Views From China’s Vice President

PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES -  Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping during a visit to Bangkok in December.
PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES - Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping during a visit to Bangkok in December.

 

Vice President Xi Jinping of China is scheduled to meet with President Obama on Tuesday at the White House. In advance of his visit, the Chinese government invited The Washington Post to submit written questions to the vice president. Following is a transcript of his written answers, as translated and provided to The Post by the Chinese government.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/views-from-chinas-vice-president/2012/02/08/gIQATMyj9Q_story_1.html ]

ON U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS 
SINCE 1972


Forty years ago, leaders of our two countries, with extraordinary wisdom and vision of statesmen, reopened the long-closed door to China-U.S. exchanges. Since then, China-U.S. relations have forged ahead despite some twists and turns and made historic achievements, bringing huge benefits to both countries and peoples. China-U.S. relations have become one of the most important, dynamic and promising bilateral relationships in today’s world. When I visited the United States for the first time in 1985, our bilateral trade was merely US$7.7 billion, and only some 10,000 mutual visits were made each year. Last year, our trade topped US$440 billion, and mutual visits exceeded 3 million.

 

What has happened over the past 40 years tells us that a sound and stable China-U.S. relationship is crucial for both countries and for peace, stability and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region and the world at large. During President Hu Jintao’s visit to the United States in January last year, the two presidents agreed to build a cooperative partnership based on mutual respect and mutual benefit. This decision fully captures the features and requirements of China-U.S. relations in the new era, that is, to develop mutually beneficial cooperation as partners based on the principle of mutual respect. 

 

 

ON CHINA-U.S.
BUSINESS COOPERATION

 

Mutual benefit is the defining feature of China-U.S. business ties. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations, China-U.S. trade has grown over 180 times. Over the past 10 years, U.S. exports to China have increased by 468 percent and created more than 3 million jobs for the United States. Forty-seven out of the 50 U.S. states have seen three-digit or even four-digit growth in their exports to China. And U.S. consumers have saved over US$600 billion by using Chinese products. A survey conducted by AmChamChina last year shows that 85 percent of the U.S.-invested enterprises in China saw their revenue grow in 2010, and 41 percent of them recorded higher profitability in China than their global average. The U.S. investment in China has boosted U.S. exports to China, accelerated U.S. industrial upgrading, and contributed to the growth of the U.S. economy.

 

As economic globalization gathers momentum, China and the United States have become highly interdependent economically. Such economic relations would not enjoy sustained, rapid growth if they were not based on mutual benefit or if they failed to deliver great benefits to the United States. The Americans who know the real picture of China-U.S. economic relations, including those in the business community, will echo this point.

Frictions and differences are hardly avoidable in our economic and trade interactions. What is important is that we properly handle these differences through coordination based on equality, mutual benefit, mutual understanding and mutual accommodation. We must not allow frictions and differences to undermine the larger interests of our business cooperation.

 

We have taken active steps to meet legitimate U.S. concerns over IPR [intellectual-property rights] protection and trade imbalance, and we will continue to do so. We will continue to press ahead with the reform of the RMB [renminbi] exchange rate formation mechanism and offer foreign investors a fair, rule-based and transparent investment environment. At the same time, we hope the United States will take substantive steps as soon as possible to ease restrictions on high-tech exports to China and provide a level playing field for Chinese enterprises to invest in the United States.

 

ON THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION

China and the United States have more converging interests in the Asia-Pacific region than in anywhere else. In recent years, our two countries have coordinated closely under the framework of APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] and ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] Regional Forum, and enhanced communication and cooperation on regional economic integration, counterterrorism, nonproliferation, combating transnational crimes, disaster preparedness and reduction, poverty alleviation and relevant regional hotspot issues, thus giving a strong boost to peace and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific.

 

What the Asia-Pacific countries care most is to maintain economic prosperity and build on the momentum of economic growth and regional cooperation. At a time when people long for peace, stability and development, to deliberately give prominence to the military security agenda, scale up military deployment and strengthen military alliances is not really what most countries in the region hope to see.

 

The vast Pacific Ocean has ample space for China and the United States. We welcome a constructive role by the United States in promoting peace, stability and prosperity in the region. We also hope that the United States will fully respect and accommodate the major interests and legitimate concerns of Asia-Pacific countries.

 

ON ECONOMIC

AND SECURITY COOPERATION


In recent years, China and the United States have conducted effective coordination and cooperation in addressing major international and regional issues and meeting global challenges. This has enriched China-U.S. relations and consolidated and expanded the strategic foundation of the relationship. China and the United States have joined hands and worked together with other countries to counter the international financial crisis and promote global economic recovery. We coordinated positions and worked for consensus at the climate change conferences in Copenhagen, Cancun and Durban. We advanced denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the Six-Party Talks process. We opposed the development and possession of nuclear weapons by any Middle East country in order to maintain regional peace and security. Our two countries have also had effective coordination in addressing such hotspot issues as Afghanistan, South Asia, Sudan and the Middle East.

 

 

We are at a time when the negative impact of the international financial crisis and the European debt crisis continues to spread, regional hotspot issues crop up from time to time and traditional and nontraditional security threats are intertwined. Under such new circumstances, it is all the more important for China and the United States to communicate, coordinate and cooperate more closely and work together to play a constructive and responsible role in upholding and advancing world peace, stability and development.

 

ON PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE EXCHANGES


Mutual understanding and friendship between the two peoples provides a solid foundation and an inexhaustible driving force for the growth of China-U.S. relations. I visited Iowa in 1985 when I was working in China’s Hebei province. I saw local corn farming and processing and stayed with a local family for a couple of days. I was deeply impressed by America’s advanced technology and the hospitable and industrious American people. That visit drove home to me the importance of closer exchanges between our peoples and gave me a better understanding of China-U.S. relations.

 

China and the United States are two great countries, and the Chinese and American people are well disposed to and interested in each other. We all want to exchange views and learn from each other, deepen friendship and seek common development. There is no reason for our two countries not to engage in friendly cooperation. I am convinced that, with the backing of the 1.6 billion Chinese and American people, our relationship will bring greater peace, prosperity and development to the world.

 

ON SPORTS

 

I like sports, and swimming is my favorite. Doing physical exercises keeps one fit and healthy and helps one work more efficiently. I think we all need to strike a balance between work and relaxation. This can keep us energetic and help us do our job better.

 

NBA games are exciting to watch and have global appeal. They are very popular in China. I do watch NBA games on television when I have time.

Write a comment

Comments: 2
  • #1

    u=21147 (Monday, 06 May 2013 07:22)

    I shared this on Twitter! My friends will definitely like it!

  • #2

    Christian Dior iPhone 6 Cases (Tuesday, 29 September 2015 10:54)


    HTC has a launch event today, September 29, and among the devices it is rumored to unveil during said event is the HTC One A9, also called Aero.

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

Read More 1 Comments