12:20 pm
G-5, not G-4: The Rise of China
I didn’t have the chance to comment much on the G-20 last week, and I recognize that I’m coming to the party pretty late in the game. But I did want to offer one observation that I did not see anywhere else.
For all the talk about China and other emerging economies demanding a greater role in both the G-20 and the IMF in the media coverage leading up to the meeting, the post-summit analysis barely mentioned them at all.
If you only read the mainstream media, this looked more like the G-7 +13 than it did the G-20. It’s even plausible to argue that the MSM portrayed it as a G-4 meeting — USA, Britain, France, and Germany — than anything else. The focus was almost entirely Obama v. Sarkozy (or, alternately, stimulus v. regulation, Obama-Brown v. Sarkozy-Merkel, and Anglo-American zone v. Euro zone). Here, for example, are a few paragraphs from Friday’s Financial Times:
Gordon Brown, host of the summit, said the meeting marked the emergence of a “new world order”, as he unveiled what leaders claimed was a $1,100bn package of measures to tackle the global downturn, including support for low income countries and a $250bn plan to boost the international money supply. . . .
The leaders papered over divisions between the US and Europe about whether the world could afford a new fiscal stimulus.
Barack Obama, US president, called the measures “bolder and more rapid than any international response that we’ve seen to a financial crisis in memory” and predicted they would mark “a turning point in our pursuit of global economic recovery”.
Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, said the summit’s agreement on a new regulatory regime and crackdown on tax havens showed “a page has been turned” on an era of post-war “Anglo- Saxon” capitalism.
Were the +13 (or +16) minor players, or did the media miss the story? I think the answer is yes to both question. Other than China, none of the other +13 really played a role. Russia’s main objectives were more political than economic; its focus thus was on the Obama-Medvedev bilateral, not the G-20. The rest of the G-20 barely rated a mention at all (the one exception: Berlusconi’s ridiculously touristy pose with Obama and Medvedev).
The media didn’t even cover China the role China played — in large part because once the summit started, it stayed behind the scenes. As a result, post-summit coverage hardly mentioned them at all (the exception: the FT and WaPo had passing references to Obama mediating a dispute between Hu Jintao and Nicolas Sarkozy over the naming and shaming of tax havens).
The Obama-Hu bilateral didn’t fare much better, receiving a fraction of the coverage accorded to Obama’s meeting with Medvedev. Only the LAT ran a story.
But it would be a mistake to assume that means China didn’t play a role. As one DC-based diplomat put it to a friend of mine, the positive results of the G-20 could not have happened without a successful U.S.-China bilateral. Chances are that most of the key initiatives announced at the conclusion of the summit came out of that meeting.
I’m not usually fond of quoting Xinhua, the offical Chinese news agency, but I think this story, which comes from Xinhua’s Rome correspondent, captures what no Western outlet managed to notice:
The meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and U.S. President Barack Obama in London on Wednesday marks the beginning of a new era in Sino-U.S. relations and the G20 London summit will strengthen China’s role on the international stage, Italian scholars said on Thursday.
Luca La Bella, a China expert with Rome’s International Studies Center, told Xinhua that “the importance of the bilateral meeting was highlighted by the fact that it was Obama’s first institutional trip abroad marking his debut on the international stage.”
“It’s a turning point in China-U.S. relations,” he said.
“Barack Obama puts China on the same level as the United States. The relations today are between equals, different from the(former U.S. President George W.) Bush era when China was being constantly put under pressure to become a world actor,” he said.
Silvio Fagiolo, a professor of international relations at LUISS University in Rome and former Italian ambassador to Germany, said “the meeting marked China’s global rise and the beginning of a long-lasting strategic relationship with the United States not only at economic level but also at cultural, political and environmental levels and in the fight against terrorism.”
“Obama is more pragmatic than Bush … his strategy is to focus on cooperation and economic priorities,” said Fagiolo.
The story is framed as an analysis piece, with much of the commentary coming from Italian experts. But Xinhua would not have published it (or given it prominence on official government websites) had it not reflected government policy. And be assured that the piece may be focusing on Obama, but the real message is that the U.S. and China are now equals — and that China expects Obama to recognize and acknowledge it. Judging by the manner in which Obama handled the bilateral, it looks like this Administration understand the new reality and is adapting its policies to reflect it.
The balance between the government’s assertiveness leading up to the meeting and its relative silence during the actual summit was an impressive performance by a confident, rising power. To put it another way, China truly has arrived. It’s now a power broker and no longer an aspirant to first tier status.
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