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Comment (WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) - Although U.S. President Barack Obama has never set foot there, China cast a long shadow in the Pacific region where he grew up.
Obama, who will visit Shanghai and Beijing for the first time on November 15-18, spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, five time zones away from Washington, D.C.; and beginning in 1967, when he was six years old, he lived in Jakarta for four years.
At the time, China was in the throes of Chairman Mao Zedong's bloody Cultural Revolution. Abroad, the nation was less interested in selling widgets than in promoting Mao's brand of radical communism -- a force the U.S. saw behind communist movements and political upheaval in Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
In 1979, Obama's senior year at Punahou school in Honolulu, China and the United States normalized diplomatic relations, launching a three-decade period in which ties between the two grew inexorably tighter and...
