Down to Business #2: Tuesday Meetings

Government of China Briefings

It is easy to forget that China has a bureaucracy. After all, the good ole' Washington Times is quick to argue that it is monolithically terrible. So, it is hard to disabuse one of the notion that there are gears and gizmos, shifts and transmissions inside of the government. Pieces of it do one thing and pieces of it do another thing - just like our government.

Let's not forget that China's most unified religion is basically, according to one friend "how to be a good bureaucrat." Confuscious and Mencius would certainly not have put it this (less than sensitive) way, but my friend does have a point there.

With that backdrop - it should be no surprise to learn that China's policy is quite comparable to availalbe gold standards in the department of keeping dangerous stuff away from Osama. Our briefing at the Ministry of Commerce matched quite well with their published white papers on nuclear nonproliferation, and government policy (of course). We learned more about process of policy-making...but on some level that was a bit dull, because it was standard bureaucratic stuff that has many analogues to how the US government and those in the "Australia Group" and other 'responsible clubs' go about controlling their exports to keep Osama frustrated.

There is a gap between the USA and China on the issue of implementation of the pristine policies. One issue strikes me from our teams discussions with US and Chinese officials: trust matters.

Implementation of these export controls to keep bad stuff from Osama is not published in some online police blotter here in China. There is not equivalent (that I know of) of the TV show "C.O.P.S" displaying Chinese authorities chasing down nuclear proliferators. So US officials seem to all be from Missouri - "show me" that you are cracking down on smugglers and violating companies etc. Chinese are seeming to be from Missouri also, they want the US to "show me" why they are slapping sanctions on certain Chinese companies. But the US cannot tell them everything because they don't necessarily trust the Chinese government with intel that might give away their sources.

Good negotiators find deals that do not require a) personal amity or b) external enforcement. A good deal is one where you know the other gal is going to keep up her end of the bargain just because she knows what's good for her and you likewise know what is good for you.

This is why the US and Russia did not blow each other to bits. No one liked the other. Heck, mean words like "evil empire" and "evil capitalists" were thrown around quite a lot.

In this issue of transparency in China's implementation of the UN Resolution, the big question for me is how to get around this mis-trust in the medium term, given that a) China is not going to democratize its information flows tomorrow morning and b) the USA is not going to divulge its top secret intelligence to China tomorrow afternoon???