The title of this post is perhaps unfortunate: "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was a wartime Japanese construct to rally captive Asian nations on a racial, "anti-colonial" basis against the Western Allies. It was as short-lived as the Japanese occupation of much of mainland Asia and the Pacific islands.
These days the stress is on peaceful economic cooperation, as in APEC "Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation," where heads of state and government get to wear the hosts' idea of national dress (bombardier jackets in the US, batik shirts in Indonesia) at annual summit meetings. The forum, started in 1989, got a boost during the Clinton years.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's inaugural foreign trip to East Asia will of course include China, and as Glenn Kessler noted in Sunday's Washington Post, in many ways is about China. He reminds us of candidate Clinton's remark:
Yesterday's forum in Brussels therefore couldn't have had better timing. The European Institute for International Relations (IERI) sponsors the "Academia Diplomatica Europaea," and the ADA program yesterday concentrated on Chinese diplomacy. The guest speaker was Dr. Gustaaf Geeraerts, Director of the Brussels Institute of Contemporary Chinese Studies (BICCS), a joint venture of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and China's Renmin University.
Dr. Geeraerts firmly believes that Western attitudes towards China, and Chinese attitudes towards the West, are a matter of mutually reinforcing perceptions: negativity produces the effect you fear, positivity pays its dividends. In the current world economic crisis of confidence, we are starting to see the self-fulfilling prophecy of deflationary protectionism, and nowhere is the interaction between China and the outside world more important than in the economic sphere.
But as Geeraerts underlined, China's leadership is painfully aware of the link between general world prosperity, internal Chinese development, and the continued legitimacy of the Chinese regime. If I didn't know that "a rising tide lifts all boats" was either an Irish or an Irish-American aphorism, I'd say that it sounded like an old Chinese proverb updated by its "Communist"/capitalist (or is it capitalist/Communist?) leadership.
I'm reminded of a comment on a post of mine last autumn, when I was adding to the general level of worry about Chinese sovereign fund encroachment investment in US financial institutions. A reader took issue:
It behooves us as a nation to keep them whole so that they continue to invest their money here. Reading the blogs one comes across a number of "let them go down" type comments,"why should we bail out the Chinese", etc. However, if [they] lose confidence in the U.S. and stop investing their money here, it will cause a world of hurt and our standard of living will take a real hit over many years.
Rising tides, bailing out, sink or swim - the analogies to The Flood are legion, and indicate the dire straits (yet another nautical phrase!) we're all in. Yesterday, Dr. Geeraerts stressed the opportunities: engagement with a China that is feeling its way around international institutions (membership in the WTO and the IMF) as well as creating one of its own, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO - logo above left).
The SCO bears watching, but I suppose that we should take comfort in its nomenclature. Naming it after China's most populous city, its international "showpiece" of commerce, stresses the economic cooperation message that is designed to calm fears about a budding hegemon. If the US set up an international organization in say, Chicago, wouldn't that be less threatening than in Washington?
Secretary of State Clinton, making her rounds tomorrow at the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Secretariat, will further reinforce the importance of relations with the countries on China's periphery. In all, it's a sign that the Obama Administration is cognizant of the central importance of China, Japan, and the "tigers" to prospects for world economic recovery.
China already owns some $700 billion in US Treasury securities, and if the US is going to sell a further $3 trillion over the next 30 months, we definitely want our main customers to be in a position to buy. Carry on, Madame Secretary.