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Wow! I love my Pedes! This is such an awesome pic:)
 
 
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Most Americans don’t see Trump as religious; fewer than half say they think he’s Christian
 
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《外交事务》杂志:中国问题思考汇集
 

The China Reckoning

How Beijing Defied American Expectations

The United States has always had an outsize sense of its ability to determine China’s course. Again and again, its ambitions have come up short. After World War II, George Marshall, the U.S. special envoy to China, hoped to broker a peace between the Nationalists and Communists in the Chinese Civil War. During the Korean War, the Truman administration thought it could dissuade Mao Zedong’s troops from crossing the Yalu River. The Johnson administration believed Beijing would ultimately circumscribe its involvement in Vietnam. In each instance, Chinese realities upset American expectations.

With U.S. President Richard Nixon’s opening to China, Washington made its biggest and most optimistic bet yet. Both Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, assumed that rapprochement would drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow and, in time, alter China’s conception of its own interests as it drew closer to the United States. In the fall of 1967, Nixon wrote in this magazine, “The world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus our aim, to the extent that we can influence events, should be to induce change.” Ever since, the assumption that deepening commercial, diplomatic, and cultural ties would transform China’s internal development and external behavior has been a bedrock of U.S. strategy. Even those in U.S. policy circles who were skeptical of China’s intentions still shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking.

Nearly half a century since Nixon’s first steps toward rapprochement, the record is increasingly clear that Washington once again put too much faith in its power to shape China’s trajectory. All sides of the policy debate erred: free traders and financiers who foresaw inevitable and increasing openness in China, integrationists who argued that Beijing’s ambitions would be tamed by greater interaction with the international community, and hawks who believed that China’s power would be abated by perpetual American primacy.

Neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted. Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the U.S.-led system. And the liberal international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected. China has instead pursued its own course, belying a range of American expectations in the process.

That reality warrants a clear-eyed rethinking of the United States’ approach to China. There are plenty of risks that come with such a reassessment; defenders of the current framework will warn against destabilizing the bilateral relationship or inviting a new Cold War. But building a stronger and more sustainable approach to, and relationship with, Beijing requires honesty about how many fundamental assumptions have turned out wrong. Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community have remained deeply invested in expectations about China—about its approach to economics, domestic politics, security, and global order—even as evidence against them has accumulated. The policies built on such expectations have failed to change China in the ways we intended or hoped.

THE POWER OF THE MARKET

Greater commercial interaction with China was supposed to bring gradual but steady liberalization of the Chinese economy. U.S. President George H. W. Bush’s 1990 National Security Strategy described enhanced ties with the world as “crucial to China’s prospects for regaining the path of economic reform.” This argument predominated for decades. It drove U.S. decisions to grant China most-favored-nation trading status in the 1990s, to support its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, to establish a high-level economic dialogue in 2006, and to negotiate a bilateral investment treaty under U.S. President Barack Obama.

Trade in goods between the United States and China exploded from less than $8 billion in 1986 to over $578 billion in 2016: more than a 30-fold increase, adjusting for inflation. Since the early years of this century, however, China’s economic liberalization has stalled. Contrary to Western expectations, Beijing has doubled down on its state capitalist model even as it has gotten richer. Rather than becoming a force for greater openness, consistent growth has served to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party and its state-led economic model. 

Trade in goods between the United States and China exploded from less than $8 billion in 1986 to over $578 billion in 2016.

U.S. officials believed that debt, inefficiency, and the demands of a more advanced economy would necessitate further reforms. And Chinese officials recognized the problems with their approach; in 2007, Premier Wen Jiabao called the Chinese economy “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” But rather than opening the country up to greater competition, the Chinese Communist Party, intent on maintaining control of the economy, is instead consolidating state-owned enterprises and pursuing industrial policies (notably its “Made in China 2025” plan) that aim to promote national technology champions in critical sectors, including aerospace, biomedicine, and robotics. And despite repeated promises, Beijing has resisted pressure from Washington and elsewhere to level the playing field for foreign companies. It has restricted market access and forced non-Chinese firms to sign on to joint ventures and share technology, while funneling investment and subsidies to state-backed domestic players.

Until recently, U.S. policymakers and executives mostly acquiesced to such discrimination; the potential commercial benefits were so large that they considered it unwise to upend the relationship with protectionism or sanctions. Instead, they fought tooth and nail for small, incremental concessions. But now, what were once seen as merely the short-term frustrations of doing business with China have come to seem more harmful and permanent. The American Chamber of Commerce reported last year that eight in ten U.S. companies felt less welcome in China than in years prior, and more than 60 percent had little or no confidence that China would open its markets further over the next three years. Cooperative and voluntary mechanisms to pry open China’s economy have by and large failed, including the Trump administration’s newly launched Comprehensive Economic Dialogue.

THE IMPERATIVE OF LIBERALIZATION

Growth was supposed to bring not just further economic opening but also political liberalization. Development would spark a virtuous cycle, the thinking went, with a burgeoning Chinese middle class demanding new rights and pragmatic officials embracing legal reforms that would be necessary for further progress. This evolution seemed especially certain after the collapse of the Soviet Union and democratic transitions in South Korea and Taiwan. “No nation on Earth has discovered a way to import the world’s goods and services while stopping foreign ideas at the border,” George H. W. Bush proclaimed. U.S. policy aimed to facilitate this process by sharing technology, furthering trade and investment, promoting people-to-people exchanges, and admitting hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to American universities.

