China: The Dragon in the Room on Obama's Asian Tour

It's a timeworn tactic for politicians. When you fail at home, go abroad. Four days after the Democrats' defeat in the U.S. midterm elections, Barack Obama headed on his longest overseas journey as President: a 10-day tour of Asia, where his foreign fans far outstrip his domestic ones.

The itinerary of America's self-proclaimed "first Pacific President" has taken him to India (the world's largest democracy) and Indonesia (the world's biggest Muslim-majority democracy) before he attends a pair of global summits in South Korea (a dictatorship turned democracy that was saved from communism by U.S. intervention) and in Japan (Asia's oldest democracy). Even though the vagaries of democratic politics had just dealt Obama what he called a "shellacking," the U.S. President has spent much of his tour highlighting the virtues of governance by the people. "Instead of being lured by the false notion that progress must come at the expense of freedom, you built the institutions upon which true democracy depends," Obama told the Indian Parliament on Nov. 8. "The lesson is clear: India has succeeded not in spite of democracy; India has succeeded because of democracy."

While Obama's trip is a celebration of Asia's liberal bastions, it is the dragon in the room — decidedly undemocratic China, a nation not even on the President's itinerary — that is the underlying focus of his grand tour. In recent months, China's international image has morphed from global economic savior into, frankly, a bit of a bully. Asian nations that once showed only gratitude for Chinese investment are now discovering that the cash often comes with the economic and even political imprint of state-owned Chinese companies. At the same time, China's increasingly aggressive territorial claims in surrounding seas have spooked countries that lie within its historic sphere of influence. From Japan to Vietnam, Asian nations have cozied up to the U.S. as a geopolitical counterweight to their giant neighbor. "Asia, which faces many uncertainties, including the rise of China, will need the firm diplomatic and economic engagement of the United States," said the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's top financial daily, in an editorial.

Just a year ago, as America was mired in recession, Obama visited China and spoke of "deep and even dramatic ties" with what is now the world's second largest economy. Yet through 2010, China's foreign policy has displayed little of the maturity expected of a rising power: Beijing has reacted with outsize indignation to perceived slights — like Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama or Tokyo's detention of a Chinese trawler that collided with a Japanese naval vessel in disputed waters. In the wake of the October awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo, Beijing unleashed a shrill fury that makes it nigh impossible to ignore the nation's tendency to silence anyone who contradicts the narrative of a stable, happy China. Since Liu's award was announced on Oct. 8, dozens of his fellow intellectuals have been placed under house arrest or barred from traveling overseas, while the Nobel laureate himself still languishes in jail.

Beijing has also dismissed Washington's recent suggestion that it could dip a mediating hand in the contested waters of the East and South China Seas, even though such American involvement would be welcomed by many of China's neighbors. "The freedom of navigation which the U.S. claims to protect is actually the freedom of the U.S. military to threaten other countries," fulminated an editorial in the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party–owned daily. "The U.S. cannot tolerate the reasonable growth of China's national strength and regional influence."

Beijing, which has a historical distrust of any foreign interference, insists that it is pursuing a policy of "peaceful development." China's assertive stance against external challengers and internal critics, however, has triggered a rethink of the so-called Beijing Consensus, China's development model based upon authoritarian capitalism. Even a few months ago, the Beijing Consensus was being hawked across the developing world as the most stable and efficient way to build an economy. But as Obama tours democratic Asia, it is the alternative Mumbai Consensus that is serving as the philosophy du jour. A term popularized this summer by White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, the Mumbai Consensus refers to an altogether messier but democratically rooted economic model in which private enterprise has a big role and in which, Summers said, "respect for individuals is the paramount value."

While India is the obvious exemplar of this flowering of private enterprise, domestic consumption and individual creativity, Indonesia — a sprawling nation of 17,000 islands and 300-plus ethnic groups that is bound by a federalist-leaning democracy — shares a similar approach. "Your achievements demonstrate that democracy and development reinforce one another," said Obama during his stop in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, where he had spent part of his childhood. But just two days before the U.S. President's speech before an appreciative audience at the University of Indonesia, China announced plans to funnel $6.6 billion into developing Indonesia's woeful infrastructure. Democratic politics aside, it's not just the leader of the free world who knows how to play to a foreign audience.