Since Xi is set to assume his country's top job of secretary of the Communist party in October, and then become state president in March 2013, this treatment is only fitting. As the eurozone's quest for funding from Beijing to help it out of its hole continued at Tuesday's EU-China summit in Beijing, it is also the latest sign of just how heavily China weighs in the global scales.
The subjects for discussion in Washington are evident. Xi and his hosts will doubtless review the state of the world and the global economy. They will disagree on Syria and express frustration over North Korea. Obama will urge the Chinese to take steps to reduce the US trade deficit with the mainland. Given the persecution of lawyers and the self-immolations of Tibetan monks and nuns, human rights may be a little more than the usual pro-forma "agreement to disagree".
Obama has been groping for a relationship with Beijing since his visit to China in 2009 (he stayed away on his latest Asian tour). On that trip, he was widely seen as having been railroaded by his hosts. Hillary Clinton sounded a tougher line last year, but Vice-President Joe Biden was all smiles when he went to the mainland in 2011, with Xi shepherding him around. And Biden has now reportedly been put in charge of China policy. Sino-US strategic committees meet repeatedly, but little of substance changes.
In part, this is because, aside from defending its "core interests" of Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan and the Communist party-led politico-economy system, China's diplomacy often seems to amount to little more than the pursuit of raw material supplies to feed its economic machine. It is correspondingly difficult to engage with. But the vacuum is also because, like Europe, the United States appears to have little clear notion of how to deal with the big new kid on the block.
China's explosive growth in the last three decades has led to straight-line forecasts that the People 's Republic is set to rule the world. This is not going to happen, if only because the political leadership in Beijing, which is used to having its way, does not want it to happen. That said, the emergence of the world's most populous nation from the ruins of the late Mao period faces other powers with a situation never experienced before. A country that is still relatively poor now houses the world's second biggest economy, with foreign exchange reserves of more than $3tn, making it a major contributor to paying for the federal deficit of the richest country on earth.
America wants to engage with China, but it also wants to hedge its bets in case things turn sour. So, Obama launched an initiative last year to buttress the US position in the Pacific, which brings it into potential confrontation with Beijing – the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) being pushed by Washington would not include the People's Republic. (Since it may well not extend to Japan or South Korea either, it is, in fact, probably dead in the water.) The naval build-up by the People's Liberation Army arouses fears among some commentators – and anxious warnings from the arms industry – that China will come to resemble pre-first world war Germany, even though its military capacity is far, far below that of the US.
China, for its part, knows that its growth has drawn heavily on the appetite in the west for its cheap goods and that it has no interest in trade wars with the US. In an allusion to commercial tensions, Xi told former senior US officials, including Henry Kissinger, at his first meeting in Washington:
"This year marks the election year of the United States. I believe no one of insight from the US side would like to see that the election factors would have a regrettable impact on the development of ties between the two countries … We should deal with friction and differences in bilateral economic and trade cooperation in the spirit of seeking mutual benefits and win-win results through a positive and constructive way."But old, protective suspicions regularly emerge from Beijing, augmented by rising nationalism on the back of economic growth. Hu Jintao, the man who will hand over to Xi, told a Communist party plenum last October:
"We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China … We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond."In this uncertain context, Xi is, himself, a source of uncertainty. Son of a Mao-era vice-premier, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution and then rehabilitated to supervise the economic development of Guangdong province, Xi has worked his way up the bureaucracy of the state and party, and was elevated to the supreme decision-making body, the standing committee, of the politburo in 2007. Ask people in Beijing how he got to the top and the answer is that all the many interest groups in China are comfortable with him. He has been careful not to express any opinion that deviates from party orthodoxy.
So, on current showing, Xi does not seem to be the leader who will be ready, or able, to undertake the structural reforms China needs in the coming years. He will have to deal with a society that is evolving beyond the constraints of the party state system – and with new tensions, as demonstrated by the ongoing imbroglio around the rock star of Chinese politics, Bo Xilai, in the mega-municipality of Chongqing. China has enormous problems, ranging from the environment to the legal system, through corruption and a lack of trust in authority of all kinds.
Those domestic challenges, rather than foreign relations, will be the key to China's development, as it tries to move away from the old growth model. The world will have to reconcile itself to sitting on the sidelines and watching as the story is played out in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Chongqing and a hundred other places far from the White House.
