China, too, can play the containment game
Richard Halloran says China's growing footprint in America's own backyard won't go unnoticed
When Xi Jinping sat down with Barack Obama in a luxurious estate on the edge of the California desert over the weekend, the Chinese president delivered a subtle message to his American host: China can play the containment game just as well as the US.
Xi was fresh from a jaunt through Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica and Mexico. He tested the doctrine proclaimed by president James Monroe in 1823, in which the US insisted that outsiders stay out of the Americas.
The high point: in Mexico City, Xi and President Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico agreed that their governments would forge a "comprehensive strategic partnership". They agreed that China would build a cultural centre in the Mexican capital and Mexico would do the same in Beijing. Such Chinese centres have been bases for political action and intelligence elsewhere.
The Chinese, who have complained loudly about the projection of American power into the seas and nations around China, thus sought to prove they could operate in the backyard of the US.
Beijing was also seeking to undercut Taiwan, which has diplomatic relations with a dozen Caribbean and Central American nations. And Xi was asserting China's role as a leader in the economically emerging third world.
Reinforcing that message, the Nicaraguan government announced last week that it had awarded a contract to a Chinese company to build a large canal that would compete with the Panama Canal further south.
