Diplomacy business
It's a funny thing about agendas. They always belong to somebody else. On Tuesday, US President George W. Bush stunned the Republican right wing by dispelling strategic ambiguity and opting for a firm 'no' to an independent Taiwan, after meeting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Washington.
The US-China trade war also seemed to undergo a temporary truce. A despatch from Bloomberg news service, published by the South China Morning Post, wondered aloud whether the US business lobby in China had tipped the balance. In other words, who paid Mr Bush to be nice to Mr Wen? Oddly, the mainland's official press virtually ignored the Bush dictum on Taiwan, which came a few weeks after Therese Shaheen, the Washington-based chairwoman of the American Institute in Taiwan, claimed the US had never said it 'opposes Taiwan independence'. The comment, made during a visit to Taipei, was seen by some as part of a hidden US agenda to encourage Taiwan independence.
One can easily imagine US Secretary of State Colin Powell brooding in his office in Foggy Bottom about the hidden Chinese agenda behind Beijing's news blackout. Why would Beijing wish to downplay Mr Wen's trip? Does it want something more solid than the president's word?
Perhaps China's anti-Americans have trouble letting go of their beliefs, but the Bush administration has not made it easy for them. Ms Shaheen's comments have been in keeping with the ongoing US campaign to force up the value of the Chinese yuan and congressional chest-thumping over China's trade surplus with the US. There has been nothing hidden about Mr Bush's agenda for winning the next presidential election. As the US economy improves, the issue of China's theoretically over-valued yuan and trade surplus are moving off the agenda.
Yet when it comes to agendas, history does play tricks with us. Take the question of the US business lobby in China, for example. As the Bloomberg article noted, China spent just US$180,000 in the past year in formal lobbying through registered representatives in Washington, and depends principally on enthusiastic US multinationals to do the 'heavy lifting', in the words of former US ambassador to China James Sasser, quoted by Bloomberg. But there is more to this story. The longest standing pro-China business lobby, now incorporated as the US-China Business Council, was set up in 1972 at the behest of vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, who leaned on brother David to round up 200 chief executives to do what the Commerce Department was then constrained from doing because of the absence of formal diplomatic relations - promote trade ties with China.
The reason was simple. President Richard Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger recognised that economic growth by way of trade and investment was practically the only carrot the US had to coax China out of isolation. In the three decades since Nixon's visit to China, the US has been enormously supportive of China's economic reforms. Historically, the US business lobby's agenda has been to foster China as a stabiliser of the global economy and to defuse potential for nuclear confrontation.
