How will Obama define China ties?

Over the decades, U.S. leaders have run through a kaleidoscope of terms, from “tacit allies” against the Soviet Union in the early 1970s to “strategic competitors” at the start of President George W. Bush's administration.

When Obama took office, his advisers spent weeks haggling with Chinese officials over what to call a relationship that has left China holding more than US$1 trillion of American debt, turned the United States into China's single-biggest export market and enmeshed the two nations in an ever-tighter web of mutual dependence.

Washington and Beijing finally came up with a bland characterization, declaring their ties “positive, cooperative and comprehensive.” This replaced a Bush-era label that had also defined the relationship as “candid,” a word Beijing disliked because it suggested that the two sides might criticize each other.

Such verbal machinations involve far more than semantic quibbling. Words frame how the two sides confront very real issues such as trade, climate change and human rights. “It's something we have always had with the Chinese, dating back to the 1970s,” said Jeffrey Bader, Obama's senior director for East Asian affairs at the National Security Council. “You can't really go through an administration without having some label that provides a general characterization.”

Getting the right words has been the cornerstone of Chinese statecraft and philosophy since the age of Confucius about 2 1/2 millennia ago.

“There must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything,” decreed Confucius in the Analects, an ancient compilation of his teachings. “If names are not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried to success.” Rectifying names, Confucius said, is the starting point for all sound policy.

Nixon recognized this when, after a long career denouncing Mao and his communist regime, he decided to reach out to Beijing. He first signaled the shift in 1970, when, for the first time, he publicly referred to Mao's domain by its official name, the People's Republic of China. He had previously called it Red China, or worse.

But what should Obama, America's most rhetorically gifted president in decades, call today's China?

How does he describe — and thus deal with — a country that declares loyalty to Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong; one that while boasting one of the world's most competitive capitalist economies, is a one-party state that censors media and jails dissidents while giving most ordinary citizens more personal freedom and economic opportunity than they have had in decades, perhaps even centuries?

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