The World

By Geoff Dyer, China bureau chief

Barack Obama has already moved on to the next aspiring Asian superpower – today he meets India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh – but plenty of people are still trying absorb what really happened on his visit to China last week.

The US press has come in for some a bit of a mauling for the highly-critical way it covered the China trip – go to James Fallows at The Atlantic and Howard French at the Columbia Journalism Review. Some of this criticism is a little unfair. The Chinese government did not actually censor the “town hall” meeting in Shanghai, as some of the coverage implied, but they did go to elaborate efforts to limit its audience and to generally ensure that the young, charismatic US president had little chance to win the hearts and minds of young Chinese.

But on another point, the criticism is valid. This was never going to be a trip about quick wins and big breakthroughs, it was about Obama setting out a long-term project to engage China as a partner on some of the most important international issues.

In many cases, it could take several years to see how this plays out, but there is one exception where we might get an early test of Obama’s engagement strategy and that is Iran.

With Tehran giving plenty of indications that it will reject the current proposal over its nuclear programme, Beijing is playing coy about whether it will support tougher sanctions. But if the proposal collapses, China could be forced to make a tough choice. The Iran issue falls directly into the new fault line of Chinese foreign policy. Beijing opposes nuclear proliferation and values good relations with the US as a key priority. But worried about energy security, China is also building up extensive energy ties with Iran and the oil industry is so politically powerful that some analysts even talk of an “oil faction” in the Communist party hierarchy. Iran could provide a fascinating insight into just how much sway Obama now has with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao and into what China’s real foreign policy priorities are.