Analyze This

Which China will receive President Barack Obama on his first trip to Asia—the China of growing influence (and foreign-exchange reserves) or the one that acts like an accidental superpower? Obama will be delivering a fairly straightforward message that the two countries must work together to tackle global—and not just bilateral—problems. Washington wants Beijing to assume more responsibility and leadership on everything from the global economic recovery to climate change to nonproliferation to regional-security headaches.

But not all of Beijing's leaders are interested. "China doesn't want to lead the world—it doesn't even want to be seen as a leader of the developing world," says Brookings Sinologist David Shambaugh, who currently lives in Beijing. "The result is that Beijing has multiple personas. It's asking 'what kind of power are we?' "

For its part, the United States has been watching its own leadership tested in the region. In the shadow of China's rise, American clout in the Pacific also declined markedly under George W. Bush's presidency. The dysfunctional new power dynamic—neither party wants to take a back seat for the other but neither wants to seem presumptuous and give offense—is painfully evident as both sides ponder unpalatable options in Afghanistan. Aside from being a quagmire for the U.S. and NATO, the war threatens to bleed over a common border into China and inflame Muslim unrest in the western region of Xinjiang, where Uighur riots took place this summer.

Still, Washington is clear on what it wants. Even as American officials feud internally over how many more troops to send to Kabul or even whether the Afghan government is a reliable partner, they're eager for China to stop free-riding and show more leadership in its own part of the world. Shambaugh thinks China's armed police should train Afghan cops, for example. But Beijing shuns anything close to putting boots on the ground. "Every foreign power that goes in has failed—so why should China join the list of failures?" as Tsinghua University foreign-policy expert Yan Xuetong says. One Chinese Netizen put it more tartly in a chatroom posting: "Now NATO wants China to help wipe it's ass."

The United States and China are also the world's biggest carbon emitters, and as the ambassador to Beijing Jon Huntsman says, "If our two countries can't get our acts together to combat climate change, nobody else will." Yet Beijing authorities want Washington to bankroll a big chunk of China's anti-pollution technology upgrades, arguing that the United States and other developed countries have this responsibility since they've been belching emissions for a century.

Within Chinese government circles, explains Shambaugh, there is an escalating debate over whether the country should assume the role of a "responsible big power" or just continue practicing the late Chinese strongman Deng Xiaoping's more veiled and ambiguous strategy of "biding time, hiding capabilities, but doing some things." Skeptics in the Beijing leadership believe China simply isn't ready to take on much greater global responsibilities—and yet "some people want Beijing to overextend itself precisely so that Chinese growth will be stifled," says Professor Yan. "China is terribly conflicted internally over this issue," Shambaugh says, quipping that when Chinese and American leaders meet next week "maybe there should be a third chair for a psychiatrist to analyze these two psychologically wounded, ambivalent, schizophrenic countries."