On December 3, 2009, The Carter Center held a series of events to celebrate 30 years of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and China and to engage the Atlanta public in a discussion of the implications of the China-U.S. relationship for China, the United States, and the rest of the world.

     

The day began with the opening ceremony of the photo exhibition, "LOOKING BACK AFTER 30 YEARS: Marking the 30th Anniversary of China-U.S. Diplomatic Relations."  The exhibit, sponsored by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) and on display through February 7, 2010, at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, details the history of diplomatic, economic, educational, and cultural exchanges between the United States and China both prior to and in the decades since the historic decision by President Jimmy Carter to normalize diplomatic relations between the two countries. The exhibit has been on a year-long tour throughout China and the United States during 2009.

     

The ribbon-cutting ceremony featured remarks by Jay Hakes, Director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, Xu Kuangdi, President of the U.S.-China People's Friendship Association, Beverly Hall, Superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, and former President Jimmy Carter, who discussed his long personal history with China and the decision to normalize relations with China in 1979. Also in attendance were Gao Yanping, Consul General of the Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in Houston, and Li Xiaolin, Vice President of CPAFFC.

     

Following the opening ceremony, students of Emory professor Dr. Mary Bullock presented their research on the scientific, cultural and economic connections between China and Georgia, on subjects ranging from the partnership undertaken by Emory University, Atlanta Public Schools and China's Nanjing University to establish Confucius Institutes in Atlanta, to The Carter Center's experiences working in China for over a decade.

     

Capping off the day of events, President Carter engaged CPAFFC Vice President Li Xiaolin, Carter Center China Program director Yawei Liu, and Emory professor and China scholar Mary Bullock in a far-ranging conversation on the past and present state of U.S.-China relations in a panel discussion moderated by Dr. John Stremlau, Vice President of Peace Programs at The Carter Center.  During the course of the conversation, President Carter discussed the extensive process undertaken by himself and then Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping to normalize relations in 1979 and expressed his belief that the U.S.-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. 

     

President Carter also engaged the other panelists in a conversation on a number of issues and concerns in the current U.S. –China relationship, including human rights and democratic reform, the American public's growing fear of China's rise, and the U.S.-China dispute over the value of the Chinese currency.

     

Below are selected remarks from President Carter on a few of these issues.

     

    "The most important foundation on which future relations will depend is the personal trust that evolves between the people of America and the people of China, and the realization that grows among all people in the world that this is really the most important bilateral relationship on which world peace and future economic progress depend."

     

    "What really matters 10, 15, 20 years down the line on the issue of climate change is what is decided in Beijing and what is decided in Washington, and the cooperation between our two countries is crucial to the effectiveness of decisions made in either capital. This is just one example of many things that shows how important this relationship is. And I think all of Americans realized [the importance] when Obama was in Beijing recently.  We realized, we owe you $800 billion. So we have to be a little bit careful about our major creditor and make sure that the American dollars stay sound, so that the tremendous deficit that we will have in our budget this year—$1 trillion—somebody will lend us the money to pay that difference.  And the main place we'll go to get the money is China. So those ties of military cooperation and understanding and economic development and climate change and people exchange, all of them are rapidly growing in importance to us and to the rest of the world."

     

    "Yesterday I lectured in [Emory University professor Dr. Mary Bullock's] class, and one of the questions the student asked me was, how does the United States preach to China about human rights when we have Guantanamo prison still open, and the United States has been guilty of torture, which is even recognized by American leaders as legitimate in prisons like Abu Ghraib.  And I told the students we don't have the right to preach to others.  We have a difference of opinion about basic human rights.

     

    "If you ask an average American on the street to define the most important human rights, they would automatically say:  freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, trial by jury, and that would just about be it.  But if you ask someone in a developing country like China about human rights, they would say:  the right to have a decent home, and to have a job, and to have the right to education, and the right to health care, as well as the right to have a voice in the selection of their own leaders. So the definition of human rights is quite different.

 

    "It's almost mandatory for an American president when he goes to China now, to talk about Tibet, and to talk about the Uighurs in the western part of China. But we have to be careful not to preach to others, because China looks upon that question in quite a different way. One of the pressures on the Chinese government in the last 10 or 15 years, not imposed from us but by their own people, is how to equalize the tremendous economic benefits that have come from the free enterprise system in China. Because along the coastal areas of China, they've had fairly rapid increase of per capita income and living standards, but in the far western part, and in places like Tibet, progress has been very slow. So the Chinese feel the need to improve the economic status in those distant communities.  And they send in Han Chinese to improve their economic status, and in the process, some of the customs and religious commitments of those distant groups have become challenged. So we have to understand the reason for Chinese government decisions.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't all insist on human rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which every member of the United Nations has adopted. So, a difference in interpretation—yes, mutual respect--yes, an insistence on perfect human rights for both countries--yes.  That is one of those issues where we disagree, but we have to learn how to not be disagreeable to the extent of estrangement."

