Pressing Issues in Asia Get Scant Attention in Debate

HONG KONG - Many of the implications of a rising China for the United States were barely addressed by President Obama and Mitt Romney in their debate Monday night, as both candidates swung foreign policy questions back to domestic issues like jobs and education.

Neither man mentioned China in his closing statement.

Heated tensions between China and three American allies in the Pacific - Japan, South Korea and the Philippines - went unmentioned during the debate. The worrisome standoffs and violent protests over various disputed islands did not come up.

The chronic and extant nuclear threat of North Korea received no mention at all from the president and just 10 words from Mr. Romney, who said “you see North Korea continuing to export their nuclear technology.” Meanwhile, the atomic potentialities of Iran took up substantial debate time.

A transcript of the debate is here.

In 10 days, the Chinese Communist Party will install a new group of leaders - the Standing Committee of the Politburo, with just nine members, or perhaps now seven - who will be making the major policy decisions for China over the next decade. The party congress and the leadership transition were not mentioned in the debate.

The China question was largely cast as a jobs and loss-of-maunfacturing issue, and it led to some testy exchanges, some of the most heated of the evening.

“You know, if we had taken your advice, Governor Romney, about our auto industry, we'd be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China,” Mr. Obama said.

In reply, Mr. Romney said, in part, “I'm a son of Detroit. I was born in Detroit. My dad was head of a car company. I like American cars. And I would do nothing to hurt the U.S. auto industry. My plan to get the industry on its feet when it was in real trouble was not to start writing checks.”

What followed was a back-and-forth about the rescue of the U.S. auto industry that featured this exchange:

Mr. Obama: You were very clear that you would not provide government assistance to the U.S. auto companies even if they went through bankruptcy. You said that they could get it in the private marketplace. That wasn't true. They would have gone through a -

Mr. Romney: You're wrong. You're wrong, Mr. President.

Mr. Obama: I, no, I am not wrong.

Mr. Romney: You're wrong.

Mr. Obama: I am not wrong. And -

Mr. Romney: People can look it up. You're right.

Mr. Obama: People will look it up.

Mr. Romney: Good.

Amid a discussion of cuts to the defense budget, Mr. Obama cited his administration's deployment of more U.S. military assets in the Asia-Pacific region, a move that the White House calls a “pivot” or a “rebalancing.”

He said the region is “going to be a massive growth area in the future. And we believe China can be a partner, but we're also sending a very cle ar signal that America is a Pacific power, that we are going to have a presence there.”

Mr. Romney, who favors an expansion of the military budget, said “our navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We're now down to 285.”

Mr. Obama countered that “we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed.”

“We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them,” he continued. “We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.”

Mr. Romney brought up his intention to call out China for manipulating its currency, an issue explored at length here by my colleague Annie Lowrey.

Mr. Romney repeated his criticism of China for “stealing our intellectual property, our patents, our designs, our technology, h acking into our computers, counterfeiting our goods. They have to understand, we want to trade with them, we want a world that's stable, we like free enterprise, but you got to play by the rules.”

He brought up the example of an American company whose valves were being counterfeited in China, right down to the serial numbers and packaging.

Mr. Obama said his administration has successfully brought a number of trade cases against China, including a recent victory at the World Trade Organization that was reported Monday on Rendezvous. That case will benefit two steelmakers, one in Ohio, the other in Pennsylvania - important swing states in the election.

People's Daily, the Communist Party's flagship newspaper, ran a commentary before the debate that suggested “China is neither the core topic nor ultimate target for the election this year, though it has been repeatedly mentioned.”

Whoever is elected, the piece said, “the United States may conti nue to adopt discriminatory and competitive economic policies toward China,” including high tariffs and further cases at the W.T.O.

The commentary concluded that “China-U.S. relations will unlikely turn rosy soon after the presidential election. China should be prepared for this serious possibility.”