The Great Debate

Xi Jinping (L) met with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Feb. 14, 2012.  REUTERS/Jason Reed

As Chinese President Xi Jinping prepares for his landmark summit with President Barack Obama in California Friday and Saturday, the critical mission of improving China’s image in the world could well be uppermost in his mind.

The central challenge that Xi faces here is that China’s soft power – its ability to win the hearts and minds of other nations and influence their governments through attraction rather than coercion or payment – has lagged far behind its purposeful hard power built on its growing economic and military might.

This “soft power deficit” could prove a real headache for the new Chinese president, for there is increasing international concern, suspicion and even outright hostility as China’s global role expands. In the United States, for example, public favorability toward China fell by over one-fifth in one year recently – from 51 percent in 2011 to 40 percent in 2012, according to Pew Research Global Attitudes Project.

At a time of continued economic uncertainty in the United States, issues such as China’s alleged currency manipulation, the mammoth size of the U.S. trade deficit with China and the large U.S. financial debt held by China, not to mention alleged Chinese cybersecurity attacks on American businesses and government offices, has taken its toll on U.S. public opinion.

The United States and China have been searching for a new way to frame their relationship.  President Barack Obama’s trip this week to Southeast Asia, the focus of much U.S-Chinese tension, reminds us that with new leadership now set in both countries, it is time for them to carry on with that important task.

The new head of China’s Communist Party Xi Jinping called for a “new type of great power relationship” when he visited Washington last spring. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that Washington and Beijing “are trying to do something that is historically unprecedented, to write a new answer to the age-old question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet.”

Obama’s China policy has been successful in securing U.S. interests. What’s missing, however, is the two nations’ shared understanding of how they can co-exist in peace decades into the future.