Wednesday 11 November 2009


TIES THAT BIND, AND LABELS TO KEEP IN MIND
For Obama, as with his predecessors, defining the U.S. relationship with China involves some semantic calisthenics

Andrew Higgins and Anne E. Kornblut

The Washington Post, November 12, 2009

When President Obama arrives in Shanghai and Beijing next week, he will face a prickly question that has vexed presidents since Richard M. Nixon first visited Mao Zedong in 1972: How exactly does the United States define its relationship with China?

Over the decades, U.S. leaders have run through a kaleidoscope of terms, from "tacit allies" against the Soviet Union in the early 1970s to "strategic competitors" at the start of President George W. Bush's administration.

When Obama took office, his advisers spent weeks haggling with Chinese officials over what to call a relationship that has left China holding more than $1 trillion of American debt, turned the United States into China's single-biggest export market and enmeshed the nations in an ever-tighter web of mutual dependence.

Washington and Beijing finally came up with a bland characterization, declaring their ties "positive, cooperative and comprehensive." This replaced a Bush-era label that had also defined the relationship as "candid," a word Beijing disliked because it suggested that the two sides might criticize each other.

Such verbal machinations involve far more than semantic quibbling. Words frame how the two sides confront very real issues such as trade, climate change and human rights. "It's something we have always had with the Chinese, dating back to the 1970s," said Jeffrey A. Bader, Obama's senior director for East Asian affairs at the National Security Council. "You can't really go through an administration without having some label that provides a general characterization."

(...) [artículo aquí]

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