WASHINGTON — When President Obama welcomes Chinese President Xi
Jinping to the White House this week, the two leaders will find common
ground in their efforts to combat global warming and restrain Iran's nuclear program .
But other flash points between the two world powers remain. Here are
the top four Obama and Xi likely will confront in their talks:
The
U.S. and China both want to talk about security in cyberspace, but that
has a different meaning in each country. In the United States it means
stopping Chinese hacking attacks such as the theft of personal
information of more than 21 million Americans from the Office of Personnel Management , revealed last spring.
China, which denies responsibility for that hack, thinks of cyber security as protecting cyber infrastructure.
“The Chinese are worried about an open Internet and want to control information,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies .
Obama
also has complained about cyber-related theft of commercial trade
secrets by China. The U.S. makes a distinction between industrial
espionage, which goes against international business norms, and national
security espionage focused on state secrets, which all countries engage
in. Chinese officials, who are focused on growing into a great power,
“don’t buy the distinction,” Glaser said.
The economy:
Obama and Xi lead the world’s two
largest economies and want more access to each other’s markets. And
China wants the United States to show confidence in China’s economy , which has been shaken by slowing growth, a stock market crash this summer and a currency devaluation.
Xi,
whose government has taken extraordinary measures to stem the stock
market crash, is keen to go home with good news from Washington,
said Minxing Pei, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund of the United States . “He needs all the good news he can get,” Pei said.
Xi would like a U.S. commitment to include China’s currency among the International Monetary Fund 's reserve
currencies, which would by a major sign of confidence in China’s
economy, Pei said. The United States wants such a step to include a
Chinese commitment to greater transparency of its economy, said Andrew
Smalls, another analyst at the German Marshall Fund.
Both
countries also are working on a bilateral investment agreement, but
they’ve yet to agree on the number of sectors that will be off limits to
each other’s investors, known as a “negatives list.”
“The United
States wants a negatives list as short as possible, Glaser said. “China
wants a much longer negative list. It remains to be seen whether that
really is doable.”
China
has alarmed the United States and its Asian allies with an aggressive
island building and fortification program in the South China Sea. The
U.S. says the islands and the military infrastructure China is putting
on them threaten navigation rights for commercial and U.S. warships.
China says the islands are legal, that no commercial traffic has been
impacted and that the issue concerns it and its neighbors, not the
United States. The two nations’ warships and aircraft have already had
some close encounters in the region.
The question facing Obama is
how to react without risking an escalation, Pei said. “If China takes
more islands (and maritime territory) what will you do?”
Human rights:
Xi is coming to Washington
seeking “a new type of great power relations” with the United
States that focuses on the countries’ common interests and acknowledge
the need to “manage and control differences according to the
state-controlled Xinhua news agency . The goal is to avoid “strategic miscalculation,” it said.
To
China, such language means U.S. recognition of China’s primacy in east
Asia, its approach to human rights and one-party rule in China, Pei
said.
The White House is unlikely to sign on to such
language. U.S. officials “speak openly about persistent human rights
violations, pressing our concerns at every level,” Susan Rice , Obama’s national security adviser, said in a speech at George Washington University on Monday.
China’s
increasing restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly
— including visa restrictions on American journalists — “hollow-out
China’s potential,” Rice said. And a Chinese law under consideration
that would tighten regulation of foreign human rights groups would
threaten “the very organizations that have promoted China’s development
and advanced the friendship between our peoples,” she said.
(source : http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/09/22/5-things-obama-xi-china-clash/72587214/)
0 komentar:
Post a Comment