Chinese President Hu Jintao is in the United States to meet with President Bush this week amid much fanfare. Undoubtedly any meeting between the leaders of these two countries will be historic. On the one hand you have a longtime military and economic superpower, and on the other you have a country that hopes to be that within a few decades. There????????s a lot to discuss on the table. Trade and development. Bilateral relations and common concerns. Human rights.

This visit, however, will be very different from previous ones.

When President Bush visited China in November last year, something unprecedented happened: no political prisoners were released. It was strange, because China always releases political prisoners before a U.S. presidential visit to the mainland. The move had a lot of people asking what the hell was going on. It was followed by the realization that President Hu was making a statement that China no longer had to make concessions to the Unites States; that it is, essentially, an equal to its Western counterpart.

In a sense, this is true. Even though China????????s GDP is 1/7 of the United States????????, and its GDP per capita is about the same fraction, the two economies have become so intertwined that what happens in one country inexorably affects the other. This is good and bad in many ways, but mainly it is bad in the short-term with regards to human rights. With the American economy so dependant right now on the Chinese economy, the U.S. government cannot extract the same kinds of human rights concessions that it could in the past. You could say that the rules of the game are more two-sided than ever.

Evidence of this comes in that a prominent political prisoner was released shortly before President Hu????????s visit to the United States this week. This can be interpreted as a statement by Hu that China????????s domestic policies with regards to things like political prisoners, censorship of the internet, etc. will not be determined by an outside power. The Communist Party fears that allowing the country to become too politically open will lead to it losing power. While of course there is no chance of it withdrawing from its economic relationship with the United States at this point no matter what the issue, this symbolic release preceding Hu????????s visit indicates that China intends to open up on its own terms.

It is an historic visit indeed, perhaps more as a growing trend than anything else. China is truly asserting itself on the world stage alongside the United States. Not in a threatening way, in terms of economic might, but politically and diplomatically in terms of its ability to sway and be swayed in policy-making. Gaining progress in the fight for human rights from the Chinese government, whether from the United States or NGOs, will only be more difficult in the future. They can do what they can, but it is likely that more indirect means through development and internal mobilization of civil society will be the means by which democracy is achieved in the country.