KGA: Based on your experience, both in office and from what you’ve observed in recent trips to the country, what do you believe is the likely future of the U.S. relationship with China?
MA: It’s hard to predict. President Obama is looking for partners, for countries we can work with. There are discussions about the Chinese helping the Europeans out of their debt crisis. We’d like to see China not only as a global power but as a power that actually takes responsibility and isn’t a free rider in the international system.
On the other hand, there continue to be issues such as the South China Sea. Secretary Clinton has suggested that there is a multilateral solution, rather than the Chinese unilaterally deciding that they have access to the sea and the islands and arguing with Vietnam and the Philippines. I was just in Beijing for the third high-level dialogue between a bipartisan U.S. delegation and the International Department of the Communist Party of China, and as a result of those discussions, I got the sense that there are actually a number of issues where we can see commonalities. For example, trying to deal with global problems related to the environment and energy.
It is one of those very fluid relationships that depend on who’s in power, and we’re going to see how that works with the transition in power in China this year, coupled with the fact that we have an election going on at home. In every election that I’ve seen the challenger tries to portray China in the worst possible way, and we’re already seeing that China-bashing going on. So it is a peculiar year to look at it all. The future of our relationship is still very uncertain, and this can be viewed as a threat or an opportunity- or treated as both.
As orginally published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs blog page on November 14, 2011. Please find the rest of the interview at the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
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