We knew Chinese leaders were a little miffed when one of their imprisoned dissidents won the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps it?s their disdain for the prize that explains their treatment of a previous winner:
Over the past two years, China has dealt with the Obama Administration in a puzzling manner. Barack Obama came into office talking about the importance of great-power relationships and the supreme importance of strategic ties with China. He traveled to China and marked the trip by accommodating the Chinese in various symbolic ways. Despite all this, China has been distinctly combative toward Obama. It overreacted to his meeting with the Dalai Lama and a U.S. arms sale to Taiwan, both predictable and routine events. It humiliated Obama at the Copenhagen climate-change conference. And on Jan. 10, while Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was in China, it refused to agree to senior military-to-military ties between Beijing and Washington. These actions could be viewed as a series of misperceptions, miscalculations and single events. But when taken along with China’s new assertiveness in Asia, they suggest that there is a larger trend at work.
