Treat U.S.-China Relations Like a Business

Inside the remarkable personage of Pasadena resident Mu Dan Ping, a citizen of China who is a partner in the Chinese business group of the accounting firm Ernst & Young in downtown L.A., is embodied much of the wondrous potential in the Sino-U.S. relationship. I’m glad she does her operating on both sides of the Pacific pond, drumming up business deals for Americans and American partners for the Chinese. My only concern is whether she’s being under-utilized. Maybe we should just let Mu--with her fancy doctorate in public administration from USC, her undergraduate diploma from a Beijing college and all that fluency in Mandarin and English--secretly rev up some kind of covert diplomatic shuttle between China and the United States. It couldn’t hurt.

Once a month, frequent-flier Mu commutes to China for Ernst & Young, tries to get East and West to meet, do business, make a whole bundle of Chinese yuan or U.S. dollars and have all, in the end, part as friends. High-powered as she is, in delightful respects Mu is also the classic U.S. immigrant success story. Like so many in this country, she hates lawyers, blames the media for just about everything and condemns America’s governing establishment for letting the public school system slide. Her own son, now attending elite Wesleyan University back East, was a top student at L.A.’s pricey and private Harvard-Westlake School. Mu may have started out in communist China, but here she is doing the capitalistic thing--making money and taking care of her own. More power to her, say I.

Like the two quarreling countries she now straddles, Mu is outspoken and contentious. She knows what she thinks is wrong with both China and America and is happy to tell you; but she is a hater of neither and is indeed a passionate lover of both. For instance, she greatly admires that America’s political system so routinely and smoothly transfers power without a hint of bloodshed, but she also wants us to appreciate that a government like China’s routinely tries to feed and clothe and house more than 1.2 billion kin without throwing up its hands. And she is critical of both--her Chinese friends for not trying harder to understand America better and her American friends for their absurd and obnoxious belief that everyone, the world over, should think and act as Americans do. “Sometimes I feel I am caught in the middle, watching both sides make mistakes,” says this woman of two worlds, who came here about a decade ago. “But there definitely is common ground. You just have to look hard for it.”

Communist theory notwithstanding, Mu believes that good old-fashioned capital and trade exchanges can help pave over a lot of Sino-American bumps. She admires unapologetically the entrepreneurship, vision and sheer willpower of U.S. business, whose interactions with her homeland she predicts will lead only to good. In fact, she suspects that the American business community, so often denounced by U.S. critics for its cash-box approach to China, holds the key to the future of bilateral relations. That’s mainly because the business mentality, she points out, aims to solve problems and satisfy all the parties involved--business partners as well as consumers. By contrast, she claims, lawyers “love problems and play a win/lose game.” Assign the Sino-U.S. portfolio to lawyers, she argues, and there will be more problems than progress and relations will head south. Pointedly noting that lawyers overrun Congress, she shakes her head in disbelief over the most-favored-nation controversy. But she blames the Western news media, which harp on the same issues again and again (human rights, copyright violations and corruption), for creating a lot of that poison. This leaves the American public underinformed, she claims, about all the social, political and economic changes taking place in China. And of course the news media in China hardly do a balanced job in presenting a true picture of America.

I mentioned to her that she might also want to cast blame on a partisan Congress that will not permit the president to conduct foreign policy in the overriding national interest. This past week, while Mu was in China rustling up business, I did an informal head count of the state’s congressional delegation on the upcoming vote over reextending normal trade relations with China, as Clinton recommends. Perhaps you won’t believe this, but in California right now, only 15 members of Congress firmly support renewing MFN; 13 oppose it and 26 want to be counted as undecided. What an astonishing disgrace when the state’s future as well as the nation’s is so dependent on sensible, mature relations with Asia and China.

As Mu had put it about Chinese-American business deals that go sour: “What is tragic is when you try to sleep in the same bed but have such different dreams.” That’s the nightmare that may well be developing now in Sino-U.S. relations.