Chinese Leader’s One-Man Show Complicates Diplomacy
President Xi Jinping’s Solo Decision-Making Presents Challenges
BEIJING — As Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, joined by a large group of American officials, met with senior Chinese leaders here on Wednesday, they faced an American-Chinese relationship riven by a strategic rivalry not seen before, a situation that neither side appears in the mood to improve.
Complicating matters is the one-man leadership style of President Xi Jinping, who appears to make the big decisions on national security — meant to challenge American primacy in the Asia-Pacific region and establish a China-centric alternative — without much consultation with others, Chinese and American experts say.
China’s push against two of America’s major allies, Japan and South Korea; its thrust into the South China Sea, which threatens freedom of navigation; and the sudden imposition of anair defense zone near Japan all reflect Mr. Xi’s thinking about China’s rightful place in Asia, analysts say.
Both China and the United States have set low expectations for progress on the issues scheduled to be discussed at the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue, intended as a setting for the two sides to hash out difficult topics.
Mr. Xi opened the dialogue with a speech that stressed the positive, saying China and the United States had more common interests than differences. He also emphasized China’s economic and military strength. “The vast Pacific Ocean has ample space to accommodate two great nations,” he said, suggesting as he has previously that China would play a much bigger role in the Pacific.
The best prospect seems to be the effort toward a bilateral investment treaty that China agreed to start negotiations on last year.
Toward that end, China’s vice minister of finance, Zhu Guangyao, said Monday that talks would begin soon on lifting restrictions on foreign investments in both countries, such as cutting back on the national security reviews Washington conducts before approving big Chinese investments in the United States.
In one critical area — cyberespionage — there is unlikely to be any real discussion. After the Justice Department won the indictments of five members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on charges of cybertheft in May, China suspended a working group that had held only two sessions.
The atmosphere between Beijing and Washington has deteriorated to such an extent since Mr. Xi and President Obama met at the Sunnylands estate in California a year ago that even pressuring a nuclear North Korea, the one area they agreed to pursue at that time, has almost vanished from the agenda, American officials said.
The Chinese decided to link the question of how to rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons to other big issues, like China’s territorial ambitions in the East and South China Seas, and several months ago, the officials said, Beijing suspended working-level meetings on that matter.
In a sign of the divisions, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, told an audience in Washington that persuading North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, at the behest of the United States, was “mission impossible.”
On the Chinese side, Mr. Xi is making decisions based on his interpretation of “China’s national greatness and military effectiveness,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing who has advised the government on occasion.
“Power concentrated in one man’s hand means foreign policy will be decided by his strategic personality and his political beliefs,” he said.
Mr. Xi’s sense that Mr. Obama is a lame-duck president propels his inclination to “push and push again” in the South China and East China Seas, Mr. Shi said.
Mr. Xi reigns supreme on the Standing Committee, which consists of the seven top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, and none of the others appear to be involved with foreign policy, Mr. Shi said. Mr. Xi almost certainly takes the advice of the military, but the “decision is his making,” Mr. Shi said.
Another Chinese academic, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, described Mr. Xi as the “emperor” on the Standing Committee, with “six assistants.”
Mr. Xi’s leadership style stands in contrast to that of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, who made decisions collectively with the Standing Committee, the academic said. Unlike Mr. Xi’s, Mr. Hu’s connections with the Chinese military were fairly distant.
Senior Obama administration officials say they believe that Mr. Xi made all the major strategic decisions since the Sunnylands meeting virtually single-handedly.
These include the imposition of the air defense zone in airspace claimed by Japan last November and the dispatch in May of a billion-dollar oil rigbelonging to a Chinese energy company into waters also claimed by Vietnam, they said.
Mr. Xi’s top-down style makes navigating Beijing’s opaque bureaucratic system even more hazardous for the Obama administration. A much ballyhooed national security commission set up by Mr. Xi has turned out to be focused more on domestic policy than on foreign, Chinese analysts say.
In the usual pecking order, the state councilor, Yang Jiechi, a former foreign minister and former ambassador to the United States, would serve as Mr. Xi’s chief foreign policy adviser. That was certainly the case when Dai Bingguo held the job under Hu Jintao, and Mr. Dai became the go-to person for many American officials, Chinese and American analysts say.
But Mr. Yang apparently does not have a close relationship with Mr. Xi.
Instead, Mr. Xi appears to rely on Wang Huning, director of policy research of the office of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, who accompanies the president almost everywhere and almost always sits at the head of the Chinese delegation, as he did during Mr. Xi’s visit to the South Korean capital last week.
The policy preferences of Mr. Wang — whom one Chinese academic referred to as “merely a desk officer” — are little known. When Mr. Wang served as a more junior officer, he was careful to avoid shaking hands with American officials and cautious about talking to them, a former senior American official said.
A Navy admiral, Sun Jianguo, appears to have the blessing of Mr. Xi, or at least the top levels of government, to communicate the president’s ideas about an Asia-only regional security arrangement that would replace the 60-year system of American alliances, said Evans J. R. Revere, a former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia.
Admiral Sun, who is deputy chief of the general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, delivered a stirring rendition of Mr. Xi’s ideas for a new order in Asia, with China at the center, before an international audience in Beijing last month.
There is little chance that the current negative tone between Beijing and Washington will change much as a result of the dialogue this week, or even before Mr. Obama leaves the White House, Mr. Shi said.
“I don’t think either side has the intention of reversing the trends,” he said.
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