In China, communications technologies have strengthened the hand of the state.

The crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 dimmed hopes for the emergence of electoral democracy in China. Yet many experts and policymakers in the United States still expected the Chinese government to permit greater press freedoms and allow for a stronger civil society, while gradually embracing more political competition both within the Communist Party and at local levels. They believed that the information technology revolution of the 1990s would encourage such trends by further exposing Chinese citizens to the world and enhancing the economic incentives for openness. As U.S. President Bill Clinton put it, “Without the full freedom to think, question, to create, China will be at a distinct disadvantage, competing with fully open societies in the information age where the greatest source of national wealth is what resides in the human mind.” Leaders in Beijing would come to realize that only by granting individual freedoms could China thrive in a high-tech future. 

But the fear that greater openness would threaten both domestic stability and the regime’s survival drove China’s leaders to look for an alternative approach. They took both the shock of Tiananmen Square and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as evidence of the dangers of democratization and political competition. So rather than embracing positive cycles of openness, Beijing responded to the forces of globalization by putting up walls and tightening state control, constricting,  rather than reinforcing, the free flow of people, ideas, and commerce. Additional stresses on the regime in this century—including an economic slowdown, endemic corruption in the government and the military, and ominous examples of popular uprisings elsewhere in the world—have spurred more authoritarianism, not less.

Indeed, events of the last decade have dashed even modest hopes for political liberalization. In 2013, an internal Communist Party memo known as Document No. 9 explicitly warned against “Western constitutional democracy” and other “universal values” as stalking-horses meant to weaken, destabilize, and even break up China. This guidance demonstrated the widening gap between U.S. and Chinese expectations for the country’s political future. As Orville Schell, a leading American expert on China, put it: “China is sliding ineluctably backward into a political climate more reminiscent of Mao Zedong in the 1970s than Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.” Today, an ongoing crackdown on journalists, religious leaders, academics, social activists, and human rights lawyers shows no sign of abating—more than 300 lawyers, legal assistants, and activists were detained in 2015 alone. 

Rather than devolving power to the Chinese people, as many in the West predicted, communications technologies have strengthened the hand of the state, helping China’s authorities control information flows and monitor citizens’ behavior. Censorship, detentions, and a new cybersecurity law that grants broad government control over the Internet in China have stymied political activity inside China’s “Great Firewall.” China’s twenty-first-century authoritarianism now includes plans to launch a “social credit system,” fusing big data and artificial intelligence to reward and punish Chinese citizens on the basis of their political, commercial, social, and online activity. Facial recognition software, combined with the ubiquity of surveillance cameras across China, has even made it possible for the state to physically locate people within minutes.

THE DETERRENT OF PRIMACY

A combination of U.S. diplomacy and U.S. military power—carrots and sticks—was supposed to persuade Beijing that it was neither possible nor necessary to challenge the U.S.-led security order in Asia. Washington “strongly promot[ed] China’s participation in regional security mechanisms to reassure its neighbors and assuage its own security concerns,” as the Clinton administration’s 1995 National Security Strategy put it, buttressed by military-to-military relations and other confidence-building measures. These modes of engagement were coupled with a “hedge”—enhanced U.S. military power in the region, supported by capable allies and partners. The effect, the thinking went, would be to allay military competition in Asia and further limit China’s desire to alter the regional order. Beijing would settle for military sufficiency, building armed forces for narrow regional contingencies while devoting most of its resources to domestic needs.

The logic was not simply that China would be focused on its self-described “strategic window of opportunity” for development at home, with plenty of economic and social challenges occupying the attention of China’s senior leaders. American policymakers and academics also assumed that China had learned a valuable lesson from the Soviet Union about the crippling costs of getting into an arms race with the United States. Washington could thus not only deter Chinese aggression but also—to use the Pentagon’s term of art—“dissuade” China from even trying to compete. Zalmay Khalilzad, an official in the Reagan and both Bush administrations, argued that a dominant United States could “convince the Chinese leadership that a challenge would be difficult to prepare and extremely risky to pursue.” Moreover, it was unclear whether China could challenge U.S. primacy even if it wanted to. Into the late 1990s, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was considered decades behind the United States’ military and those of its allies.  

Against this backdrop, U.S. officials took considerable care not to stumble into a confrontation with China. The political scientist Joseph Nye explained the thinking when he led the Pentagon’s Asia office during the Clinton administration: “If we treated China as an enemy, we were guaranteeing an enemy in the future. If we treated China as a friend, we could not guarantee friendship, but we could at least keep open the possibility of more benign outcomes.” Soon-to-be Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress at his confirmation hearing in January 2001, “China is not an enemy, and our challenge is to keep it that way.”  

Even as it began investing more of its newfound wealth in military power, the Chinese government sought to put Washington at ease, signaling continued adherence to the cautious, moderate foreign policy path set out by Deng. In 2005, the senior Communist Party official Zheng Bijian wrote in this magazine that China would never seek regional hegemony and remained committed to “a peaceful rise.” In 2011, after a lively debate among China’s leaders about whether it was time to shift gears, State Councilor Dai Bingguo assured the world that “peaceful development is a strategic choice China has made.” Starting in 2002, the U.S. Defense Department had been producing a congressionally mandated annual report on China’s military, but the consensus among senior U.S. officials was that China remained a distant and manageable challenge.

