Sunday, November 9, 2014 When Barack Obama lands in - TopicsExpress

Sunday, November 9, 2014 When Barack Obama lands in Beijing for a two-day state visit this week, he will find a city of traffic-free roads, crystal blue skies, and powerful officials who have made up their minds against him. Obama will participate in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday at the start of a short regional tour – later in the week, he will attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) summit and the East Asia Summit (EAS) in Burma and then the G20 summit in Australia. The White House has said that Obama expects “candid and in-depth conversations” during the visit, his first to China since 2009. Yet the president will confront a widening strategic gulf between the world’s first and second largest economies; experts say that China’s leaders will probably snub him on a range of hot-button issues, including human rights, cybersecurity, and China’s rising territorial ambitions in the south and east China seas. President Xi Jinping probably sees Obama as marginalised at home, especially after last week’s devastating midterm elections, and weak on foreign crises in Ukraine, Iraq and Syria. Xi, on the other hand, is just getting started – since taking the country’s most powerful post in autumn 2012, he has overseen effective campaigns to ratchet up both nationalism and repression, cementing himself as China’s most powerful top leader since Deng Xiaoping. Obama has two years left in office; Xi has eight. “We’ve seen indications that Xi Jinping has an ambition to increase China’s influence in east Asia, central Asia, and the western Pacific,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations expert at Renmin University in Beijing. “Many statements and actions imply that this will come at the cost of American predominance in the same regions. I think that this is already raising concerns in Washington.” While the two sides will almost certainly fail to reach any agreements on larger strategic concerns, he said, they can make progress on issues with greater international consensus, such as combating climate change, terrorism and corruption. Beijing will host leaders from Apec’s 21 member economies over the next week, including Vladimir Putin of Russia and the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and has been treating the summit as its biggest international event since the 2008 Olympics. The government has spent $6bn (£3.8bn) on conference venues on the shore of Yanqi lake, a scenic spot in a mountainous district about two hours by car from the city centre. It has adapted a host of measures to temporarily curb Beijing’s notorious traffic and air pollution, including closing factories and government offices, and restricting motorists to driving on alternate days. The summit’s economic agenda will be dominated by discussions about recalibrating global institutions to acknowledge China’s rising global clout. For example, China is gathering support for the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a home-grown, $50bn (£31.5bn) alternative to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Many neighbouring countries, including India, have thrown their weight behind the project. American officials have fought back, raising concerns that the institution would be redundant and alarmingly opaque. On Saturday, Xi pledged $40bn for a “new silk road” infrastructure fund, promoting trade links between China and seven other Asian countries, including Pakistan, Tajikistan and Bangladesh. “Back in 2001, China was asking humbly to get into the room; in 2014, China wants to take centre-stage,” Chen Fengying, a senior fellow researcher with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told Bloomberg. “China is now playing offensive, not defensive.” During Obama and Xi’s last meeting, at the Sunnylands summit in California in June 2013, Xi espoused a “new model for a great power relationship,” suggesting that the two countries should meet as equals. Since then, Xi has presided over the most severe rollbacks of freedom of speech and assembly in recent memory, detaining scores of activists, lawyers and journalists and cracking down on even moderate dissent. Chinese hackers have infiltrated American institutions ranging from military contractors to chemical companies. China has infuriated its neighbours, claiming a disputed reef near the Philippines and placing an oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam. Chinese state-controlled media portrayed Obama as a lame duck after the midterm elections. “The US public used to speak highly of Obama, but now many seem to have reversed their opinions,” the nationalist tabloid Global Times wrote in an editorial last Wednesday. The newspaper added: “With China’s rise, we gradually have the ability to have a clear understanding of the US. The country is too lazy to reform. US society selected Obama, but there is no great American president in this era.”