RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
NPR's Tom Gjelten explains.
TOM GJELTEN: It makes for a very complicated relationship, says China expert David Finkelstein, from the Center for Naval Analyses.
DAVID FINKELSTEIN: There are so many different bureaucracies that are dealing with each other across the Pacific that the two presidents, to a certain degree, are maestros trying to orchestrate all the various parts of their governments to move this relationship to a much more cooperative footing.
GJELTEN: The United States is a mature nation, with well developed institutions and years of practice in superpower diplomacy. China is a rising nation, rising so fast it can hardly manage its own growth. Though it's not a democracy, it has some of democracy's problems.
EVAN FEIGENBAUM: Even authoritarian political systems do have politics.
GJELTEN: Evan Feigenbaum is Asia direction at the Eurasia consulting group.
FEIGENBAUM: Chinese leaders are trading off contending policy views all the time.
GJELTEN: Contending views, for example, on economic policy. One group is linked to the big state enterprises and the big exporters. They're looking for help from the Chinese government, a subsidized exchange rate, for example, so their products sell at lower prices on the international market. This hurts US exporters. And this is where President Obama has to deal with politics. Many members of Congress favor a get tough policy with China on the currency issue. President Obama and his team have to recognize that President Hu and his team will be sensitive to the interests of the Chinese exporters. But economist Eswar Prasad, of Cornell University, says there are other interest groups in China, ones the Obama Administration may be tempted to reach out to.
ESWAR PRASAD: You do have slightly more reformist people within the government, and especially a group of fairly influential academics, who feel that, in fact, these firms would do a lot better if they were exposed to foreign competition, and that this is where China's future lies.
GJELTEN: David Finkelstein thinks one of the problems is that President Hu and his vice president, Xi Jenping, are the only civilians with positions of responsibility over the Chinese armed forces.
FINKELSTEIN: So we have a Chinese military that is civilian poor, not a lot of suits running around the Chinese defense establishment. It's mostly all uniforms, except for Hu Jintao and Xi Jenping.
GJELTEN: Chinese military leaders have lately sounded more aggressive in their rhetoric than the civilians, just as some economic officials favor more open policies than others. But it may be dangerous for the Obama Administration to try to support some interests in China and ignore others.
CHENG LI: We should not choose who are the friends in China, who are the enemies in China. It's not that simple.
GJELTEN: Cheng Li is a China analyst at the Brookings Institution.
LI: We should not use ideological term to see these are the reformers, these are the communists, these are the hardliners, these are liberals. Sometimes liberals, on the economic front, could be hardliners on the political front.
GJELTEN: Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
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