For Beijing, the United States’ alliances and military presence in Asia posed unacceptable threats to China’s interests.

That view, however, underestimated just how simultaneously insecure and ambitious China’s leadership really was. For Beijing, the United States’ alliances and military presence in Asia posed unacceptable threats to China’s interests in Taiwan, on the Korean Peninsula, and in the East China and South China Seas. In the words of the Peking University professor Wang Jisi, “It is strongly believed in China that . . . Washington will attempt to prevent the emerging powers, in particular China, from achieving their goals and enhancing their stature.” So China started to chip away at the U.S.-led security order in Asia, developing the capabilities to deny the U.S. military access to the region and driving wedges between Washington and its allies.

Ultimately, neither U.S. military power nor American diplomatic engagement has dissuaded China from trying to build a world-class military of its own. High-tech displays of American power in Iraq and elsewhere only accelerated efforts to modernize the PLA. Chinese President Xi Jinping has launched military reforms that will make Chinese forces more lethal and more capable of projecting military power well beyond China’s shores. With its third aircraft carrier reportedly under construction, advanced new military installations in the South China Sea, and its first overseas military base in Djibouti, China is on the path to becoming a military peer the likes of which the United States has not seen since the Soviet Union. China’s leaders no longer repeat Deng’s dictum that, to thrive, China will “hide [its] capabilities and bide [its] time.” Xi declared in October 2017 that “the Chinese nation has gone from standing up, to becoming rich, to becoming strong.”

THE CONSTRAINTS OF ORDER

At the end of World War II, the United States built institutions and rules that helped structure global politics and the regional dynamics in Asia. Widely accepted norms, such as the freedom of commerce and navigation, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and international cooperation on global challenges, superseded nineteenth-century spheres of influence. As a leading beneficiary of this liberal international order, the thinking went, Beijing would have a considerable stake in the order’s preservation and come to see its continuation as essential to China’s own progress. U.S. policy aimed to encourage Beijing’s involvement by welcoming China into leading institutions and working with it on global governance and regional security.

As China joined multilateral institutions, U.S. policymakers hoped that it would learn to play by the rules and soon begin to contribute to their upkeep. In the George W. Bush administration, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick memorably called on Beijing to become “a responsible stakeholder” in the international system. From Washington’s perspective, with greater power came greater obligation, especially since China had profited so handsomely from the system. As Obama emphasized, “We expect China to help uphold the very rules that have made them successful.”  

In certain venues, China appeared to be steadily, if unevenly, taking on this responsibility. It joined the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization in 1991, acceded to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1992, joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, and took part in major diplomatic efforts, including the six-party talks and the P5+1 negotiations to deal with nuclear weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, respectively. It also became a major contributor to UN counterpiracy and peacekeeping operations. 

Yet Beijing remained threatened by other central elements of the U.S.-led order—and has increasingly sought to displace them. That has been especially true of what it sees as uninvited violations of national sovereignty by the United States and its partners, whether in the form of economic sanctions or military action. Liberal norms regarding the international community’s right or responsibility to intervene to protect people from human rights violations, for example, have run headlong into China’s paramount priority of defending its authoritarian system from foreign interference. With a few notable exceptions, China has been busy watering down multilateral sanctions, shielding regimes from Western opprobrium, and making common cause with Russia to block the UN Security Council from authorizing interventionist actions. A number of nondemocratic governments—in Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere—have benefited from such obstruction.

China has also set out to build its own set of regional and international institutions—with the United States on the outside looking in—rather than deepening its commitment to the existing ones. It has launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank (along with Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa), and, most notably, the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s grandiose vision for building land and maritime routes to connect China to much of the world. These institutions and programs have given China agenda-setting and convening power of its own, while often departing from the standards and values upheld by existing international institutions. Beijing explicitly differentiates its approach to development by noting that, unlike the United States and European powers, it does not demand that countries accept governance reforms as a condition of receiving aid.

The assumptions driving U.S. China policy look increasingly tenuous.

In its own region, meanwhile, Beijing has set out to change the security balance, incrementally altering the status quo with steps just small enough to avoid provoking a military response from the United States. In the South China Sea, one of the world’s most important waterways, China has deftly used coast guard vessels, legal warfare, and economic coercion to advance its sovereignty claims. In some cases, it has simply seized contested territory or militarized artificial islands. While Beijing has occasionally shown restraint and tactical caution, the overall approach indicates its desire to create a modern maritime sphere of influence.

In the summer of 2016, China ignored a landmark ruling by a tribunal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which held that China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea were illegal under international law. U.S. officials wrongly assumed that some combination of pressure, shame, and its own desire for a rules-based maritime order would cause Beijing, over time, to accept the judgment. Instead, China has rejected it outright. Speaking to a security forum in Aspen, Colorado, a year after the ruling, in July 2017, a senior analyst from the CIA concluded that the experience had taught China’s leaders “that they can defy international law and get away with it.” Countries in the region, swayed by both their economic dependence on China and growing concerns about the United States’ commitment to Asia, have failed to push back against Chinese assertiveness as much as U.S. policymakers expected they would.

