Lack of China expertise puts Obama administration on the back foot
Barack Obama came to office with a strong team of advisers on China. Today the US administration is practically devoid of them
Three years after US President Barack Obama vowed to shift his focus toward Asia in response to China's growing power, the advisers behind that policy are gone. So is their expertise.
Instead of Timothy Geithner - the former treasury secretary who had studied Putonghua as a college student in Beijing and was seen by anti-corruption tsar Wang Qishan as a family friend - Obama has budget expert Jack Lew heading the department. While the previous secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton stressed the need for an Asia "pivot", her successor John Kerry now has focused on a quest for Middle East peace. And the current US ambassador to China, Max Baucus, says he is "no real expert on China".
As a result, former policymakers in both parties say, the US is reacting to events rather than shaping them in the face of an increasingly assertive China.
"The administration was heavy on China people in the first few years, and now we seem to be completely devoid of them," said Jon Huntsman, the Chinese-speaking US ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011.
For Obama, who's visiting Beijing this week for the Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, it's a bad time to have a thin bench.
President Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader in a quarter of a century, is changing China's behaviour at home and abroad with a difficult-to-fathom impact on the US.