     

    "One of the interesting thing that Rosalynn and I noticed the week before last was when we happened to be in Vietnam. …The president of Vietnam with whom we were meeting was very proud of the fact that they have good relationships now between Vietnam and China. And if you look down a list of all the controversial countries in the world, China has a good relationship with them all—China and Iran, China and Burma, China and Vietnam, China and North Korea, you could go down a long list.  It would be hard to find any country on earth with which China does not have good diplomatic and trade relationships.  I think we could learn some lessons in that respect, because a lot of those countries-- we don't even speak to them, we don't talk to them, we don't communicate with them, we don't try to resolve our differences through diplomacy."

     

    "I think we need to basically give up our effort to change what is happening in China and we need to start correcting our own economic circumstances in our own government.  But it takes a lot of political courage to raise taxes on America to balance our budget or to cut our deficit or to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq and do things that will save money. I don't think we need to fear China's becoming ascendant in economics. We're still enormously more powerful in our gross national product than is China.  But China's growing so rapidly, that I think it is a matter for us to be cautious in what we're doing ourselves.  [I have seen] the American public opinion polls that show that we fear China more than any other country on earth, not only economically, but politically and even militarily. China is increasing its military expenditures.  But we have to realize that the American military budget is greater than the budget of all the other countries on earth combined.  China plus Russia, plus Great Britain, plus France, plus Israel even.  Greater than all of them. So we don't need to fear China militarily, we just need to make sure we don't ever come into conflict with China that we can't resolve through diplomacy and through correcting our own mistakes.  So I think that mutual respect and easy communication is the best way to make sure we don't make a tragic mistake."

     

    "I think that what's happened in the last Taiwanese election was, the Taiwanese people chose a leader who made clear he would try to get along harmoniously with China.  So I think that exchange of tourism and investments back and forth has helped to ensure that we won't have a mistake made in the future that would cause some military conflict between the mainland and Taiwan. If that happened, there would be tremendous political pressure on the American government to intercede, which I think would be a tragic situation."

     

     

    "The main thing we are insisting on now for China economically is that they increase the value of their currency—the Yuan…. Most unbiased economists in the world are sure that the yuan is undervalued, and this cheap currency in China means that China can sell their products abroad much easier than they can buy foreign products for themselves. And because we have this enormous negative trade balance with China--we buy much more from China than we sell them--it sort of aggravates this problem. But it's a sovereign country, and I think we have as much chance of forcing the Chinese to change the value of their currency as the Chinese have the right or authority of convincing the U.S. Congress on what to do about some issue that concerns them.  I think China will continue to make [its] own decisions. And if they do increase the value of the yuan, it will be because of their own domestic considerations, and not pressure from the U.S."

     

    "[Villages] were authorized in 1982, shortly after normalization, to have democratic elections.  And five years later, the National People's Congress required this to happen. And then about 10 years later, The Carter Center helped [the NPC] to revise the law.  Rosalynn and I have witnessed these elections.  In the villages, everyone is registered to vote automatically when they reach the age of 18, and they are expected to vote.  And the people who run for public office, we would call them mayor and city council, five of them, are elected for three-year terms.  And the process is beautiful.  On election day, all the people that are registered to vote come and put their stools in the town square, and the candidates for office make a campaign speech from a platform, and they limit it to a two or three minute campaign speech.   And then people go up and cast a secret ballot, with a little screen so nobody can see how they vote.  And then they sit back down and take the big ballot boxes and dump them on the table and count them and tabulate them on the blackboard, and they announce who won.  And they take office that day, and they serve for three years and they can run for reelection. But the trick is, quite often they tape record the campaign speech, so if that same candidate runs for reelection, they replay what they promised three years earlier.  So there's a pretty high turnover rate.  But it's a beautiful process.  

 

    "We thought, and this was sort of presumptuous, that if the village elections showed that they were successful, which they have, that the Chinese government might move them up to the township level and so forth.  That was our hope that we didn't talk about, but we talked about it privately.  And that hasn't happened.  And now there's been kind of a restraint placed upon further progress.  And one reason is that the villagers and their elected officials think that they can make their own decisions. Whereas the communist party members think that they still have the authority to make the decisions. …So that's one reason it's kind of slowed down the process. The Chinese have adopted that village election policy to the extent that the National People's Congress is now revising the law to improve it, not to do away with it.  So I think that still, 900,000,000 Chinese people, which is a large part of 1.3 billion, have now experienced themselves the ability to participate in democratic elections."