Former governor is the U.S. point man in an important and tricky relationship.
By Matt Canham and Thomas Burr
Washington: After a year of cooperation, the United States has repeatedly clashed with China in recent weeks over an arms sale to Taiwan, a massive cyberattack involving Google and the Dalai Lama’s visit to the White House.
And the man feeling the heat, and charged with strengthening the delicate bilateral bond is one who only a year ago was busy trying to mollify factions of the Utah Legislature.
Jon Huntsman Jr., the U.S. ambassador to China and Utah’s former governor, is facing his first major test in the bid to ease long-standing tensions and create a lasting partnership between these two world powers.
A bumpy flight
These diplomatic squabbles shouldn’t have surprised anyone, Huntsman said in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune.
In preparation, the administration spent its first year building relationships and seeking common ground on security issues and climate change. Huntsman equated the strategy to a pilot who knows he will face some rough air.
“The desire is to get the first year to as high an altitude as you possibly can, knowing full well that you will inevitably hit some wind shears that could take the relationship down,” he said.
Using Huntsman’s analogy, at the moment, the seat belt sign is definitely lit.
China has lashed out in anger, particularly at the $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, cutting off military discussions and threatening sanctions against U.S. companies. And Obama’s low-profile meeting Thursday with the Dalai Lama didn’t go over well in Beijing either.
Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, criticized the United States for meddling in China’s internal affairs, which “seriously hurt the national feelings of the Chinese people and seriously undermined China-U.S. relations.”
In both instances, high-ranking Chinese officials summoned Huntsman for stern rebukes, a common reaction when China feels slighted.
A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, suggested U.S.-China ties will ride a roller coaster for years to come.
“This is a relationship with elements of cooperation and elements of competition. China is not an ally,” the official said. “When you have a relationship between two countries with as much impact on the globe, with the variety of interests we have, with different interests and different values, it’s inevitable that there’s going to be some overlap and some areas of conflict.”
Huntsman and Obama have often said no international relationship will mean more in this century than the bonds now being formed between the United States and China.
China is widely viewed as a potential superpower because of its astronomical economic rise, combined with its increased willingness to act on the world stage. The Communist nation is also inextricably linked to the U.S. economy as a major trading partner that owns almost $1 trillion of U.S. debt.
Obama believes China’s help is crucial to confronting the largest international challenges, from a potentially nuclear Iran to a global climate pact. And designating Huntsman as the face of the United States was meant to show how seriously the president took the relationship.
A fresh start
Huntsman arrived in Beijing last August as something of a diplomatic rock star. A former ambassador to Singapore and a potential Republican presidential candidate, Huntsman was clearly a heavy hitter politically. He was also well versed in Asian affairs, spoke Mandarin and has a daughter he adopted from China.
He let Chinese journalists tour his private residence and spoke fondly of their culture and their future on the world stage.
“Jon Huntsman is an absolutely superb ambassador, as good an ambassador as one can possibly have in China,” the senior administration official said. “We’ve got some difficult issues and at a time like that, you want Huntsman there.”
Like Obama, Huntsman hasn’t ducked the nations’ differences, but he doesn’t dwell on them. Instead he has sought to emphasize common goals and to show that the United States respects China’s growing international importance.
Huntsman has defended recent U.S. actions to upset Chinese leaders, but he has also tried to assuage an angry Chinese populace through an op-ed he wrote for The Global Times, a major Beijing-based newspaper.
“The Sino-U.S. relationship is the most complex and vital relationship in the world today,” he wrote. “We cannot, we must not, allow our disagreements to negate aspects of our relationship that are so critical to the region and the world.”
Huntsman wrote that he recognized the “strong feelings” about the sale of military helicopters and anti-aircraft missiles to Taiwan and he applauded China for building a better relationship with its cross-strait neighbor. But he defended the arms deal, saying U.S. policies have helped maintain the peace in Asia.
In The Tribune interview, Huntsman noted that today China is more robust, confident and “feeling its way in the world.”
But there are still peaks and valleys in bilateral relations.
“It’s a relationship that goes in very distinct cycles and has from the very moment [President Richard] Nixon stepped off the plane in ’72,” Huntsman said.
Praise and brickbats
Beijing isn’t the only one leveling criticism at the Obama administration.
In the United States, some on the right have accused the president of kowtowing to a foreign power and playing nice when he should be pushing U.S. economic interests, while many on the left wanted Obama to take a stronger position on human rights.
Those who study the China-U.S. dynamic say it’s impossible to appease everyone with a relationship this complex and it’s common for tensions to flare early in a new administration, particularly on long-standing disputes such as the governance of Tibet and Taiwan.
“I don’t think there is any deliberate effort to poke a finger in the eye of the Chinese leaders,” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies and an expert on China. “There is no good time to sell arms to Taiwan.”
Glaser says the Chinese have reacted with rhetorical flourish, but little serious action. She said China is likely testing the new U.S. administration to see how strongly it will stick to established policy such as recognizing the Dalai Lama or providing military help to Taiwan.
“But I think we have seen very little evidence that China is confronting the United States,” she said.
What is clear, Glaser said, is that the Obama administration had unrealistically high expectations for the role China could play internationally, while China may have been mistaken about how far the new president would be willing to move to appease them.
“There needs to be a bit of an adjustment on both sides,” she said.
A conservative economist with the Heritage Foundation believes Obama and his foreign policy team misread China, putting too much stock in relationships and not enough focus on pure national interest.
“I think the Obama administration came in with this idea that we are going to be nicer than the Bush administration,” said Derek Scissors, who focuses on the Chinese economy. “But there was no Bush administration problem to fix.”
President George W. Bush was well regarded in China because he was a big proponent of free trade, Scissors said, while Obama’s team has taken small steps to restrict trade such as placing tariffs on tires from China. At the same time, Obama and Huntsman have pressed China to put pressure on Iran and North Korea.
“From their perspective, they could say ‘You are taking stuff away from us and asking us to do more,’ ” Scissors said. “That is not an approach that is going to go over very well, very quickly.”
Administration officials argue they were not trying to differ from the Bush administration, rather they were attempting to show some level of continuity by delaying touchier issues. They say some differences, such as Taiwan, might never be resolved. But they believe ties, built through mutual respect, can benefit both nations economically and keep the peace internationally.
Huntsman said as much in his recent column: “There are real differences between our two nations; differences in interests, differences in values, differences in approaches to issues both at home and abroad,” he wrote.
“But more noteworthy are our common interests and the increasingly common approaches that have developed with the maturing of our relationship.”
