracy of American copyrights and trademarks, reopen the Chinese market to American beef, and allow more foreign firms to compete for government contracts.

Mr. Hu plans to visit Microsoft and dine with its chairman, Bill Gates, in Seattle on Tuesday. Human rights and media watchdog groups have pressed Mr. Gates to raise concerns about China's online censorship and arrest of cyber-dissidents when they meet. Mr. Hu will also tour Boeing's aircraft factory there before continuing on to Washington on Thursday and delivering a speech at Yale on Friday.

On the sidelines in Seattle, Mr. Hu has also invited a small group of American statesmen and scholars to discuss bilateral relations with him privately, an event that the two countries agreed to keep off the official agenda to encourage candor, participants said.

The session was organized by Zheng Bijian, a former head of the Communist Party's main training academy for party cadres, who coined the term "peaceful rise." The concept of peaceful rise, though only informally endorsed by Mr. Hu, is intended to show that China believes that it can emerge as a great power without following the violent path blazed by the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France and Russia before it.

"There is a real effort at salesmanship going on," said one former Bush administration official invited to participate in the private session. "He wants to come across as charming and attentive to American concerns."

Optimists on both sides say the attempts to build confidence amount to more than a propaganda campaign. China, they say, has become a "status quo" power, committed to maintaining the international order forged primarily by the United States in the postwar period.

Global commerce and a peaceful diplomatic environment in East Asia have contributed enormously to China's rapid economic growth in the past quarter century, which depends on foreign investment, open markets, secure borders and generally nonideological ties with its neighbors.

Many Chinese scholars say Beijing may not tolerate American hegemony in foreign affairs indefinitely. But most also say that Beijing has too much at stake in the current world order to try upsetting it in the foreseeable future.

"We have no incentive to wreck the global system established by the U.S.," said Wang Xiaodong, a prolific writer and pundit who has argued that the country should not bow to American pressure. "The reason is, simply, that it is a game we can win."

On the American side, the trend is also toward more integration. Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, who last fall called China a "stakeholder" in the international system, has promoted high-level strategic dialogue between the countries, which China has eagerly embraced.

But there are many pessimists as well. They see the risks of conflict mounting unless the Communist Party gives up its monopoly on power. Mr. Hu's accommodation of the United States is viewed as temporizing, giving China time to gather strength and spread its influence unhindered.

People who worry about China's intention point in particular to its rapid military buildup as a sign of its increased financial wherewithal and nascent strategic ambitions that will inevitably challenge America's dominance in the Pacific.

Beijing's efforts to secure supplies of oil, natural gas and other commodities in countries that have rocky relations with Washington, including Sudan, Iran and Venezuela, have also raised suspicions that it is using its buying power to create a circle of friends hostile to American interests.

Economically, China is widely accused of keeping the value of its currency, the yuan, artificially cheap to encourage export-fueled growth and attract foreign manufacturers. Last year, it enjoyed a record $203 billion bilateral trade surplus with the United States.

While Chinese officials say they intend to shift to an economic model that favors domestic consumer-led growth and will gradually let the yuan appreciate closer to its market value, both the Bush administration and some members of Congress say that is not happening fast enough to head off a possible rupture in economic ties.

Randall G. Shriver, a former Bush administration deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific who is now with Armitage International, a consulting firm in Washington, said Chinese actions on the economic, military and diplomatic front signaled a willingness to undermine American foreign policy goals.

"I'm not convinced that they want to challenge us across the board," Mr. Shriver said. "But there is a general notion that they want to accumulate influence, which will necessarily diminish U.S. power."

He added, "The game is on."