US-China Trade Negos: The 'Rashomon' Effect

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 5/09/2019 10:45:00 AM
This guy looks about as crazy as Trump, which is no mean feat. How Rashomon explains international economic diplomacy.
Blame in on Akira Kurosawa. The famed Japanese director's acclaimed film Rashomon featured the same event--a murder--as narrated by four different parties, to vastly different versions. Today, we have the same thing going on with trade negotiations that have been occurring between Chinese and American negotiators. The accounts are so vastly different that the rest of us aren't exactly sure whose version is accurate given that there is so little overlap. As the late film critic Roger Ebert keenly observed about Rashomon, there are four accounts offered, but no apparent solution. And so it is with the China-US trade negotiations. Let's begin with the more widely-publicized, American version of these events:
In a Reuters report published Wednesday and attributed principally to three U.S. government sources, the Chinese had been on the brink of an unconditional surrender before trying to wriggle out of it at the last minute. A nearly 150-page, seven-chapter draft had included binding legal language to change its legislation on intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers, competition policy, currency manipulation and access to financial services, Reuters reported, alongside an enforcement regime similar to those imposed on troublesome countries like North Korea and Iran. Beijing tried to reverse all that in a series of last-minute edits, according to the report.

That backs up an earlier report by Jenny Leonard, Saleha Mohsin and Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News citing people familiar with the matter saying that the Chinese went back on promises to include changes to its laws in the text of the deal.
In short, "the Chinese reneged" is the Yankee take on events. How about for the Chinese?
An article in the Wall Street Journal, sourced to “people familiar with the thinking of the Chinese side,”  had a vastly different read. President Donald Trump’s tweets about his friendship with President Xi Jinping; praise of China’s economic stimulus; criticism of the U.S. Federal Reserve; and positive statements about planned Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans – all were taken as evidence that Washington’s resolve was weakening along with its economy, according to the report. Beijing never had any intention of specifying which laws it was prepared to change to get a deal over the finish line, and didn’t take seriously hints from the U.S. that time was running out, it said.

The Chinese, on the other hand, never explicitly said that they would revise their national laws to comply with the Americans' wishes in their version of events.
Having studied and taught some material on cross-cultural communication, could it all have been a case of mutual misunderstanding?
Still, the risks of such misinterpretation are a familiar hazard of diplomacy, especially in discussions between negotiators with different languages and cultural contexts, so it’s somewhat astonishing to see such a gap still yawning between the two sides after all the talking that’s been done over the past year.
Maybe there should be experts in cross-cultural communication participating in these sorts of high-stakes discussions? It's only the fate of the world economy that hangs in the balance, after all.