Merkel and Clinton Go To China: One Makes Deals, The Other Gets Snubbed

From Testosterone Pit:

Bring home the bacon, or the speck, as it were, was the guiding principle for German Chancellor Angela Merkel when she frolicked in China last week. But her pleas to get the Chinese to buy the crappy bonds of debt-sinner countries in the Eurozone fell on deaf ears. This week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was hobnobbing with the Chinese elite. It turned into a clash fest, and instead of bringing home the bacon, she argued with the Chinese over everything and the South China Sea.

Merkel was accompanied by seven ministers and a delegation of executives from EADS, subsidiaries Airbus and Eurocopter, Volkswagen (which sells nearly a third of its cars in China), Siemens, Thyssen-Krupp, SAP.... Three planes stuffed with Germany’s political and corporate elite. It wasn’t about human rights or Syria or the South China Sea, but about trade.

Germany’s interest is of mercantile nature. China’s focus is on strategy, part of which is to realign the world away from the hegemony of the US. It sees Germany as the leader of the Eurozone in a multi-polar world. And China needs friends. Its relationship with the US is thorny, with Japan on knife’s edge, and with countries around the South China See, which China claims as its own, it’s outright confrontational. Even in Africa, where China is investing heavily in resources, such as oil, tensions are growing.

The visits by Merkel and Clinton are symptomatic of two different approaches. American concerns are valid, and should be high on the priority list. But so should be the economy, and it would benefit from more exports to China—just as millions of people are asking, “what can the next administration do to help me get a job?” So, Mrs. Clinton, where is the bacon?

http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2012/9/5/merkel-and-clinton-go-to-china-one-makes-deals-the-other-get.html