The Edgy Optimist

This weekend, President Obama and China’s new leader Xi Jinping will meet at a retreat outside of Los Angeles. The two men are scheduled to spend six to seven hours covering a range of issues that confront the two countries, from the increasingly fraught issue of hacking and cybersecurity to what to do about an evermore unpredictable and rogue North Korea. The summit was arranged only recently, almost impromptu and more casual and low-key than the pomp and circumstances state visits of the past decade. That should in no way, however, obscure just how important the meeting is.

Rarely in history has an emerging power met an existing power without mayhem and conflict ensuing. China today is clearly emerging, with an economy that will soon be larger than the U.S.’s, though the income of Chinese citizens will remain far behind their U.S. counterparts for many years to come. In spite of recent stumbles, the U.S. remains the only country with global reach both economically and militarily.

Yet tensions notwithstanding, by any historical standard, the U.S.-China relationship has been managed remarkably well, and this casual but symbolically significant summit between the two leaders is yet another indication of that. We focus habitually on all that is going wrong in the world, yet for now at least, the China-U.S. relationship is going right. That’s not because either country and its people like the other or trust the other, but it is because we need each other.

Regardless of the outcome of the summit — and in truth, there is likely to be very little substantive public outcome — how this relationship is managed matters more to the long-term health of both the United States and China than what, say, the Fed does or does not do in the coming months. For more than ten years, the China-U.S. relationship has been an anchor of economic growth and the fulcrum of the global economy. And that is likely to be true for the next decade as well.

The importance of China to the United States, of the U.S. to China, and of the two to the world has, if anything, increased in the past two years as the European Union has sunk ever more deeply into recession and disillusion. For much of the early 2000s, you could credibly say that there were three pillars of the global economy. Now there are two.

Is China about to collapse? That question has been front and center in the past weeks as the country completes its leadership transition and after the exposure of its various real estate bubbles during a widely watched 60 Minutes exposé this past weekend.

Concerns about soaring property prices throughout China are hardly new, but they have been given added weight by the government itself. Recognizing that a rapid implosion of the property market would disrupt economic growth, the central government recently announced far-reaching measures designed to dent the rampant speculation. Higher down payments, limiting the purchases of investment properties, and a capital gains tax on real estate transactions designed to make flipping properties less lucrative were included.

These measures, in conjunction with the new government’s announcing more modest growth targets of 7.5 percent a year, sent Chinese equities plunging and led to a slew of commentary in the United States saying China would be the next shoe to drop in the global system.

As 2012 sputters to a close, it wraps up with a yawning gap between widespread economic pessimism and the actual state of economic affairs.

Though consumer sentiment rebounded in the fall, it fell in December, amid relentless coverage of the impending fiscal cliff. Holiday spending was muted. Businesses, meanwhile, cite the unresolved negotiations in Washington as evidence of continued uncertainty and many have put new spending, hiring or investment on hold. The media counts the days (and on some cable news channels, the minutes and the seconds) till we descend the fiscal cliff – adding to the general agitation.

Yet, every indicator of American economic activity has been strengthening. Stocks are up between 8 percent and 14 percent in 2012, depending on the index. Gross domestic product is increasing more than 2 percent a year; unemployment has fallen below 8 percent; wages are steady even as inflation is close to non-existent. Energy prices have declined, and home prices have increased. Debt burdens for American households are now at the lowest level in 29 years, giving the vast majority of consumers more flexibility in their spending