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Who Does China Like in the U.S. Election?
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Europe Votes Democrat, but Asia Tends Republican

That’s the headline from the fastest-growing part of the world where, as throughout a shrinking globe, the U.S. election is arousing passionate interest. Many a Shanghai dumpling gets slurped to the accompaniment of chat about superdelegates.

A bit of an exaggeration, methinks, by the NYT's Roger Cohen, but it's a decent way to begin a column that rehashes the old question of which American political party is more favored by a certain foreign government. We go through these (often quite silly) discussions every four years.

Cohen's Op/Ed, which ran a couple weeks ago, has an Asia focus, and in particular China. The traditional view, one with which Cohen agrees, is that China is more comfortable with Republican administrations. This has supposedly been true since Nixon broke the diplomatic ice in the early 1970s.

The specifics here are that Republicans are generally free traders, espouse a realist foreign policy as opposed to one that emphasizes normative concepts, and are inherently predictable. Definitely true from the 1970s to 2001, slightly less so now. Read this from the Nixon Center on the realist vs. idealist debate.

What's the problem with Democrats? The fear is that a Democratic administration might be more protectionist on trade issues and mix normative concepts in with foreign policy. Because no one really knows if/to what extent that might happen, a Democratic president presents a big mystery with respect to China policy, and hence may be a big headache for Beijing. Here are the basics on policy.

Cohen presents a fairly accurate description of the general consensus, and I think a lot of this is still true in 2008. However, given more space than is possible in the usual 800-word Op/Ed piece, one could add some nuance.

The Iraq War and the Neoconservative focus on spreading democracy globally must have given Beijing pause, at the very least. Realists see the Iraq War as a justified natural resource grab and downplay the idealistic rhetoric as PR spin, designed to drum up support of the American public. Probably, but there are also quite a few Neocons out there who are real idealists. Trying to figure out which of these positions is currently in vogue in the White House is a tough job for anyone, and must certainly be a source of confusion for political analysts here. And before you tell me that the Neocons have fallen from grace in D.C., think again – Iran.

If the Neocons present a source of instability to Republican foreign policy, so too does the Democrats' support for labor, human rights, and environmental policies. This is a known quantity, to a certain extent, but you never really know what you are going to get from a Democratic president. Bill Clinton came into office with a tough China policy, but a couple of years later moved back to traditional U.S.-China policy and rhetoric (the Republicans went in an opposite, paranoid direction), and definitely embraced free trade for the remainder of his presidency. The last couple of years of his second term saw the Republicans as the big China bashers (remember the Cox Report). Despite his being a Democrat, one would think that Beijing was very comfortable with Clinton from a policy standpoint for most of his presidency (there were a few notable exceptions).

The early Bush presidency presented some of the same uncertainties as his predecessors with respect to China policy. Bush made a couple of big verbal gaffes on Taiwan, I suspect because he (or his speech writers) failed to understand that U.S. Taiwan policy has been meticulously scripted since 1971 and any deviations whatsoever from the standard verbiage leads to serious problems. No worries, though. After a few missteps and a spy plane incident, Bush emulated Clinton and went back to traditional China policy.

How about trade? Republicans certainly represent the more "free trade" party in the U.S., and Beijing can certainly count on that. The rhetoric of Clinton, Obama, and McCain in the primaries reflect their parties' respective positions quite clearly. On the other hand, it is also true that both political parties' powerful ideological wings (the Left for the Dems and the Right for the Reps) are protectionists, albeit for different reasons, and with more vehemence and better organization from Dem lefties. McCain is much more of a free trader than many of his Republican colleagues, and Bill Clinton the President would have had real problems with the protectionist rhetoric of Hillary Clinton in 2008.

But it's all about political expediency, and the question is what the candidates would do once in the White House. Many assume that Hillary would adopt the same free trade policies as Bill Clinton if she can make it through the primaries. Maybe, and I suspect that the big money behind her campaign would push for free trade. Since we do not know very much about Obama, it's hard to say what he would do. I would not be surprised to see the first year or so of an Obama presidency resembling that of Bill Clinton's first year, which might include taking a bold stance on China that appeases the party's Left. This possibility should definitely worry Beijing. On the other hand, given that the Democrats hold both houses of Congress, Clinton's free trade leanings might not stand up to strong protectionist sentiment in the Party. Similar to the situation with Clinton, the general feeling with McCain is that whatever conservative, right-wing protectionist rhetoric he might use on the campaign trail, he will govern as a moderate on trade issues (and would have to deal with that Democratic Congress).

Does it bother anyone that for two of the three presidential candidates (Clinton and McCain), apologists are telling us not to worry, their candidate doesn't really mean what they are saying? "Relax. These are all lies. The real policies will be much better after we are done fooling all these gullible voters." Yikes. I would admire the Obama campaign all the more for not adopting this strategy but for the fact that I am worried about his China and trade policies.

So what have I learned from all this senseless rambling and links to Wikipedia? Very little, although I would say that the traditional story that China is comfortable with Republicans does not hold up quite so well as it used to. Are Republicans by and large knee-jerk realists? Not as much as they used to be. Are Democrats protectionist, pro-labor idealists? Yes, except when they actually get into the White House.

Times have changed, after all. Used to be that the Democrats' strong support of international institutions made no difference to Beijing. In the era of WTO, being an internationalist might just be a plus. The only real conclusion one can make, therefore, is that Chinese professors and analysts of U.S. politics have a tough job in 2008, and those who throw up their hands and adopt a traditional "They liked Nixon, so they'll like McCain" approach are being exceptionally lazy.