TAKING STOCK

As the assumptions driving U.S. China policy have started to look increasingly tenuous, and the gap between American expectations and Chinese realities has grown, Washington has been largely focused elsewhere. Since 2001, the fight against jihadist terrorism has consumed the U.S. national security apparatus, diverting attention from the changes in Asia at exactly the time China was making enormous military, diplomatic, and commercial strides. U.S. President George W. Bush initially referred to China as a “strategic competitor”; in the wake of the September 11 attacks, however, his 2002 National Security Strategy declared, “The world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.” During the Obama administration, there was an effort to “pivot,” or “rebalance,” strategic attention to Asia. But at the end of Obama’s time in office, budgets and personnel remained focused on other regions—there were, for example, three times as many National Security Council staffers working on the Middle East as on all of East and Southeast Asia.

This strategic distraction has given China the opportunity to press its advantages, further motivated by the increasingly prominent view in China that the United States (along with the West more broadly) is in inexorable and rapid decline. Chinese officials see a United States that has been hobbled for years by the global financial crisis, its costly war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and deepening dysfunction in Washington. Xi has called on China to become “a global leader in terms of comprehensive national strength and international influence” by midcentury. He touts China’s development model as a “new option for other countries.”

Washington now faces its most dynamic and formidable competitor in modern history. Getting this challenge right will require doing away with the hopeful thinking that has long characterized the United States’ approach to China. The Trump administration’s first National Security Strategy took a step in the right direction by interrogating past assumptions in U.S. strategy. But many of Donald Trump’s policies—a narrow focus on bilateral trade deficits, the abandonment of multilateral trade deals, the questioning of the value of alliances, and the downgrading of human rights and diplomacy—have put Washington at risk of adopting an approach that is confrontational without being competitive; Beijing, meanwhile, has managed to be increasingly competitive without being confrontational.

The starting point for a better approach is a new degree of humility about the United States’ ability to change China. Neither seeking to isolate and weaken it nor trying to transform it for the better should be the lodestar of U.S. strategy in Asia. Washington should instead focus more on its own power and behavior, and the power and behavior of its allies and partners. Basing policy on a more realistic set of assumptions about China would better advance U.S. interests and put the bilateral relationship on a more sustainable footing. Getting there will take work, but the first step is relatively straightforward: acknowledging just how much our policy has fallen short of our aspirations.

 

 

Did America Get China Wrong?

The Engagement Debate

 
The View From China

"The United States has always had an outsize sense of its ability to determine China’s course,” Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner write in their article “The China Reckoning” (March/April 2018). Of course, China here could be replaced by present-day Egypt or Venezuela, or by South Vietnam before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Americans have often thought that they could alter another country to their liking and then felt frustrated when things turned out otherwise. Still, Campbell and Ratner’s self-reflection is admirable. And their counsel—that Washington should focus more on its own power and base its China policy on more realistic expectations—is worth taking seriously.

Although Campbell and Ratner have legitimate reasons to be dismayed at the direction of the U.S.-Chinese relationship, their Chinese counterparts may be equally disillusioned with, and probably more perplexed by, the United States. Some U.S. watchers in China, myself included, find the country we have studied for years increasingly unrecognizable and unpredictable. We should do our own self-reflection to examine what went wrong. Political polarization, power struggles, scandals, a lack of confidence in national establishments, tweets doubling as policy announcements, the frequent replacement of top officials in charge of foreign affairs, vacancies in important government positions—similar problems existed before, but their intensity and scope have been particularly stunning since the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The way the Trump administration is wielding U.S. power and influence is bewildering to Chinese political analysts. In recent years, Americans have often asked China to follow the “rules-based liberal international order.” Yet Washington now has abandoned or suspended some of the same rules that it used to advocate, such as those of the Paris agreement on climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It has become harder and harder for foreign-policy makers in China to discern what rules the Americans want themselves and others to abide by, what kind of world order they hope to maintain, and where Washington is on major international issues. 

Even more unsettling to Beijing is that a new American consensus is emerging with regard to China. In the United States, “hard realists” focus on China’s military and assertive behavior abroad, while “liberals” deplore China’s effort to tighten political control at home. These two threads have converged in the view that China is a major “strategic competitor” and “revisionist power” that threatens U.S. interests. Official documents, such as the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, enshrine this depiction. As a result, U.S.-Chinese business deals, educational exchanges, and other agreements are becoming increasingly fraught. Previous crises, such as the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 or the midair collision of a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. reconnaissance plane near China’s Hainan Island in 2001, created temporary storms. The current deterioration in relations may prove more permanent. 

Still, two larger principles should prevent a head-on confrontation between China and the United States. First, as the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has pointed out, the primary geopolitical divide today is between “the world of order” and “the world of disorder.” Both China and the United States belong to the world of order. Campbell and Ratner regret that events elsewhere distracted from the Obama administration’s effort to “pivot,” or “rebalance,” U.S. strategic attention to Asia. Yet that might not have been such a bad thing. Despite labeling China as the United States’ principal rival, the Trump administration has fixed its attention on the world of disorder (especially the Middle East and North Korea), and that shouldn’t change as long as China does not commit any blunder that might draw the United States’ focus away from more imminent troubles. 

Second, even as strategic competition and economic friction are likely to intensify between the two countries, there is potential for cooperation. U.S. renewable energy technology, for example, could help China address its environmental challenges. And millions of Chinese people would be willing to spend their savings on American medical breakthroughs if society-to-society ties were strengthened.

