Obama Says U.S. Seeks to Build Stronger Ties to China/China Focuses on Territorial Issues as It Equates Tibet to U.S. Civil War South

Obama Says U.S. Seeks to Build Stronger Ties to China
By HELENE COOPER and MARTIN FACKLER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/world/asia/14prexy.html?_r=1&th&emc=th


TOKYO — The United States is not threatened by a rising China, President Obama said Saturday, but will seek to strengthen its ties with Beijing even as it maintains close ties with traditional allies like Japan.

In a wide-ranging speech on his first trip to Asia as president, Mr. Obama drew on his own background to reassure the people of the fast-growing continent that even as the United States seemed preoccupied with conflicts in the Middle East and other regions, it was increasingly “a nation of the Pacific.”

“I know there are many who question how the United States perceives China’s emergence,” Mr. Obama told an audience in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. But he added, “In an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another.”

Declaring himself “America’s first Pacific president” (a description that somehow ignored Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, two Californians), Mr. Obama previewed many of the themes that will shadow him during his weeklong trip, which will also include stops in Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul.

He called on North Korea to return to talks aimed at reining in its nuclear weapons program or face even greater isolation; he urged the military government in Myanmar to release the leader of the country’s beleaguered democracy movement, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (although he mispronounced her name); and he pledged to “never waver in speaking for the fundamental values that we hold dear.”

But at every turn of his address, Mr. Obama projected a more conciliatory America, which is trying to break from the past. On Myanmar, for example, he pledged that he would “be the first American leader to meet with all 10 Asean leaders.” Mr. Obama will be at the table in Singapore on Sunday with the leaders of Myanmar and the other countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, an economic group.

And while Mr. Obama spoke at length about human rights, he never connected the pursuit of such rights specifically to China and Tibet, where Beijing-backed authorities have clamped down on religious freedom. Instead, Mr. Obama, clearly seeking to avoid alienating Beijing on the eve of his inaugural visit to China, struck broader themes, saying that “supporting human rights provides lasting security that cannot be purchased any other way.”

As he has on many of his trips abroad, Mr. Obama painted a picture of an America willing to learn from its mistakes. In particular, he said, the United States and Asia must grow out of the imbalance of American consumerism and Asian reliance on the United States as an export market, a cycle he called imbalanced.

“One of the important lessons this recession has taught us is the limits of depending primarily on American consumers and Asian exports to drive growth,” he said. “We have now reached one of those rare inflection points in history where we have the opportunity to take a different path.”

Mr. Obama seemed to speak directly to the new Japanese government’s efforts to build a tighter Asian economic sphere, and used his own history to deliver the message: Don’t exclude the United States.

“My own life is part of that story,” he said. “I am an American president who was born in Hawaii and lived in Indonesia as a boy. My sister Maya was born in Jakarta and later married a Chinese-Canadian. My mother spent nearly a decade working in the villages of Southeast Asia, helping women buy a sewing machine or an education that might give them a foothold in the world economy.”

“So,” he added, “the Pacific rim has helped shape my view of the world.” He even spoke of his first trip to Japan as a boy—“As a child, I was more focused on the matcha ice cream,” he said.

That drew laughs from the audience, which gave him a standing ovation both before and after his speech.




China Focuses on Territorial Issues as It Equates Tibet to U.S. Civil War South
By EDWARD WONG
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: November 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/world/asia/14beijing.html?th&emc=th


BEIJING — The Chinese government had a special message for President Obama on Thursday: He is black, he admires Abraham Lincoln, so he, of all people, should sympathize with Beijing’s effort to prevent Tibet from seceding and sliding back into what it was before its liberation by Chinese troops: a feudalistic, slaveholding society headed by the Dalai Lama.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a news conference.

Mr. Qin added: “Thus, on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China’s stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

For many Americans, Mr. Qin’s analogy might sound like a stretch, but it revealed which issues Chinese leaders see as among their top priorities, ones that Mr. Obama will no doubt have to grapple with after he arrives in China on Sunday for his first trip here.

While much attention will be focused on broad international issues like trade and currency values, climate change and the ailing world economy, questions of sovereignty and territory remain an obsession of Chinese foreign policy. Some scholars and analysts see this as an expression of an aggressive expansionism that will only deepen as China moves toward superpower status. Others argue that China is driven more by the need to recover territory wrested from it during the decades it was known as the Sick Man of Asia, when pieces of it were humiliatingly annexed by European powers and Japan.

