Untended Garden

How exactly are perceptions in the East and West at odds here?
The Western press recounts the Dalai Lama's position, which is against independence: he wants increased autonomy. So from that point of view, why is the Chinese government not negotiating with him? But the Chinese look more at what they call the Dalai clique. The younger people around [the Dalai Lama] do want independence. And that never gets played up in the West. Conversely, here [in China] you don't hear about the Dalai Lama's position itself, you only hear about the clique as a whole. It's not clear that the Dalai Lama can in fact control the younger people around him that want independence. Conversely, it's not clear that he can't. But if Western governments thought that the Tibetans were demanding independence they would be more cautious in supporting those demands. Further, few people know very much about the Tibetan monarchy—which was pretty brutal—nor about Chinese-Tibetan history over a period of a thousand years. Finally, we don't have trustworthy information about what a majority of Tibetans who actually live in Tibet want.

In general, do the Chinese have a different approach to foreign policy and the global community?
The thing you realize most living here is just how complicated Chinese development is. You're very aware of the accomplishments, of the speed—the Chinese seem to have telescoped everything that the United States did in 100 or 150 years into 10 or 15 years. Everything's happening 10 times as fast. At the same time, the scope of the job left to do is staggering. When you travel and you see just how many cities still need to be built, how much infrastructure still needs to be built—yes, they've lifted 400 million people out of poverty, but there's another 800 million left to go. So foreign policy is much less important to the Chinese government than domestic policy. What China really wants is to avoid conflict abroad so that it can concentrate on developing at home and—to state it more positively—securing a benign international environment in which to develop. [This] makes absolute sense. This is not a country that wants foreign adventures at the moment. It also does mean, though, that the desire to avoid conflict can bring the government into conflict over issues like how you treat regimes in Africa that have natural resources China needs for development but who are abusing their own people. There, I think, China's still very much learning what it means not just to be a great power but a responsible great power.

Slaughter and other foreign-policy leaders are converging on May 1 and 2 at The Global Leadership Forum, a conference hosted by NEWSWEEK along with the Royal United Services Institute and Princeton's Project on National Security. The GLF will examine the most pressing global challenges against the backdrop of the coming US elections. Visit Princeton's GLF blog read the thoughts of U.S. and European thinkers and officials on the most pressing issues of our day: climate change, global finance, the dynamics of the Middle East, weapons proliferation, global health and transatlantic relations.

© 2008