Your humble blogger is a student in Professor Minxin Pei's course, "Chinese Politics." Today, Professor Pei wrote in The Financial Times about the Obama approach to the ChiComms. Here are the relevant take away paragraphs:
More important, Mr Obama has reverted to long-standing American principles in dealing with a rising great power. For while the US can confidently manage China's mounting economic prowess, and count on economic progress to liberalise the Chinese political system, the world's sole superpower can ill-afford to allow its new rival to become Asia's hegemon.
In many ways, Mr Obama's evolving China policy is more grounded in reality. By abandoning the touchy-feely rhetoric of "strategic partnership", Washington's balanced but hard-nosed new China strategy more accurately reflects the complex dynamics of economic co-operation and geopolitical competition that underlie its ties with Beijing. It is also a policy that should reassure China's nervous neighbours that America is committed to maintaining Asia's strategic balance.
In the years ahead, as Washington pursues this policy further, we should expect more frequent eruptions over security issues, even as the two countries keep close economic ties. In its essence, Mr Obama's revamped China strategy is a continuation of Mr. Bush's "strategic hedging" - a strategy certain to endure as long as China remains a one-party state, and continues a realpolitik foreign policy that challenges the America-led liberal world order.
