Of dinners and deals: the different diplomatic styles of China and the US make negotiation all the more necessary
Tom Plate says relentless engagement, rather than aggressive containment, offers China and the US the best chance of achieving their ends
All's well that ends well? Start with this: guess who's been coming to dinner? In the otherwise Diet Coke blue-jeans Barack Obama years, a hip span showcasing the fewest number of formal White House state dinners of any administration since Harry Truman, only China has been graced with two prandial extravaganzas - just one for Japan, just one for anyone else. It's been a double dollop of dinner-party diplomacy for China. Let us all - including the anti-US faction in Beijing - dwell on this.
Each of the two state White House mega events for China - the first in 2011 with Hu Jintao when he was president, then last week with President Xi Jinping - produced results, which, mixed or unmixed, were better than no results. Right now, the US media is picking holes in the cyber warfare agreement - but, really, who understands this problem fully? Notably, the Xi government's commitment to climate control and global de-warming increases with every diplomatic event.
Perhaps Chinese people don't like breathing filthy air any more than anyone else. Western media critics continually - if correctly - point out that China's anti-earth emissions are double those of the US; but with its economy under stress in many sectors, and its population more than three times that of the US, how could it be otherwise? (Maybe China should stick with tea farming and forget all about modernisation?)
If Xi returned home believing his diplomatic venture was a success - it was - in part that's because he is Chinese, the Western business suit notwithstanding. What counts for him and his government is not so much the trip's actuarial pluses and minuses but the very fact that it took place - twice. Chinese needs are different from the American.
Americans go for quarterly reports and five-year plans that tend to get scrambled every 18 months. By contrast, the bottom line for the Chinese is harder to achieve but more enduring: they want to get totally re-established as what their country centuries ago was, before (in their eyes) the rest of the world was walking all over them.
