Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Xi Jinping and U.S.-China Relations in the Shadow of the Arab Spring

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of History at UC-Irvine, wrote China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University in 2010. He is an Asia Society Associate Fellow.

There are many things worth keeping in mind as Chinese leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping heads to Washington to meet with President Obama — including the simple fact that Chinese and American views of international issues often diverge sharply. There is never uniformity in either country on any topic, of course, but even taking into account considerable variations of opinion within each nation, the contrasts between the way some diplomatic topics are thought about on opposite sides of the Pacific can be striking. And these different worldviews can complicate meetings between leaders. At the present moment, for example, as Washington is frustrated by Beijing’s efforts to block U.N. actions in Syria, different views of the Arab Spring loom large....

Americans often expect most Chinese people to see the world roughly the way most people in this country see it, but this often isn’t the case. One reason is each country’s national mythology colors views of the international arena. American ideas about Tibet, for instance, are shaped fact the way struggles for religious freedom figure in our patriotic tales.

In China’s case, ideas about struggles to combat imperialism play a comparably central part in the national imagination. The so-called “century of humiliation,” which began with the Opium War in 1839 and ended with the Japanese occupation during World War II, get enormous play in patriotic education drives. The Communist Party has made a fetish of detailing in great but selective detail each painful episode in that period, such as the invasion by a consortium of foreign powers that took place in the wake of 1900’s Boxer Uprising. This approach to the past lays the groundwork for harsh criticism of any contemporary international situation that can be construed as a case of strong countries interfering with or ganging up against a developing one. Paired with this, in instances such as Arab Spring, is Beijing’s obsessive concern with stability at all costs, which fits in with the argument it makes continually through the official media that China’s economic boom has been the result of stable conditions....