US-China Bilateral Understanding in Perspective

作者：Robert A. Kapp  来源：US-China Perception Monitor

A busy week of U.S.-China diplomacy in Beijing in November produced new understandings on visa policies, revision of the WTO Information Technology Agreement, controlling carbon emissions, and improved military-to-military communication. Each agreement should be welcomed; each should be viewed in a short-term, medium-term, and long-term perspective.

It is encouraging to note that both governments kept their mouths shut while they negotiated these understandings. The central implication of these agreements is that the U.S. and Chinese governments, in spite of deep differences of strategic goals and a continual stream of more specific disputes, are able to communicate effectively, negotiate professionally, and above all to maintain confidentiality until mutually agreeable results can be unveiled. This is reassuring.

Let us quickly review these understandings, from three temporal perspectives–immediate, middle-term, and long-term.

First, visas. Washington and Beijing put their new visa agreement into effect with startling speed, so the immediate impact of the measure is self-evident.  Issuance of ten-year multiple-entry visas (five year visas for students), however modest that might sound, is actually a huge step forward for the U.S.-China relationship–not only in the short term (within a couple of weeks, I was happy to meet the leader of a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences delegation in Washington who could show me his shiny, new ten-year visa), but in the medium and long term.  Think of it as a “trade facilitation” measure, which reduces the time that frequent travelers, especially in the business world, have to spend simply working through the bureaucratic processes of travel documentation.  Think of it as well as a long-term “confidence building measure,” an indication that both nations understand the sustained, long-term nature of their engagement.

Next, the agreement to move forward on a revised Information Technology Agreement under the WTO. Trade in information technology products worldwide approaches a trillion dollars annually, but because the original ITA was written in the mid-1990s and has not been revised since, most of the key technology categories that form the leading edge of today’s global IT economy–having been developed since the ITA was created–do not fall under current ITA jurisdiction and thus face significant tariffs when they cross national boundaries. The U.S. perceived, through long and fruitless discussions with China, that the PRC’s overarching concern for the nurturing of its domestic IT sector had left Beijing unwilling to eliminate tariffs on a long list of advanced IT products—many  of them of American origin–in any revision of the ITA, and that had led to deepening frustration.

The Sino-American agreement on ITA announced by U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and his Chinese counterpart in Beijing was thus a major breakthrough, both bilaterally and for the international trading system embodied in the WTO.  Not only did China agree to the inclusion of numerous key IT categories in any revised ITA, bringing global tariffs on such goods to zero; the fact that the U.S. and China could reach agreement on this contentious issue meant that the rest of the WTO’s members could return to the negotiation of ITA revisions with much higher confidence that a final agreement could be reached.

So, for the ITA agreement, the key significance is not in the immediate term, but rather in the medium term, i.e., the time it takes for the WTO community to reach agreement on the final form of a revised ITA, and in the longer term, because the expanded flow of IT products worldwide under WTO rules and without tariff burdens will affect the economies of producer and consumer nations alike, and influence the future evolution of information technology industries worldwide.

Third, the climate change/carbon emissions agreement. Climate change challenges are, to all but the “denier” community, existential in nature. They are short-term, in that seas are already rising and weather patterns seem already to be changing.  They are medium-term, in that the entire world community must somehow, in a reasonable amount of time, arrive at both common understandings of the causes of climate change and measures of human intervention required to begin to meet the danger. And of course they are long-term, for reasons that need no elaboration.

Carbon emissions are at the core of man-made changes in the world’s climate. China is now the largest national emitter of carbon dioxide, with the U.S. the second-largest emitter. We all know the reasons for this and we know the nearly intractable divergences of view that have made progress on carbon emission control so difficult: the built-up gases in the atmosphere were mostly put there, over 200 years, by the now most developed nations, not by China or other developing nations; China’s per-capita emissions are a modest fraction of America’s per-capita emissions, even though its absolute emissions levels outstrip America’s now continue to grow rapidly as China modernizes.  Until this past November, the inability of the U.S. and China to find common ground has been a key factor in the paralysis of world efforts to rein in carbon emissions.

