China's charm offensive begins
■"China Plans To Honor A Reformer," by Philip P. Pan, Washington Post, 9 September 2005, p. A1.
Guess who's coming to America?
President Hu Jintao of China, at a point where the anti-Chinese hysteria inside the Beltway has reached some serious proportions.
China remains the default position for the hawks ready to abandon the Global War on Terrorism. It's threat imagery is the strategic rear for the realists who wish to pull away from this messy world and occupy their minds with grand theories of great power balancing and billiard balls knocking around a strategic landscape.
But the Chinese won't be their silent partners in this return to the manic bipolarism of the past. Bit too clever. Bit too smooth
Hu knows he comes to America at a tough time, needing to repair images upon images. So we see the careful rehabilitation of Hu Yaobang, whose death in 1989 set off the democratic push that became the showdown at Tiananmen Square.
Hu Jintao is known as the most careful of bureaucrats, and on the surface, rehabbing Hu Yaobang carries some dangers, for it will surely be received by many as a signal.
At the same time, Premier Wen Jiabao let loose the notion that free elections previously limited to villages could expand to larger townships. Now, you have to understand, China's definition of a village is most people's definition of small American city, so a township starts to get up there.
In neither instance are these risky moves. Anything but. They are carefully considered gives, designed to lighten the load, soften the tone, take the edge off.
The hard-cores will deride all this, of course, saying it's those clever Chinese killing us softly with Hu's song: The Theory of Peacefully Rising China.
And they'll be both right and completely irrelevant in this judgment.
China is signaling all right. It is signaling the future it considers worth risking.
Some are ready on our side to take this risk, others pull back.
All must choose.
I do in the November issue of Esquire, which is the micro to BFA's macro, the j'accuse! to the je propose!, the yang to the yin.
Hi and low is the way to go.