Let’s welcome China-Iowa friendship

By Alan Brody

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About a billion people in China, and hundreds of millions of others in the United States and around the world, will be hearing our state's name in association with the upcoming visit of China's Vice President Xi Jinping.

Xi Jinping is the leading candidate to become the next General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in October of this year, and then president of China from 2013-23.

We owe his visit to Iowa's “citizen diplomats” of past years. As a middle-level official from China's Hebei province, Xi in 1985 visited Muscatine and Des Moines as part of a “Sister States/Provinces” program. He had home-stays with families in Muscatine and was graciously received by the then (and now) state governor, Terry Branstad.

My wife and I received the same kind of warm hospitality from the Chinese during our 1995-99 stay in China, where I was a senior officer with UNICEF. We developed tremendous respect for the Chinese as we came to understand something of that nation's culture, its systems of governance, the sufferings its people went through during a century of Western and Japanese domination and exploitation, and the aspirations they today have for prosperity and security.

China over the last three decades has made amazing achievements to expand economic and social rights of its people, as it transformed its economy. In areas of civil and political rights, China has begun to wade into another river of change where it is similarly feeling its way in currents that can be dangerously complex.

Few Americans understand, for example, that the January 2012 disturbances we read about in “Tibetan areas” were not in the Tibet Autonomous Region, but rather in small prefectures and counties within other provinces where Tibetans are only one among 55 minority ethnic groups who live in enclaves surrounded by other communities. I am not sure that our own history regarding the rights of similarly situated American Indian “nations” within our borders provides many positive examples with which we may effectively lecture the Chinese.

China does pose a challenge to the United States. China's government and people are united in aspirations to have a place of respect and strength among the world's leading nations, and the country is already a global competitor to U.S. economic and strategic interests. I am among those who believe China will become the world's second super power. It has a large and increasingly educated population, a strong economy, and a national policy to emphasize investment in both physical infrastructure and “social capital.” These developments place China on a current trajectory set to overtake America, particularly if we continue with our own recent history of neglecting investment and squandering so many of our assets.

America has little to gain and potentially much to lose by trying to blame China for our own failures of governance during the last 12 years.

China and America are not doomed to be enemies or one day to go to war. Chinese public opinion will not allow their government to put the country's precious young people at risk in military adventures, unless they find themselves in a desperate situation that threatens the nation's most fundamental interests. Friendship with America is in their interests, and in ours.

So I hope we Iowans may raise our glasses in a toast of friendship as Gov. Branstad welcomes Vice President Xi Jinping to Iowa. And let us also as citizen diplomats ensure a friendly welcome and stay for the thousands of Chinese students who have come over the last few years to study at our Iowa universities. In such personal interchanges, each of us helps lay foundations for future relations of peace and prosperity between the United States, China and the rest of the world.

Iowa City resident Alan Brody is a member of the Board of the Council for International Visitors to Iowa Cities (CIVIC). Comments: brody.alan@gmail.com