Jul 23rd 2009 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

G2: twice as big, no more productive

ADDING a conjunction to the name of a diplomatic forum may not sound like much, but America and China insist it is significant. On July 27th the two countries will hold their first Strategic and Economic Dialogue attended, unlike previous conjunctionless ones, by America’s secretary of state. Both hope the upgrade will help them deal with everything from climate change to global economic imbalances. It may not.

China, ever worried about the impact of its rising power on American political opinion, has been pleased that Barack Obama’s campaign slogan “change” does not seem to apply to America’s dealings with China itself. The new forum merely tweaks the Strategic Economic Dialogue launched by President Bush in 2006 which was led on the American side by the treasury secretary. It also absorbs a security-focused forum called the Senior Dialogue which began in 2005. Hillary Clinton’s involvement, alongside her treasury counterpart, Timothy Geithner, raises the status of America’s participation, which, the Americans hope, will encourage more progress on issues—especially climate change—that straddled the remits of the forum’s precursors.

On the global economy, the two sides are already broadly in agreement. Both have big stimulus programmes. Both think China’s consumers need to spend more, America’s to save more. China mutters about moving away from the dollar as a reserve currency but in May, its holding of US Treasury debt rose by $38 billion, to more than $801.5 billion—its highest level ever. Climate change, on the other hand, is producing posturing. The topic has been a prominent one in recent visits to Beijing by American officials, including Mrs Clinton, Mr Geithner and the commerce secretary, Gary Locke. In a speech to businessmen, Mr Locke said pointedly that 50 years from now, China “does not want the world community to lay blame for environmental catastrophe at its feet.”

Despite the approach of UN-sponsored climate-change talks in Copenhagen in December, America and China—the world’s biggest contributors to global warming—show little sign of consensus. A visit by Mr Obama himself to China, which is likely to take place not long before the Copenhagen conference, may help focus minds. A conjunction of them is harder to imagine.

The Economist 2009.07.23