Obama in China: his hosts are still grateful for the snub to the Dalai Lama

So President Obama is in China for the first time. (First time as President that is – no idea whether he may have spent time gallivanting around there in his youth.) In the international fixture calendar, this ought to be the Big One: the Liverpool-Manchester United of summitry. But I think it’s unlikely that we’ll need to hold the front page this time.

That’s partly for good reasons. There do not appear to be any major conflicts threatening to boil over. Nowhere in the world are the giants of the 20th and 21st centuries respectively facing each other down like boxers at the weigh-in. China does not feel the need, as Russia often does, to act all truculent so as not to be ignored. They know no one’s going to ignore them.

Of course the Chinese never lose the opportunity to score a point. The opening Foreign Ministry communiqué (issued by Mr Qin Gang, an old mate of mine and probably the only government spokesman in the world who has also umpired at Wimbledon) focussed, on, of all things, Obama’s much-appreciated refusal to meet the Dalai Lama prior to visiting China. As a black president, said Mr Qin, Obama was in a better position than his predecessors to appreciate the fight against slavery, which is what the Chinese were conducting when they overran Tibet in the fifties. (Can’t you just see the Dalai bestriding the old plantation with his assortment of whips?) Obama was also reminded of Abraham Lincoln, whose concern for the unity of his country is now matched by that of President Hu Jintao. So there we have it: main item of concern a minor squabble in which the US has already made the necessary concession. Advantage People’s Republic of China.

This is not to say that the meeting room in the Zhongnanhai Party Complex does not contain the odd large grey pachyderm. As I mentioned in my post of 3rd August, the economic issues between the two giants are deep-seated, and they constitute a total stand-off: the Chinese are not going to take the risk of freely floating their currency just to please Uncle Barack, and the US still owes China two trillion big ones and isn’t going to be wiping out the debt any time soon. And if there is a real prospect of agreement between the two major climate change players in advance of the Copenhagen summit, they’ve certainly done a good job of preserving secrecy on the matter.

It’ll certainly do Obama no harm to get a handle on how China works, and to ensure that the mood music is good (which is what he does best). But I imagine they’ll have been scraping the barrel for anything of substance to put in the final communiqué. Still, better jaw-jaw than war-war, as the man said.