Thus, the agreements reached by Presidents Obama and Xi in Beijing are a significant milestone.  China committed to capping its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, and to raising the proportion of energy generated by renewable sources to 20%. The United States announced a new “target” of reducing, by the year 2025, carbon emissions by twenty-six to twenty-eight percent of 2005 levels.

In the immediate term, this agreement again speaks to the ability of the two governments to make commitments on vital issues requiring substantial changes in domestic economic policy.  China’s agreement on carbon is the first conspicuous indicator that the PRC is capable of redefining its own national interests in the energy sector in a manner compatible with those of the U.S. and the world community.

Also in the intermediate term, the U.S.-China agreement on carbon emission limitations announced in Beijing will unquestionably affect the course of global climate change negotiations which, until now, has proceeded fitfully, in part because the rest of the world saw the seemingly permanent U.S.-China impasse as a guarantee that serious negotiations would remain beyond reach.

Unfortunately, the intermediate-term perspective on this bilateral carbon-limitation commitment is not all cheerful.  Domestic political divisions within the United States immediately came into view, with the incoming leader of the U.S. Senate denouncing the agreement as part of President Obama’s “war on coal.”  With President Obama facing politically hostile majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress for the final two years of his administration, it is simply not possible to know whether his bold initiatives with China will proceed smoothly or not. And on China’s side, where the commitment to capping carbon emissions by a certain date has gigantic implications for the country’s energy supplies and economic development, the next fifteen years will prove whether Beijing is able to live up to the commitments it has made, in the face of domestic economic and political challenges–including the challenge of “vested interests” in the fossil-energy sector.

But one has to start somewhere. Given the inability of the U.S. and China to make progress on this key aspect of climate change until now, the commitments arrived at in Beijing should be seen, in the long-term view, as a significant milestone in a journey that will last, not only for years or decades, but for centuries–indeed, forever.

Finally, the two military agreements– “protocols,” in the formal terminology—announced  in Beijing are of immediate significance, first of all because they were reached at all.

In the face of rising tensions in maritime East Asia, against the background of China’s complex relations with Japan, Korea, the Philippines and other nations of Southeast Asia, the dangers of unplanned and potentially uncontrolled military encounters between American and Chinese ships or planes have become obvious. While the issues of China’s increasingly blunt assertions of sovereignty in the “East China Sea” and the “South China Sea” remain contentious and were not addressed by Presidents Xi and Obama last November, the more immediate problems of military-to-military communication and crisis-avoidance were.  As one of my former diplomat friends put it, “If two planes are approaching each other head-on at 600 miles an hour each, it’s important for both pilots to know who is supposed to turn right or left, and who is supposed to point up or point down.”

These protocols, one involving agreed rules for the prevention of accidental hostile encounters at sea and in the air and the other involving each side’s commitment to notifying the other side in advance of major military activities (such as missile launches, significant exercises, etc.) are, in the immediate term, a public recognition of a potentially fatal danger and the need to start doing something about it.

The key significance here, though, lies in the intermediate term. That is, once the leaders have agreed that their two militaries will work together to put in place the rules of conduct that will help prevent accidents and unintended escalation, the two militaries still have to make these commitments real, and both have then to train their personnel to act in accordance with the systems they create. This is not a day’s work. It will be over the intermediate term–of the coming months, let us say, or within a year’s time–that we will know whether the commitment of the American and Chinese leaders has been turned into durable, dependable new patterns of behavior on both sides.

The longer-term significance of these military protocols lies only in their status as building blocks of something larger and even more difficult to achieve; the rearrangement of national assumptions as to each country’s military presence in the Asia-Pacific region and, ultimately, the whittling away at the structures of distrust that have come to dominate each great nation’s perception of the other’s intentions.  From that longer perspective, these protocols are an encouraging, but not a definitive, sign, that the recent deteriorating trend in Sino-American military relations may have turned in a more constructive direction.

All in all, then in short- medium- and long-term perspectives, the U.S.-China relationship achieved unexpected and valuable progress in a busy week in Beijing.  Let us hope that more such encounters, and more such progressive steps, will characterize U.S.-China relations in 2015.

Article written by Dr. Robert A. Kapp

来源时间：2018/4/5   发布时间：2014/12/22

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