As a result, Mr. Obama can expect to get an earful from Chinese officials not only on the Dalai Lama, whom the president says he will meet after the China trip, but also on Taiwan, the self-governing island that China says is a rebel province. Taiwan receives annual arms shipments from the United States.

“Tibet and Taiwan are, from China’s perspective, the two core sovereignty issues, and they rank above all others in Chinese diplomacy,” said David Shambaugh, a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Disputed territory is also the biggest obstacle in relations between China and its largest neighbor, India. On Tuesday, Mr. Qin denounced the Dalai Lama for his visit this week to the Tibetan Buddhist enclave of Tawang in the Indian Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh.

Tawang is one of the most potent symbols of China’s unresolved sovereignty issues. China says it was once part of Tibet, which the Chinese military seized in 1951, and so belongs to Beijing. India says that Tibetan leaders ceded it to British-ruled India in a 1914 treaty. Tawang figured centrally in a border war between China and India in 1962.

Part of the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party lies in the notion, rightly or wrongly held, that it ousted foreign influence from the country and has tried to reunite fragments of China to return the boundaries of the modern nation to roughly those of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) at its height. That includes Taiwan, Tibet, the western region of Xinjiang and, by China’s calculation, Tawang.

“In most respects, the People’s Republic of China, of course, inherits the fixed boundaries of its predecessor nation-state, the Republic of China, which declared as its territorial boundaries what had been mostly the messy frontiers of the Qing empire,” Alice Miller, a political scientist and research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wrote in a China discussion forum posting that she agreed to make public.

“Messy” is the operative word here. In the age of empires, there were no hard and fast borders, whether the imperial rulers were the Ottoman Turks or the Manchus or the Moghuls. The seat of empire had its sphere of influence, radiating outward, with tributary states occupying the borderlands but rarely being governed in the same way as regions within a modern nation today.

Trying to define national borders along the contours of an old empire is a daunting task. If, for example, Tibet paid tribute to the Qing emperor at certain points in history, should Tibet be part of modern China? If Tawang did the same with Tibetan rulers in Lhasa, should Tawang be part of modern Tibet?

Along with India and Indonesia, China is one of a handful of vast, multiethnic nations that follow the contours of fallen empires. Because of their size and history, all three nations grapple with the same issues: border disputes, ethno-nationalism, occasionally violent movements by disaffected ethnic or religious minorities.

China is often criticized as handling uprisings harshly in Tibet and Xinjiang, which the country’s ethnic Han leaders consider internal issues of sovereignty. But in dealing with its neighbors on territorial issues, China has in the recent past generally sought to settle conflicts through negotiation, scholars say.

Since 1949, it has resolved 17 of 23 border disputes, offering concessions in 15 of those instances and, over all, receiving less than half of the contested territory, said M. Taylor Fravel, an associate professor of political science at M.I.T. The compromises have generally come at times of regime instability, when the Communist Party has felt threatened by external or internal forces, he added.

The big question, then, is whether Chinese leaders will continue to show flexibility on border issues as China becomes a greater world power, and as it stamps out internal threats.

China’s maritime disputes have proven harder to settle than those on land. In the resource-rich seas to its east and south, China is trying to assert control of various islands — most notably the Spratly, Paracel and Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands — that are also claimed in whole or in part by other Asian countries. In March, official Chinese news organizations reported that the government intended to send six more patrol vessels to the South China Sea in the next three to five years.

Even the United States has run directly afoul of China’s maritime border claims: On March 8, five Chinese vessels harassed an American surveillance ship in what Pentagon officials said are international waters. The Chinese insisted that the American ship, the Impeccable, was conducting illegal surveillance in waters under their jurisdiction.

Dennis C. Blair, the national intelligence director, told Congress that China’s general behavior in the South China Sea was “more military, aggressive, forward-pushing than we saw a couple of years before.”

This all speaks to how a bolder, brasher China might handle issues of sovereignty and territory, comparisons to Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding.

“The biggest unknown is how a stronger China will behave in its outstanding disputes,” Mr. Fravel said. “When it has compromised in the past, mostly in disputes on its land border, it was a relatively weak state. The question now becomes: how will a stronger China behave in its remaining territorial disputes over maritime sovereignty and with India?”