Washington - Before leaving Washington for a public-diplomacy tour in Chicago Friday, Chinese President Hu Jintao called for a “win-win” relationship between the United States and China.
While it may be too soon to gauge the full impact of Mr. Hu’s state visit on bilateral ties, it does seem that each country’s leader got a “win” from their meetings.
President Obama came off as more assertive with a rising China – certainly more than he had during what some critics viewed as a weak performance when he visited Beijing in late 2009. Mr. Obama put human rights on the table, insisted on a two-way street between the two countries in terms of economic access, and apparently pressed successfully (though in private) for increased Chinese pressure on North Korea
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For his part, Hu got all the pomp and stature of a state visit – very important to the Chinese. And he was seen as having enhanced his legacy as a pillar of China’s domestic economic transformation and its rise as a global power.
Yet the tangible results of the visit were less certain. Obama said publicly that the US will be looking for a stepped-up appreciation of China’s currency, but the high-profile currency battle between the two economic giants did not deliver any concrete developments. Recent commitments by the Chinese to make a concerted effort to respect foreign intellectual property rights took a few steps forward, but some US business leaders say they remain in a skeptical wait-and-see mode on an issue of do-or-die importance to America’s export sector. And while Hu did acknowledge in the two leaders’ press conference Wednesday that “a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights,” those words were largely censored in China.
The result, in the eyes of some US-China experts, is that while the summit had points of success for each side, it probably did little to give the two key powers of the 21st century a more durable and tension-resistant relationship.
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