Hold the mao-tais: the risks of Sino-American summit chumminess

As U.S. President Barack Obama prepares for his extraordinary private retreat with Chinese President Xi Jinping on June 7 and 8, the stated aspirations of officials on both sides for a "new type of great-power relationship" perversely risk undermining regional and global security rather than dampening Sino-American conflict.

No country, including the United States, wants to see armed confrontation or even a cold war between Washington and Beijing. Naturally they should work together wherever they can to build trust and habits of cooperation that can reduce strategic competition. At the same time, no country (other than China) wants Beijing to have such a privileged relationship with Washington as to elevate Chinese interests above those of Tokyo, Brussels, New Delhi, and other friendly capitals. Leaders of American friends and allies note acidly that, despite far greater affinities of interests and values, they do not get to spend two days alone with the president of the United States on a ranch in California.

On the Chinese side, the symbolism of Xi’s conclave with Obama is being exploited to demonstrate that China has a special relationship with America that elevates it above other countries. This dynamic has particular resonance in countries like Japan and India, which face dangerous territorial disputes with China but are unsure of the extent of American support for their sovereign rights.

In the traditional Chinese worldview, international politics operates more as a hierarchy than as a world of equal, sovereign countries. Recent Chinese moves to elevate the Sino-American relationship onto a higher plane by extension elevate China over every country except America. This has the effect less of dampening conflict than of ramming home to others China’s status as the world’s deputy superpower — one that is not being contained so much as being courted by the reigning superpower, despite an intensifying clash of interests.

As Jamil Anderlini wrote in the Financial Times this week, Chinese diplomats "seem obsessed with getting the Americans to acknowledge that the ‘new type of great power relationship’ is one between equals." The result is that "lesser nations [feel] left in the cold." But Sino-American summit chumminess sits uneasily with the reality of China’s aggressive campaign to undermine the global liberal order and America’s place in it.

Powered by China’s extraordinary rise, Asia is home to the world’s leading economies outside the West. Access to Asia’s teeming and increasingly prosperous consumer markets is decisive to America’s prosperity. Any country that would lock the United States out of this region, or undercut its ability to project the power and influence that underwrite its commerce and investment there, would gravely threaten core U.S. economic interests.

China’s emergence as the world’s second-largest economic and military power is now causing it to openly chafe at the extraregional role of the United States in its backyard, even though nearly every Asian power welcomes the American presence and works actively to enable it. To secure some degree of regional consent for its aspirations to be Asia’s hegemon, Beijing needs to weaken the links between the United States and Asian powers threatened by China’s authoritarian rise. However, despite deep interdependence among Asian economies, China’s ascent has in some ways had the opposite effect: The fear of Chinese domination among China’s Asian neighbors has benefited the United States by drawing it more deeply into various forms of partnership with those neighbors.

This has strengthened elements of the U.S. position in the region even as China seeks to more actively edge America out of it. So as China seeks to push out its influence and assertively project greater power in its neighborhood, for instance by staking expansive territorial claims in the South China and East China seas, the United States becomes more fully invested in opposing those claims, propelled by its own interests and those of friends and allies that see American influence as a balancer and hedge against Chinese dominion.

The stakes extend beyond the Asian neighborhood. The Obama administration and the U.S. Congress are rightly highlighting the extraordinary Chinese theft of American intellectual property that is resulting in the "greatest transfer of wealth in history," according to the head of the U.S. National Security Agency. A commission chaired by retired Pacific commander Adm. Dennis Blair and former Ambassador Jon Huntsman estimates the value of American economic losses to cyber-espionage from countries led by China to equal the value of all American exports to Asia. Meanwhile, China recently marked the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre with a new round of domestic repression and has helped block international action to end the bloodletting in Syria.

Obama is right to look for a way for Washington and Beijing to manage their many differences. But given the concern among American allies that "G-2" logic retains a strong pull on the official U.S. imagination, and China’s intensifying pursuit of policies designed to achieve asymmetric gains at U.S. expense, downplaying American grievances for the sake of Sino-American comity at this weekend’s summit would be a strategic error that could undercut America’s still-strong position in a rising Asia.