Freeman Report June 2007 - Vol. 5, No. 6

In 2004 when then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Dai Bingguo created the forum which U.S. officials now refer to as “the Senior Dialogue” some wondered aloud if we were set-up for failure from the outset.  For starters, we couldn’t even agree with our Chinese counterparts on the name of the Dialogue (and still can’t).  The Chinese insisted the forum be titled the Strategic Dialogue, while the U.S. held firm that “strategic” was a term we reserved for our closest allies.  There were worries on the U.S. side that the Chinese wanted yet another prominent venue through which to complain about U.S. support for Taiwan, while the Chinese worried that senior U.S. officials would not be able to partake in such a dialogue without pressing for the concrete deliverables that sell so well to the Congress and media.