by MEL GURTOV
The Idea, and the Obstacles
President Xi Jinping’s call for a “new type of great-power relationship” in meetings in 2013 with President Obama raises important questions about the future of US-China relations. On the surface, it appeared that the two leaders were on the same page. At the June summit, Obama agreed with Xi that “working together cooperatively” and bringing US-China relations “to a new level” were sound ideas.1 When the G-20 countries convened at St. Petersburg in September, Obama said of Xi’s proposed new model: “we agreed to continue to build a new model of great power relations based on practical cooperation and constructively managing our differences.” But he added that “significant differences and sources of tension” remain with China, implying that China’s “playing a stable and prosperous and peaceful role” in world affairsremained a matter of US concern.2
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There are a least five obstacles to C-2. One is differing notions of international responsibility. In 2005 Robert Zoellick, then a deputy secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, proposed that China become a “responsible stakeholder” (fuzeren de liyi xiangguanzhe) in the international system. Zoellick hoped to attract Chinese leaders with the idea that the United States valued China as a partner in international affairs. But the reception was lukewarm, as a number of Chinese analysts decided that what Zoellick really meant by “responsible stakeholder” was that China should support the US position on key international issues such as North Korea’s nuclear weapons, Iran’s nuclear plans, and global finance. US policymakers today still use that expression when trying to push China in the US direction, as when Obama remarked at St. Petersburg that China’s rise must be peaceful.
Chinese leaders and foreign-policy specialists prefer to refer to their country as a “responsible great power.” They say that their “peaceful development” policy will break the pattern of rising powers challenging the dominant power for top position. They ask how the United States can speak of global responsibility in light of its unilateral interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, its hard line on negotiating with North Korea and (until recently) Iran, its failure to put its financial house in order, and (in response to US accusations of computer hacking) spying on China and many others. The Americans ask how China can speak of being a “responsible great power” when it acts aggressively in support of its territorial interests in the South China Sea and Sea of Japan, and when it rejects strong sanctions to deal with North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear-weapon ambitions. On many other international issues, such as global warming and energy, the two countries similarly have widely divergent ideas about what responsibility means. Unless and until the United States and China reach agreement on what it means to be a globally responsible great power, it is hard to imagine that a “new type” of US-China relationship can evolve.