An American Lion

The idea that you can say that President Obama’s recent trip to Asia was a failure (or a success) is laughable. Wait a few years—then tell me what it was.

It was a good first effort to first engage and then, secondly, lay the groundwork for future arrangements. It doesn’t matter what President Obama did or didn’t say in the carefully worded statements and press releases—they are going to be deliberately vague on purpose and they are going to be humbly crafted because that’s what a new U.S. President has to do when first engaging the Chinese.

Did you expect bombast, talk of total victory, and a roadmap to the future paved with good intentions? And since the media did a terrible job, how do you even know?

Howard French — long of the NYT, now of the Columbia Journalism School, friend of mine in both Tokyo and Shanghai. He has a new online Q-and-A with the Columbia Journalism Review, here, in which he says that the traveling press covered Obama’s meetings with Asian officials as if this were a bunch of stops in a presidential campaign tour, and as a result missed or misrepresented what was going on. Read the whole thing, but here are two samples:

From the set-up to the interview, by Alexandra Fenwick:

“In almost every analysis of the trip, Chinese officials were portrayed as optimistic and newly emboldened to stand up to American interests and Obama was cast in the role of the meek debtor, standing with hat in hand. The line is that little was achieved and Obama was stifled, literally by state television and figuratively by the Chinese upper hand in the power dynamic.”

Howard French goes on to say that these assumptions were flat wrong. He offers many explanations, including this:

“I find that the Washington reporters tend to be typically the most subject to this instant scorekeeping. This is part of the game of Washington reporting. They’re at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon that I think is distressing in terms of the approach of the press to serious questions. Everything is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff. You can’t be an expert on every question, and so you’re part of the Washington press corps and if you’re really good and really diligent, you’re going to be expert maybe in a few things and one of those things might not be China.”

If you have seen Howard French’s coverage over the years, including the five years he was based in Shanghai, you will know that no sane reader has ever put him in the category of “soft” on the Chinese leadership or China’s faults. Yet his wonderment and exasperation at what he reads is palpable.

William Moss picks up on this, and gives credence to the above:

All subsequent U.S. presidents visiting China have struggled with Nixon’s legacy. Some things have changed since 1972, not least the antediluvian idea of a weekly news cycle, but presidential visits to China remain more symbolic than substantive. Years of diplomatic spade work drive actual policy changes, leaving government communication offices, pundits, and journalists to construct a narrative from stage-managed vignettes, choreographed meetings, and turgid communiqués, or to pull odds and ends from the margins. Different agendas produce different narratives, and sometimes the real picture emerges from the totality of coverage, like a poster emerging from a mosaic of small photographs.

That was the case with President Barack Obama’s widely heralded visit to China. Expectations were high. China’s significance in global affairs has blossomed in the past decade. A charismatic and more multilaterally inclined U.S. president, a resurgent and confident China, and a host of headline-dominating issues including climate change, trade, and the aftermath of the financial crisis suggested a visit that, while not approaching the magnitude of 1972, could at least be substantive.

Despite that potential, much of the pre-visit American coverage sounded defensive. In stories that ran in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and CNN, the messaging of the American government was clear: There is room for both of us; China’s rise is not bad for America. Newsweek fretted about the decline of American influence in the Pacific under George Bush’s presidency. In an AP story, an analyst suggested that the United States brought “nothing to the table in Asia.” The coverage painted a picture of a chastened superpower, pleading for a stronger renminbi and acutely aware of owing nearly a trillion dollars to Beijing.

No such soul-searching was visible in the tightly managed pre-visit coverage of the Chinese press. Typically for such a high-level visit, the tone was set by Xinhua, the Chinese state-owned news service. Xinhua stories relayed the comments of various Chinese officials expressing confidence in the success of Obama’s visit, although without offering a definition of what “success” entailed. The importance of trade relations was a dominant theme. China Daily, the main English language newspaper, offered a hopeful editorial praising Obama for being the first U.S. president to listen to the opinions of other nations.

All we get from the media is a sickening combination of bad score keeping and phony soul searching. That’s entirely the wrong way to view the first diplomatic outreach and personal visit of the President to China. If he gets the chance to go a second time, perhaps even a third time, then we might see something worth getting spun up about. The real results are years away.

Remember that, while it may appear to the media that President Obama gave away everything or nothing at the table, you have to bear in mind that everything that happened on this visit will impact how we go forward with issues like Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan and India. A concession in a joint statement issued between us and China could gain some valuable support on a statement about Iran. That groundwork has now been laid, and that will drive the debate over whether President Obama had a positive impact on U.S.-China relations.