With so many issues to discuss (the global economy, the valuation of the Chinese currency, North Korea, Iran, energy, climate change, trade), it will be difficult to get past the noise in the media coverage to hear what I hope will be the music coming out of Beijing.
The Chinese media will cloak their subjectivity in the Chinese journalistic style of assembling a numbing array of facts that offer no insight into anything other than the official government point of view.
The U.S. media, meanwhile, will report about conflict, because conflict is an easy story to tell and the story that the editors back in New York and Washington best understand.
The nationalist drums will also be beating on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, within social media in China, where voices will call for the Chinese government to stand tall in the face of bullying Americans, and among the cadre of fringe bloggers in the U.S. who believe the only good U.S. foreign policy is one in which we push everyone else around.
I was at a luncheon last week at which U.S, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke spoke about the Strategic & Economic Dialogue, being led by Hillary Clinton, Timothy Geithner and their Chinese counterparts Dai Bingguo and Wang Qishan. Locke is a smart, savvy Chinese American who in many ways is a human metaphor for the future that these meetings between China and the U.S. could represent.
He spoke about the troubling trade issues facing the two countries (theft of intellectual property, currency valuation, and market protection), but made a compelling point that is worth keeping in mind when reading or watching reports about the upcoming talks.
The two countries are locked in a death grip, in which the future of their peoples are inseparably linked. If one goes over the cliff, down they both go. China is the world's largest holder of U.S. debt. About $895 billion or so in U.S. Treasuries are in China's investment portfolio. The U.S. owes the Chinese a lot of money. On the other hand, the U.S. is China's largest trade partner. The country has moved from the rice paddy to the center of the world's economy in 30 years largely because Americans have an insatiable appetite for Chinese manufactured goods, and that social and economic progress stops if Americans stop buying.
Locke's point: The U.S. and China are in a unique position to work together to insure their common future, and just maybe the future of the everyone else on the planet.
Success coming out of the meetings this week will not mean the U.S. has trumped China on issues like currency valuation and Iran, even though these will be the primary focus of U.S. media. It will not mean that the Chinese have fended off the bullying tactics of the U.S. and stood proud in protecting the welfare of the Chinese economy, even though that will be the primary theme in Chinese media.
Success will be more subtle to judge. It will be linked to whether the two countries seem headed toward a shared view of energy independence, for example. (Both have an unhealthy and unsustainable dependence on Middle East oil.) It will be tied to whether they find a way to work together to commercialize clean energy technologies that allow economic growth without the climatic destruction.
These are the important questions, the harder stories to tell. So, while you're listening to media reports in coming days about these two superpowers haggling over the day-to-day issues that separate them, try to determine if, amid the noise, any music is being played.
