In Washington, a Strategic Shift on China—Toward Containment-Newseek

In Washington, a Strategic Shift on China—Toward Containment-Newseek there’s little question that any measure of trust between Beijing and Washington has diminished; a foreign ministry official late last year told Newsweek that there is "no question" that relations between the two countries were “better when George W. Bush was president than they are today.” The question is, to what extent does that matter to Beijing? Foreign diplomats there seem increasingly to think it’s not that big a deal to Xi & Co.; Beijing is increasingly suspicious of the U.S. as a rival in Asia and increasingly convinced that its own ascendancy is irreversible. The quest for supremacy in the Pacific, therefore, is likely to intensify. If true, those attitudes will have consequences...If China, in fact, doesn’t care that it's “losing Washington,” that only makes it more likely that it will lose it. And at the moment, that appears to be the road Beijing is on. // Can Beijing sway the US business lobby, a key pillar of support in DC over the decades, after a year+ of making their lives more difficult in China? There are indications that people close to Xi understand the risk and are working to undo some of the damage...Is that one of the reasons for the seeming increase in public profile of Li Keqiang since the NPC, to put a softer face on things? Or is Premier Li, as one reader suggested, "leading from the chin" as part of of an orchestration to have him take the fall for the struggling economy and not last past the 2017 19th Party Congress?http://www.newsweek.com/washington-shift-china-toward-containment-326591?utm_source=The+Sinocism+China+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9f683f1dda-The_Sinocism_China_Newsletter_05_02_155_2_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_171f237867-9f683f1dda-29615013&mc_cid=9f683f1dda&mc_eid=5935182a65