But as you can see this is a 20 year record we have and the progress has been okay but certainly not outstanding and I think the future is likely to remain the same. Now on the second way of looking at this you can look at it comparing China and United States in the region so let’s look at China’s strengths in the region which many people do, they often don’t look at China’s limitations and let’s look at American’s weaknesses which almost everyone does but they don’t often look at American strengths and we have to use all four elements to do this it won’t take too long I think I can do this in that short period of time. China’s strengths, big traitor, very important for trade in various countries in the region, investment from Asia goes to China it’s pretty much one way there isn’t much Chinese investment in the Asian but it’s very important for those investors. And then diplomacy China is very good in diplomacy both bilaterally and multi lateral organizations they follow win-win diplomacy and we’ll get to that in a minute. This time cultural influence that China has in Asia and the ethnic Chinese in South East Asia are a positive influence for Chinese relations in the region and in the background of all this is the rising the people liberations army and that gets in the way of the reassurance policy that China has for the region. So we are complicating we say, well, why are you building up this military force, you see? But they handle it pretty well and it’s clearly a source of influence.

The kind of governments and people’s around China they pay attention to the build up of the Chinese military. What are Chinese limitations and weaknesses, the legacy which I’ve already discussed, second is Chinese people are very patriotic that’s not a bad thing right? But they are nationalistic. And unfortunately all around China are countries that are equally nationalistic and patriotic, and what does that mean? If you have a dispute you can’t settle it, it’s very difficult particularly if it’s over territory and issue of sovereignty or something like that it’s very difficult to settle these issues so that’s an impediment to improving relations, the expansion of the Chinese military is dealing with some situation like some in the region the authoritarian system of China is viewed by many of [IB] don’t care about it but some care about it a lot. And then we get into trade, trade is the being important element of Chinese relationship with the Asia.

But half of China’s foreign trade is controlled by foreign investment enterprises in China, half of this trade is processing trade where the commodity goes back and forth across the border and as a manufactured product it’s sometimes consumed in China but more often than not it’s exported out of China to the other big markets and what are those markets the biggest markets are the European Union and United States so it’s a very inter-dependent type of trading relationship. It’s not something where a country can usually throw its weight around very easily in this kind of a situation.

Investment, investment is one way the investors from Asia like they make money in China they are happy their governments tend to be happy but their laborers don’t get the investment in their country those people aren’t very happy they can’t go to China this is a drag on China’s relationship with the region. China doesn’t give aid in significant quantities into Asia, except for [Maymar] in North Korea and so this is, so they don’t compensate for this and then there is diplomacy and China’s diplomacy is very good and its win-win diplomacy and win-win I work for congress so I try to simplify these things, I’m sorry if I’m too simple. But the way it works the Chinese go to the government and say what do you want and the government says we have six priorities and the Chinese say we agree with three and half of those let’s talk about that and so they agree on things they have all these meetings with human education they agree on things they already agreed on and they keep agreeing more weekly than they used to in the past and that’s very reassuring what about the things they don’t agree on? They don’t talk about those. and so what does this mean for the other government well the Chinese are basically saying to other government you don’t have to do anything you wouldn’t ordinarily do and the other governments likes that very much there are a fewer sections you can’t talk to Taiwan and you can’t talk to the Dalai Lama. But basically those are the main…but implicitly for China what does it mean, China is not going to do anything it wouldn’t ordinarily do and this means China doesn’t do risk, cost or commitment that it wouldn’t ordinarily do. Now you can say, oh why does that matter? It matters in a minute you’ll find out.