Things look different from here

I’m in China, which should go along way to explaining my failure to post on things like President Obama’s farewell address and President elect Trump’s press conference. I was going to just embed them under the title “Compare and contrast,” but I haven’t figured out how to embed on my iPhone or Kindle. Anyway it was just too easy to show what we all know: America has traded a high-minded thinker of impeccable propriety for a low-life four flusher.

So I’ll focus instead on my brief experience here: three days in Nanjing and only two in Beijing. Both astound.

I was expecting Third World. The centers of both are far from it. These places look more like Europe or America at their most orderly and cleanly, albeit too often shrouded in a thick layer of smog that has mostly disappeared there. Traffic is intense but fairly calm. Trains and train stations run like clockwork, some at a remarkably smooth 200 miles per hour. Except for the ubiquitous harassment by young women trying to entrap foreigners into buying them a ridiculously expensive coffee, people on the street are friendly and helpful, despite an almost universal dearth of English. GPS is the answer, if you’ve got free data. The Forbidden City, the palace complex of more or less six hundred years of Ming and Qing emperors, and the Nanjing Memorial to the city’s victims of a Japanese massacre in 1937/38, rent electronic guides in English.

Knowledgeable Chinese are frank and plainspoken in discussions of South China Sea (SCS) issues. They generally defend something like what they understand the government’s position to be, as most of their counterparts in Washington would, but not without citing mistakes and suggesting course corrections. Everyone here thinks the land features of SCS (low and high tide elevations, rocks, reefs or islands) belong to China, but at least some appear to think Beijing will eventually be prepared to negotiate practical compromises with the other claimants, as it has done with some of its land borders.

The Chinese understand American positions well, so they will be surprised and appalled that Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State suggested in Senate testimony today that Beijing be blocked from access to the nine facilities they have built on what they claim as sovereign Chinese territory in the SCS and that the US should back the sovereignty claims of others who had built many more facilities before the Chinese started doing so two years ago. Nominee Rex Tillerson apparently doesn’t know that Trump’s good friends on Taiwan make the same SCS claims as Beijing.

Washington until now has avoided taking sides on the sovereignty claims for decades, as the main US interest in the SCS is freedom of navigation. The Chinese are quick to point out that there is no risk from their side to commercial shipping, as 70-80% of that flows through the SCS to and from China itself. The core issue is freedom of navigation for military ships and planes, which the US pretty much wants to be able to go anywhere anytime. They don’t keep to well established sea lanes or air corridors. The Chinese don’t like that because they think US military craft are spying on them, which is surely true at times even if not always.

Of course there are bigger issues involved. China is a rising power. Some see a clash with the existing US regional hegemon as inevitable. People in both Beijing and Washington would like to avoid that, as it has the potential for catastrophe. That’s why our 15 SAIS masters students are here on a study trip: to think about ways of managing the issues peacefully. I hope Trump doesn’t make that impossible before we publish the findings April 15!