Five months ago Chinese leader Hu Jintao held a high profile state dinner with Obama. Since then Obama has premised his policy proposals on a competition with China. Yet if he learned anything from that visit, it isn't at all obvious.
For Hu Jintao, his American visit was a chance to reaffirm China as the world's second greatest superpower. Like Soviet Premier Khrushchev's extended tour of America, this visit was not about diplomacy, but a way of showing all the folks back home and around the world that there are only two nations worth mentioning in the same sentence.
