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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, August 14, 2005

Emerging China requires closer attention from U.S.

By Rep. Ed Case

Congressman Ed Case meets in Beijing with Tang Jiaxuan, state councilor of China, a position comparable to a post in the United States between the president and secretary of state.

Office of Rep. Ed Case

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I returned Tuesday from 10 days in the People's Republic of China, one of 12 members of a bipartisan Congressional delegation led by my Small Business Committee chair and friend, Donald Manzullo, R-Ill.

We not only represented our country in Round VII of the U.S.-China Interparliamentary Exchange, through which members of Congress and our National People's Congress counterparts trade views, but also sought to understand a country rapidly emerging into superpower status.

Our travels took us from Beijing, the government seat; to multiethnic Yunnan Province; to industrial ricebowl Chengdu; to haunting roof-of-the-world Tibet; to go-go Shanghai.

We met with senior leaders of the omnipresent Chinese Communist Party in their walled compound of Zhongnanhai, the NPC in the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square, and provincial leadership, enduring highly scripted statements on hot-button issues like Taiwan, trade, military escalation and human rights.

But beyond this formalistic officialdom, we had remarkably frank interchanges on what is really driving each of our countries. We also interacted candidly and without government interference with China's grassroots, from street vendors to university students, soldiers, Buddhist monks, farmers and large-business owners and their workers.

We benefited tremendously from the collective knowledge of our own in-country foreign service professionals. And I had productive meetings with Bo Wu, Hawai'i's representative in China, as well as our consuls general in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, on Hawai'i-specific challenges such as visa hurdles for local tourism.

I certainly took away a better understanding of modern-day China, but there is much more for all of us to learn. Here are some observations:

  • There's no doubt that the tiger is fully awake. This country of 1.3 billion in an area larger than the Mainland U.S. has sustained an annual economic growth rate of 10 percent-plus for almost two decades and could well top the world inside of a generation.

    Yet China faces tremendous internal challenges. While some are getting very rich and hundreds of millions are better off than in the past, well over half of its population still lives in great poverty.

  • The Party runs everything, but it is no longer a party of ideology, only of raw centralized power. It is also riding a bucking tiger, trading capitalist freedoms and limited autonomy for fealty to central government and no-dissent commitments; buying loyalty from underdeveloped provinces with infrastructure investment; and trying to contain internal have/have-not flareups.

  • Basic freedoms of religion, association and press clearly do not exist in China. But it's not that simple. In Lhasa's magnificent Potala and Drepung Monastery at 14,000 feet in rural Tibet, the people are clearly practicing religion, yet it takes government permission to become a monk.

    There are many papers and television shows, but the content is clearly government-influenced (for example, constant Japan-bashing). People can associate but, without government permission, not formally. The deal: Do what you want as long as you don't challenge government control.

  • Chinese foreign policy goals are to: maintain national unity, with a primary focus on absorbing Taiwan; counter perceived U.S. hegemony; assure adequate resources like oil to feed insatiable internal demand; and develop trade relationships that will advance its own growth.

    And do all of this without risking any fights with us, at least not yet.

  • The Chinese military is expanding rapidly, especially its naval and ballistic missile capability. It professes to be doing so for purely "defensive" goals, but it clearly desires to at least gain the capability to occupy and hold Taiwan. Whether its long-term goals include regional military expansion is obscure.

  • China's people are largely proud of their direction and apparently willing to trade reductions in basic freedoms against continued progress. They are not overtly anti-American, but both skeptical and open.

    In this rapidly changing and often conflicting and confusing milieu, how should we deal with China? A good start would be to balance our federal budget. Our crushing deficit is being financed by loans from China, our fastest growing creditor, giving it unnecessary economic and political leverage.

    Smart, fair trade should be our goal, drawing China into mutual international agreements and requiring intellectual property and other protections.

    On human rights and freedoms, we can't "make" China do what we want overnight, but we should continue to highlight outright abuses and to facilitate the flow of information to China's people that will lead them to their own conclusions.

    Militarily, President Reagan's maxim, "trust but verify," sums it up, and clearly we must maintain an adequate deterrent capability in the Asia-Pacific region, highlighting Hawai'i's role. Overall, our actions and decisions must be fair, firm, realistic, duly respectful and, above all, consistent and with the same long-term view as China follows.

    China is a work in progress, the future of which is anything but predestined. As it emerges, it will be either a constructive or destructive force for our world. The relationships we develop and decisions we make with respect to China must be among our very highest national priorities.

    Ed Case represents Hawai'i in Congress from the 2nd District (Rural O'ahu and Neighbor Islands). He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.