Campbell and Ratner seem disturbed by “the increasingly prominent view in China that the United States (along with the West more broadly) is in inexorable and rapid decline.” In fact, Chinese think tanks and media constantly debate whether the United States is a declining power, and no consensus has emerged. Despite occasional triumphalism in Chinese official media, Beijing remains sober-minded enough to see China as a developing country still trying to catch up with the United States not only economically but also in terms of higher education and technological know-how. In reality, compared with most other countries in the world, both China and the United States are rising powers. Although China is rising more rapidly, the power gap between the two countries is still significant. It would be wise for China to adhere to Deng Xiaoping’s approach of “keeping a low profile” and to avoid overstretching its resources. 

In his 2011 book, On China, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proposed that Beijing and Washington establish a relationship of “co-evolution,” in which “both countries pursue their domestic imperatives, cooperating where possible, and adjust their relations to minimize conflict.” I think “co-evolution” also means “benign competition.” Finding out which country is better able to handle its domestic affairs and satisfy its citizens is the most constructive form of competition between China and the United States.

WANG JISI is President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.

 

Engagement Works

Attacks on the supposedly failed China policy of the past 40 years, such as that by Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, are based on the false premise that the policy was meant to remake China in the United States’ image. Such critiques often fail to distinguish between the way Washington publicly justifies its policies, by referring to values, and the way it actually formulates them, by putting national interests first.

Consider Richard Nixon, the ultimate realist. In 1967, before his election to the presidency, he wrote in this magazine about the need to transform China. But when he became president, and his skillful policy brought China to the U.S. side in the Cold War, his real intent became clear: not to turn China into a democracy but to gain a geopolitical advantage for the United States in the competition with the Soviet Union.

Another example is U.S. efforts to establish diplomatic relations with China in the late 1970s. (I participated in the secret negotiations as a State Department official.) Washington could not fully exploit its advantage in the Cold War without establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing. It was that sentiment—and not gauzy dreams of Chinese democracy—that drove the policy of normalization.

An exception to the rule of interest-based policy formulation was the Clinton administration’s misguided decision in 1993 to link most favored nation trading status to human rights in a vain effort to use economic leverage to force changes in Chinese behavior. (As the U.S. ambassador to China at the time, I doubted the wisdom of this approach but sought to carry it out to the best of my ability.) The policy failed, not because of obduracy in Beijing but because the United States put one of its interests in opposition to another. This produced internecine warfare in Washington. Ultimately, the president rescinded the policy. 

To date, constructive engagement has served U.S. interests well. Since the 1980s, cooperation with China has advanced U.S. national interests in many areas. American businesses were eager to tap into the Chinese market, and U.S. companies lowered the cost of their goods by taking advantage of cheaper labor. Although Maoist China believed that nuclear proliferation would break the monopoly of imperialists and hegemons, China under Deng Xiaoping accepted that proliferation posed a threat to Chinese interests and acceded to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1992. Today, dealing with global warming would be impossible without Chinese cooperation. 

Meanwhile, China changed for the better all on its own. The Communist Party’s decision to let the country’s best students study at U.S. universities, exposing them to the vitality of the U.S. market-based economy and showing them the positive role that an independent judiciary and a free press can play in checking abuses of power and corruption, has made a profound impact. Chinese diplomats, some trained in the United States, have become highly professional. Chinese financiers have brought home financial skills learned in the West. And Chinese lawyers, influenced by international standards, have quietly drafted new prison laws to curb torture and the mistreatment of prisoners.

Should the United States have hindered the economic development in China that has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of abject poverty? How would that have accorded with U.S. values? At every step of the way, U.S. policymakers have known that a more prosperous and more powerful China would take on the characteristics of a rising power. That was not, and should not have been, cause for alarm. Do Americans really believe that their government lacks the capacity to deal with powerful countries in ways that do not lead to war? 

Last fall, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified to Congress that China would become the biggest threat to the United States by 2025. That is quite possible. Should Washington mistakenly conclude that this outcome is predetermined, it will happen even sooner. Slashing the State Department’s budget, inducing the most experienced Foreign Service officers to leave in droves, and disparaging diplomacy will weaken the foreign policy arm of U.S. strategy and make military solutions the sole alternative.

There is a better way. The wisest approach would be to continue engaging with China while focusing on advancing U.S. interests. If Washington behaves responsibly, the U.S. military presence in East Asia will balance China’s growing strength and foster its peaceful rise. Meanwhile, the United States should stop sending the world the message that it is no longer prepared to play a constructive global leadership role. Instead, it should emphasize that U.S. policies seek the common good, not simply the good of the United States. Making the U.S. model more attractive should be the starting point of any effort to deal with a rising China. 

J. STAPLETON ROY is former Founding Director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. From 1991 to 1995, he served as U.S. Ambassador to China. 

 

The Signs Were There

Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner’s essay is a valuable contribution to the intensifying debate over the future of U.S. China policy, but it is also incomplete and, in certain respects, misleading. Although no school of thought or individual observer can claim to have gotten China completely right over the past quarter century, some have done better than others at grasping Beijing’s motivations and anticipating its behavior. The “clear-eyed rethinking of the United States’ approach to China” that Campbell and Ratner call for should begin by acknowledging this disparity and examining the divergent beliefs and assumptions that lie behind it.

As the authors note, events have decisively disproved the predictions of those who claimed that engagement would lead to China’s economic and political liberalization and its transformation into a “responsible stakeholder” in the U.S.-led international order. Optimistic observers underestimated the Chinese Communist Party’s resourcefulness, ruthlessness, and unwavering determination to retain its exclusive grip on domestic political power, and they overstated the material and ideological forces that were supposedly pushing China toward greater openness, integration, and democracy. Since Deng Xiaoping began the process of “reform and opening up,” China’s leaders have confounded the expectations of their Western counterparts, finding ways to enjoy the benefits of participation in the global economy while retaining control over their people through an evolving mixture of co-optation, coercion, and indoctrination.

