Imagine 40 years from now how a global affairs columnist for the Fox-Xinhua (or New Shanghai Times)
content-providing service will analyze the world’s geo-strategic and
geo-economic balance of power. This might be the way he or she recalls the
visit that China’s former president Hu Jintao made in April 2006 to Washington,
the capital of what was then known as the “United States.”
“Now in 2046, the city is a major tourist attraction for Chinese and
Indian tourists, many of whom stay at the seven-star hotel previously known as
the “White House” (the Lincoln Suite is the most expensive).
He or she (cloned in 2011) might write the following:
“As I downloaded news reports that were published in the American media on that week, what really astonished me was the extent to which President Hu’s first visit to the then U.S. capital since becoming China’s paramount leader had received so little attention in the American press. The headlines in the New York Times and the Washington Post (both of which have since been bought by our parent company) were devoted to U.S. efforts to prevent Iran from gaining access to nuclear military capability — Iran conducted its first nuclear test two years later and is now a leading nuclear military power — and to the violence in what was known then as ‘Iraq’ (now divided between Turkey, Iran, and the Syrian Federation) and was still occupied by the U.S. (which withdrew from there two years later).
“And believe it or not, much of the media coverage on the eve of the visit was focused on the refusal of the Americans to call Mr. Hu’s trip to Washington a ‘state visit’ (as the Chinese had requested).
“Indeed, in retrospect it does seem quite incredible that the nation that was the global superpower of that period seemed to have ignored China’s dramatic rise in economic, political, military, and cultural power while devoting almost its entire resources to trying to achieve regime changes and implant democracy in the Middle East.
“During the first term of the presidency of George W. Bush (whose nephew George P. Bush is now the president of the Florida-Cuba Federation), he and his aides saw China as a ‘strategic competitor’ (the Pentagon) and as an important trade partner (corporate America), and committed themselves to place the relationship with Beijing at the top of Washington’s global agenda.
“But the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, resulted in the bumping of China to the diplomatic back-burner.