Susan Shirk Quoted on U.S., China Diplomacy Tactics
Tread carefully with insecure officials
05/16/2011
New Europe
Chinese officials are increasingly insecure in their positions says UE China expert, Susan Shirk, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs for the US, and this is changing their attitudes. Shirk puts the start of this change to the pre-Olympic Games period, where there was a crackdown on dissidents, “it hasn’t stopped, it’s got worse” she points out.
She also was concerned over the US response to human rights abuses, “I’ve yet to see anything that we’ve done that has made any difference,” adding, “I despair.”
Shirk sees what she terms a “control coalition” within the hierarchy, consisting of officials from the ‘propaganda’ and defence sectors and elements of the Communist Party, rising in influence over a “performance coalition” of those looking towards increased trade and improvements in the economy. However, both China and the US have settled on a course of quiet diplomacy and trying to avoid public clashes. This is good for cooperation, but both caps are prone to domestic politics. Shirk says the Chinese are “preoccupied with domestic threats”, one of them being the internet. Images of ethnic conflict on the internet have enflamed nationalist feeling in some quarters and dissidents in others.
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Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Ho Miu Lam professor of China and Pacific Relations at IR/PS.
She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and the Koreas.