Whether they realized it or not, the optimists were influenced by academic theories about the requirements of economic growth, the links between development and democracy, and the socializing effects of participation in international institutions. The widespread acceptance and apparent authority of these theories made it easier to downplay or ignore evidence that seemed to contradict them. In addition, from the 1990s onward, Beijing used propaganda and influence operations to encourage the perception that engagement was achieving its desired effects. 

Many optimists also appear to have suffered from a failure of imagination and a lack of strategic empathy. They could not conceive of what Beijing might want other than to become a full member of the Western “club,” and they seem not to have understood that the liberal principles on which the prevailing international order was based were profoundly threatening to China’s authoritarian rulers. Whatever their shortcomings, however, optimistic arguments underpinned a set of policies that promised to promote peace and stability and that were enormously profitable for at least some sectors of American society. It is not surprising that these policies were backed by a broad coalition of experts, business executives, politicians, and former government officials. 

In support of their assertion that “all sides of the policy debate erred,” Campbell and Ratner include one example of what might be called “hawkish optimism”: the argument that if it maintained a sufficient margin of advantage, the United States could dissuade China from trying to compete with it in the military domain. Although this view had some adherents, with the passage of time, most China hawks argued not that competition could be avoided but that the United States needed to run faster in order to stay ahead. If not for the 9/11 attacks, this is the approach that the George W. Bush administration would have pursued with greater vigor, and it was the course of action that the Obama administration attempted to resume with its 2011 announcement of the “pivot.”

The fact is that not everyone has been equally optimistic about the ability of U.S. policy to change China or to steer relations onto a smooth and peaceful trajectory. Absent from Campbell and Ratner’s account is any discussion of those who, for some time, have questioned the efficacy of engagement and warned that an escalating competition with China was, if not inevitable, then highly likely. Like their optimistic cousins, these skeptics came in several varieties. As China’s economic growth accelerated in the 1990s, some theorists of international relations (such as Samuel Huntington) cautioned that fast-rising states have historically tended to seek regional, if not global, hegemony, pursuits that have often brought them into conflict with the dominant powers of their day. Around that time, a handful of defense analysts (led by Andrew Marshall, the director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment) began to warn that if it acquired large numbers of conventional precision-strike weapons, China might be able to offset the United States’ seemingly overwhelming advantage in military capabilities, thus neutralizing its ability to project power into the western Pacific. And beginning in the early years of this century, despite talk of village elections, the growth of civil society, and the unstoppable momentum of market-driven reforms in China, a few close observers (such as James Mann,  Andrew Nathan, and Minxin Pei) identified retrograde, repressive, statist, and nationalist tendencies in the political and economic policies of the Chinese regime. 

For most of the past quarter century, the skeptics struggled to gain traction against their more numerous, influential, and optimistic opponents. In time, U.S. policy grew ever more lopsided. Washington continued to pursue engagement while failing to invest adequately in the diplomatic and military policies needed to balance China’s growing strength and without paying sufficient attention to the risks of opening up its economy and society to an emerging strategic competitor. 

The United States and its democratic allies today face an increasingly rich and powerful authoritarian rival that is both ambitious and deeply insecure. China’s rulers are attempting to use every instrument at their disposal to reshape Asia and the world in ways that serve their interests and defend their domestic regime. This is a challenge of historic proportions. But it should not have come as a surprise.

AARON FRIEDBERG is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. From 2003 to 2005, he served as Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

 

Don’t Abandon Ship

Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner brand decades of U.S. policy toward China as a failure, reflecting Washington’s current apprehension over the direction of Beijing’s domestic and foreign policies. But their article misses the mark in fundamental ways, offering an often inaccurate account of U.S. officials’ expectations of and strategies toward China and sweeping the many achievements of past decades under the rug. 

It is unrealistic to think that the United States could drive China to abandon its political system and to curb its ambitions to become a great power. But history has demonstrated that the United States can affect how China pursues its interests by projecting American strength and leveraging common interests. It would be rash and self-destructive, therefore, for Washington to abandon efforts to shape China’s policy choices, as Campbell and Ratner suggest.

Campbell and Ratner identify President Richard Nixon’s opening to China as the start of a failed attempt to alter China’s political trajectory. But rapprochement was never designed primarily as a means to change Beijing’s basic interests; it was about recognizing common interests and working with China for mutual benefit. China’s decision to side with the anti-Soviet camp created enormous advantages for the United States and great costs for the Soviet Union. For example, the Chinese border with the Soviet Union and Mongolia tied down more Soviet forces than were stationed in all the Warsaw Pact countries. 

Through rapprochement, Chinese leaders also came to see the stabilizing benefits of the U.S. presence in East Asia, which underpinned its tacit acceptance of the U.S.-Japanese alliance. As Campbell and Ratner point out, Beijing today is much less sanguine about this system and is increasing its capabilities to counter the U.S. military presence in the region. But there is little evidence of a concerted effort to drive the U.S. military out of Asia. Chinese analysts still grudgingly recognize that the U.S. presence can serve as a restraint on U.S. allies in the region and prevent the escalation of local conflicts. Washington can still use this common desire for stability, along with clear projections of U.S. strength, to encourage cooperative behavior by China in East Asia.

