President Barack Obama recently completed a three-day tour of China as part of his week-long Asia trip. He held a town hall meeting with students in Shanghai and visited the Great Wall and the Forbidden City between meetings with Chinese leadership in Beijing. What can we glean about the future of these two countries based on his visit?

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J.R. Siegel

Every time an American President meets with a Chinese leader, there is an expectation that, this time, the Chinese will listen to us and change their ways. Yet the pattern remains the same: Americans offer advice, the Chinese listen, nod their heads, and ignore absolutely everything that the Americans have to say.

The Chinese define their national interest narrowly—the Communist Party does what it thinks it needs to do in order to remain in power. If it means rolling tanks out on the streets, the Party will do that. If it means keeping the renminbi (RMB) pegged to the dollar, the Party will do that.

The problem with the current pegging of the RMB to the dollar is that it’s bad for everyone. This “beggar thy neighbor” policy is taking low-level jobs away from other developing countries in the region and thereby making them more likely to tilt towards the U.S. than China. At some point, China will need to transition its economy towards more service-based industry and stimulate domestic demand—neither of which will happen if wages remain artificially low. In the short run, mercantilism seems like a good thing; in the long run, it will wreck the Chinese economy.

The irony is that, for once, the U.S. President is trying to help China. In order for the Party to remain in power, it will have to stimulate real economic growth—not investment in fixed assets—by letting the RMB rise and the market play a more prominent role. It is also true that, if Beijing wants to be perceived as a “peaceful and harmonious” global actor, it needs to start sharing some of the costs of global leadership. China cannot simultaneously distort the global economy, peacefully rise, and be perceived as a key international stakeholder.

Ignoring the advice of the U.S. was a strategy that served Beijing well for 40 years. If the Party continues to ignore this advice, it risks throwing away everything it has so carefully built.

George Ding

Obama’s main goal in China was the same as the trips abroad during his campaign: don’t do anything stupid. But this was not a simple fact-finding mission. Long before he arrived in the stately halls of Beijing, the American media was opining on his ability to thread the needle on issues like human rights, the two T’s, and climate change.

In a country where strong opinions are discouraged, the president did a laudable job of gently urging without haughtiness or condescension. The amazing thing was how much Obama said without actually saying it. In Shanghai he brought up issues like natural rights and freedom of information, framing them as a brief history lesson on America. It was suggestion disguised as exposition.

Obama’s trip also accomplished something else. By attending state dinners and visiting the quintessential places of Chinese culture, Obama gave Chinese leaders massive face. The only thing the Chinese government loves more than symbolism and pageantry is face, and Obama’s trip was a mixture of all three. Throughout his trip, Obama embodied a respectful America that earnestly wants to understand and work with China. This is political capital in the new era.

Only time will tell if Obama has ushered in a new chapter in U.S.-China relations or if the two countries will return to bickering as usual. The critics who say he has returned to America with no concrete accomplishments are right. But what he has returned with could be much more valuable: respect from the second most powerful nation in the world.

Fenwick Smith

If a President of the United States speaks in a closed, government-vetted forum, does he make a sound?

Obama in Shanghai displayed once again his abilities as a consummate public speaker. He certainly seemed to believe he was addressing China as a nation, but as any observer would note, the faces behind him, albeit youthful, had the fixed, stiff-necked half-smiles that denote Chinese Communist Party officials. There were few flickers of actual engagement with the content of the President’s address. The democracy agenda was pushed gently, but with a didactic tone far removed from the bullheaded rhetoric of the previous administration. His refreshing humility, more akin in tone if not in content to, dare I say, a Chinese politician than an American one, no doubt warmed his audience to him.

But did he make an impact?

The transcript of Obama’s Q&A has been sought out by Chinese netizens but those are not the people he needs to reach.  The Chinese government within minutes diluted and edited Obama’s speech using their own templates and enabled strict Internet and television controls to limit viewership. Enough encouragements of Sino-U.S. friendship were made to allow his remarks to penetrate into the public arena, but in a format “suitable” for the old hundred names. Essentially, by filling the studio with previously-vetted Shanghai students who were mostly Party members, the Chinese government has kept Obama’s “public” appearance isolated. The Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology was sealed off from the rest of the city, ostensibly “closed for maintenance,” keeping the general public in the dark about Obama’s presence until the last possible moment. Content was not screened live anywhere in China; the text of his speech containing remarks concerning an uncensored Internet were removed from Xinhua websites as quickly as they were posted. I doubt government officials were forcing these deletions—they were more likely an example of the Chinese media’s innate capability for self-censorship. A number of questions, particularly the “randomly selected Internet questions” were blatantly skewed in favor of the Chinese administration.

The President engaged well on a personal level with his questioners, and replied smoothly and candidly, but he was speaking to the Party, not the people, and thus the entire appearance felt—and indeed was—staged. Like a high-level Chinese tourist, or any of his predecessors, Obama was ferried from one photo-op to another, remaining a long way from the political and social realities of the nation he was visiting. And, in the corridors of power where the Internet is uncensored and knowledge unrestricted, the Chinese leadership will nod, smile and dismiss the visit as a publicity stunt well executed. Obama will go home with the feeling that the U.S. will have to continue to negotiate with China on China’s terms. Simply put, China is powerful enough not to listen, and the U.S. is no longer powerful enough to make China listen.

Yulin Zhuang

The key thing to take away from this procession is the lack of any sort of behavior that could be construed as inflammatory or provocative, even by hypernationalist Chinese netizens, whose paranoid frenzies are legendary for their lack of scruples. From declining to meet the Dalai Lama in October to promising that the United States does not seek to contain China’s rise, President Obama has shown a more nuanced understanding of diplomacy as practiced by the Chinese—in public, bland, uninformative, and undistinguished; in private—who knows.

But we can be certain Obama understands that saying or doing anything likely to set the Chinese off would merely be counterproductive to a meaningful dialog. China would be forced to spend its time elaborately posturing to “save face” and Obama would lose the chance to engage China’s cooperation on a wider range of issues. In the view of your average Chinese citizen, China will no longer be dictated to by arrogant foreigners. The orgiastic display of jingoistic pride that was the National Day celebration on October 1st merely served to reinforce this view among Chinese. Sino-U.S. relations may be headed the way of U.S.-French relations—two proud countries eager to put each other down.