Covering China

The panel at the Asia Society in Hong Kong (Patrick Boehler)

The Asia-Pacific region needs stronger institutions to avert conflict between China and the United States, concurred a panel of foreign policy experts at a panel discussion in Hong Kong on Feb. 10.

“We mustn’t make adversity or enmity between the United States and China a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said John D. Negroponte, former American director of national intelligence and deputy secretary of state.

Historical links with American traditional allies in the region are not enough to maintain a balance power in the region, said Negroponte. “We have to institutionalize these relationships,” he said point at a network of treaties and organizations similar to that which controls America’s relations with Europe.

“I don’t think balance of power is entirely dead as a concept. There needs to be an equilibrium within this community,” he added.

Japanese financial magnate Toyoo Gyohten said he is seeing the bearings of a confident superpower in Chinese foreign policy. “China believes that the rise of China and the fall of the United States is a historical destiny,” he said. “So time is on their side.”

He added that he was concerned of a coming clash of civilization between the two superpowers.

“What China needs most now is try to establish a national ideology, which can be accepted and be respected in shared world”

“China needs to create its ethos of a global leader,” Gyohten said.

Chinese Professor Yuan Ming, director of Peking University’s authoritative Institute of International Relations, called the lack of that “spiritual dimension” a major dilemma.

“We still don’t understand what really Confucius means,” she said. “We have to revisit the Classics.”

How to combine those old traditions with modern ideas, values remains a big challenge,” Ming said.

Former prime minister of South Korea Lee Hong-Koo concurred that Chinese leadership will be needed alongside American leadership to bring about Korean unification, which he sees as vital for long-term peace in the Asia-Pacific region.

This year will see elections and possible leadership change in the United States, China, South Korea and Russia, he noted, pointing to major changes in foreign policy those changes could bring about.

Negroponte said that the United States has embraced its new pacific orientation not only in foreign and economic policy, but also in culture and demographics.

“You can almost think of President Obama as sort of an Asian president, the fact that he was born in Hawaii and spent an important part of his youth in Indonesia,” he said. “We haven’t had a president with that kind of experience.”

Negroponte had started his career in Foreign Service in Hong Kong in 1961. He visited Mainland China for the first time with then US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972. One year earlier, Kissinger’s secret first visit to Beijing started the process of establishing diplomatic and economic relations between the two countries.

The panel discussion was held at the Asia Society Center in Hong Kong, which had just been inaugurated a day earlier. It marked the 40th anniversary of the state visit of American president Richard Nixon to China in February 1972.