Although the United States made some compromises on its Taiwan policy along the path toward the normalization of relations with China in 1979, it has successfully protected the island from domination despite the massive rise of mainland China’s power in subsequent decades. Under the United States’ own “one China” policy, the United States has maintained a robust relationship with Taiwan, which has created incentives for mainland China not to act rashly to achieve unification. Taiwan is now a free and wealthy democracy. It almost certainly would not be either of those things without the United States’ balanced, informed, and firm posture toward cross-strait relations over the last five decades.

U.S. policies toward China and the World Trade Organization have also fostered a web of economic interdependence that has produced great prosperity and arguably been a major force for peace. Since China joined the WTO, in 2001, U.S. exports to China have grown faster than U.S. imports from China. China is now the United States’ third-largest export market. Beijing’s recently introduced “Made in China 2025” campaign and the ongoing coerced transfer of intellectual property from foreign firms to Chinese ones are troubling, but this is hardly the fault of WTO agreements, which are primarily about trade. What is needed to address such problems are more agreements—for example, a bilateral investment treaty and U.S. accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership—and much better enforcement of existing ones. 

The effort since 2005 to urge China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the existing international order has often been frustrating, but it has hardly been a failure. The United States has convinced a reluctant China to contribute to important international efforts, such as reducing genocidal violence in Sudan, pushing Iran to negotiate the nuclear deal, and pressuring North Korea to reenter negotiations on nuclear disarmament. The United States has little choice but to seek Chinese cooperation on such matters: China’s economic footprint is so large in these troubled regions that it could single-handedly undercut international pressure.

Campbell and Ratner seem to suggest that almost anything China does to become more influential, including developing a stronger military, is revisionist. To them, that’s true even of China’s development of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (which adheres to the existing norms of international development lending), because they view the international order as by definition U.S.-led. According to this logic, the only way that U.S. policy could be considered a success is if China were to stop getting stronger or refrain from seeking a larger voice with its growing power. Such a standard is unrealistic and provides no guidance for how the United States can best manage the reality of China’s increasing power and influence.

Although the United States could never dictate Chinese foreign policy, it can, along with allies and partners, shape the environment around China so that destabilizing policy options appear unwise to Chinese elites. As China’s power grows, this task will become more challenging, but it is not impossible. It can be achieved with precisely the policies Campbell and Ratner advocate, including a strong U.S. presence in East Asia and the avoidance of unnecessary confrontations. In fact, this is what U.S. officials in all administrations since Nixon’s have advocated. And despite dismissing decades of U.S. China policy as an utter failure, Campbell and Ratner largely promote a strategy of staying the course. 

Campbell and Ratner are rightly concerned about various disappointing trends in Chinese domestic and foreign policy since the 2008 financial crisis: the strengthening of authoritarianism at home, the moves away from marketization, and China’s abandonment of its “peaceful rise” diplomacy of the previous decade in favor of assertive behavior in regard to sovereignty disputes in the East China and South China Seas. But many Chinese observers, including well-placed ones in the Chinese Communist Party, share these concerns and disappointments. In 2007, few of them would have anticipated all that transpired in the decade that followed, so it seems unfair to claim that U.S. China watchers were naive or ill informed when they hoped for or expected better.

Ultimately, if there is to be progressive political change in China, it will have to come from within China itself. But the United States should continue encouraging Chinese leaders to seek political stability and greater prosperity through more liberty and freer markets. The United States can do this in two ways: by getting its own house in order to set an example that inspires Chinese citizens and elites and by continuing to try to persuade Chinese leaders at all levels that political and economic reform will produce more stability and wealth than will doubling down on statist economics and authoritarianism. Liberal democratic ideas are still powerful in China—that is precisely why the Chinese Communist Party spends so many resources countering them. 

THOMAS CHRISTENSEN is William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2006 to 2008, he served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. PATRICIA KIM is Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

Time Will Tell

Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner are right to raise questions about the assumptions that have guided U.S. China policy. Twenty-five years ago, the West bet that China would head toward democracy and a market economy. Such a bet was not simply the product of post–Cold War illusions. Social science theories of modernization suggested that as an economy approached the threshold of an annual income of $10,000 per capita, an expanding middle class would demand more liberties. This expectation was based not only on Western history but also on the recent experiences of Asian countries such as South Korea. Moreover, the development of the Internet meant that societies had access to vastly more information than ever before. U.S. President Bill Clinton said that trying to control the Internet would be like trying to “nail Jell-O to the wall.” As it turned out, the Chinese Communist Party proved quite adept at that seemingly impossible task. 

Were these theories wrong? Yes, in the short run, but it is too soon to be sure for the long run. It may take many more decades for modernization theories to be properly tested by history. 

Regardless, U.S. policy toward China has not been a total failure. When I supervised the Pentagon’s East Asian strategy review in 1994, the United States knew that if it tried to contain China and prevent its economic growth, it would fail, because such a policy had no support in the region or elsewhere. Moreover, as I told the U.S. Congress at the time, treating China as an enemy would guarantee that it would become one. Integrating China into the international order would not assure future friendship, but it would keep open a range of cooperative possibilities.

Just to be safe, however, we created an insurance policy in case this bet failed. As Campbell has pointed out elsewhere, when it comes to U.S. grand strategy in Asia, some Americans start with China and work from the inside out. Others work from the outside in and aim to stabilize the situation by arranging alliances in the region to balance Chinese power. That was the strategy we chose during the Clinton administration. 

