WASHINGTON - January 19 - Chinese President Hu Jintao is in the United States this week for a state visit.

HENRY ROSEMONT
Available for a limited number of interviews, Rosemont is visiting professor of religious studies at Brown University and author of several books including A Chinese Mirror: Moral Reflections on Political Economy and translations of Chinese classics. He said today: “China is a threat to the United States only if the United States assumes that it is, and pursues an aggressive foreign policy that serves only our own and not China’s interests. The best hope for a less tension-filled world is for both countries to reduce military spending significantly — with the U.S. taking the lead both to show good faith and because its military budget is larger than the rest of the world’s combined — and to be willing to surrender a little of their sovereignty to the United Nations in order to strengthen that organization’s ability to reduce terrorism and war and adjudicate disputes between nation states.” Rosemont wrote the piece “Is China a Threat?“

ROBERT WEIL
Weil is the author of Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of “Market Socialism”. He said today: “The U.S. and Chinese leadership have a common interest in maintaining the stability of the current global capitalist system, and are symbiotically linked through trade, investment and government financing ties. However, they disagree over the best means to carry out the exploitation of the working class — ‘free market’ versus ‘statist’ — and over the division of the spoils. China is challenging the U.S. ‘right’ to dominate East Asia, economically, politically, and militarily and is even beginning to assert its power globally. This leads to a schizophrenic ‘hot-and-cold’ relationship, with the need to cooperate, avoid conflict and ‘manage’ such issues as North Korea on the one hand — and the intensification of an increasingly dangerous rivalry on the other. The U.S. is aggressively pursuing a new ‘containment’ policy of political and military alliances around China. But growing polarization and working class discontent in both countries may affect future relations.”

JOSEPH GERSON
Gerson is disarmament coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee; for several years he has led a series of exchanges between U.S. and Chinese peace advocates and scholars. He said today: “U.S. people have not been told that the recent U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-Korean military ‘exercises’ in the Yellow Sea were experienced by Chinese as much the same way Americans would have responded to Chinese military ‘exercises’ in Chesapeake Bay just miles from our national capital in Washington, D.C.

“To enforce the ‘containment’ of China and to compensate for the relative decline of U.S. economic and military power, Washington is in the process of encircling China with an expanding of network military alliances from East Asia to NATO, including the restructuring of … foreign military bases. These include the creation of the tacit alliance with India, U.S. bases in Central Asia, the toppling of the Hatoyama government in Japan, U.S. encouragement of greater Japanese-South Korean military collaboration and ‘partnerships’ between NATO and selected Asian nations.

“The U.S. military budget remains more than ten times the size of China’s. With millions of people across the U.S. in need of jobs, education and trade lagging, our deteriorating 20th century infrastructure, we need to reduce military spending so that our tax dollars can be used to revitalize the nation and provide for essential human needs. Chairman Hu speaks of building common ground. Better, President Obama should pursue a Common Security approach to U.S.-Chinese tensions, in the tradition of the Common Security approach that resulted in the end of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War.”