In 1994, we began to revive the U.S.-Japanese security alliance, which was in bad shape. Many Americans regarded the alliance as a Cold War relic, and some even feared a Japanese economic threat. In Japan, many politicians viewed the U.S. treaty as obsolete and wanted a closer relationship with China or reliance on the UN, instead of the United States, for security. After two years of hard work, we were able to reduce support for those positions in both countries. The joint declaration on a security alliance signed in April 1996 established the U.S.-Japanese treaty as the basis for stability and prosperity in East Asia in the post–Cold War era. It remains so to this day. Some American hawks argue that China wishes to expel the United States from the western Pacific, or at least push the country back beyond the chain of islands that run along China’s coast. But Japan is the heart of this island chain, and it pays the United States to keep 50,000 troops there. China is in no position to expel the U.S. military. 

No one can be certain about China’s long-term future—not even Chinese President Xi Jinping. If the United States maintains its alliances with Australia and Japan and continues to develop good relations with India, it will hold the best cards in the Asian balance of power. The United States is better positioned than China not just in terms of military power but also in terms of demographics, technology, currency reserves, and energy independence. There is no need to succumb to exaggerated fears. Washington can wait to see what future decades will produce in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping created a framework for institutional succession, which Xi has torn up. Xi’s new system might not last forever. In the meantime, there are issues such as climate change, pandemic disease, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and financial instability on which both countries can benefit from cooperation.

Maybe the United States was not so wrong after all. As strategic gambles go, the outside-in China policy has proved more robust than the current handwringers recognize. 

JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., is University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Kennedy School. From 1994 to 1995, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

 

Better Together

Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner rightly conclude that the United States needs to adjust its basic assumptions about China and pursue a more sustainable bilateral relationship. But the historical and contemporary contexts on which the authors draw to reach such a conclusion are deeply flawed. A strategic redesign based on this faulty reasoning would make the world less stable and leave the United States in a weaker position.  

First, the assessment that the United States has always failed to induce changes in Chinese behavior is incorrect. Campbell and Ratner neglect to mention that President Richard Nixon’s opening to China altered Chinese policies in the United States’ favor, which was arguably one of the most decisive factors in the outcome of the Cold War. Second, Beijing’s participation in Washington-led economic globalization has made China perhaps the largest contributor to global economic expansion and interconnectedness in the past three decades. Fifteen years ago, the Chinese grand strategist Zheng Bijian coined the term “peaceful rise” to describe China’s development. Many doubted such a shift would be possible. But a peaceful rise has already happened to a large extent. 

In both ancient and modern times, violence and disruptions have accompanied the rise of great powers. The Athenian Empire, the Roman Empire, and the British Empire, along with France, Germany, Japan, and the United States, all invaded countless countries and territories, killed massive numbers of people, and subjugated large populations to enable their ascents. China’s rise has been faster and bigger, yet so far, it has been largely peaceful. This is in no small part because of China’s successful integration into the post–World War II international order. 

As Campbell and Ratner admit, China has participated fully in the international institutions that it has joined, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. The authors fault China for not fully supporting, and at times seeking to undermine, the U.S. alliance system in Asia, which they present as a bedrock of the order. But China is excluded from this alliance system. Washington should not expect Beijing to comply with a system that acts against China’s national interests. 

American elites such as Campbell and Ratner assume that the current international order empowers the United States to compel other countries to accept its political system and values and to militarily enforce what Washington views as the correct application of international rules. But the post–World War II order confers no such legitimacy. The UN Charter specifically guarantees national sovereignty. That was the kind of international order China signed on to after Nixon’s outreach; Beijing has never accepted Washington’s post–Cold War revision of the order, which expanded the powers of the U.S. alliance system to attack or invade sovereign nations without the endorsement of the UN Security Council.   

China and the United States should and must cooperate to ensure a peaceful and productive twenty-first century. A realignment of the bilateral relationship is necessary, but it should be based on a correct understanding of the historical and contemporary contexts. If U.S. elites continue to believe that their country is entitled to global hegemony, the United States will accelerate its own decline. The world is too big, and too many developing countries are rapidly catching up, for a country of 325 million people to be its sole ruler.  

But if the United States abandons its post–Cold War triumphalism and returns to the priorities that made the twentieth century “the American century”—rebuilding its own social cohesion, achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth, and investing in the future—it can excel in a more competitive world without making an enemy of China or anyone else. If the United States treats China, and indeed also Russia, with the respect that such a great power deserves by recognizing its natural sphere of influence, it will have a chance to remain the world’s most powerful country for a long time.  

ERIC LI is a venture capitalist and political scientist based in Shanghai.

 

Campbell and Ratner Reply

In “The China Reckoning,” we advanced a straightforward set of claims: that U.S. policy toward China, particularly since the end of the Cold War, has been undergirded by the belief that China would gradually liberalize and broadly accept the existing international system; that the gap between these aspirations and China’s actual evolution is growing wider; and that this divergence calls for a reassessment of U.S. strategy. 

The responses to our piece collected here are thoughtful contributions to the debate over how to interpret and advance U.S.-Chinese relations. Notably, despite quibbles over historical context and language, the responses rarely challenge our core arguments. 

Admittedly, there are areas where our essay would have benefited from greater clarity or detail. It is true that many motivations have animated U.S. policy apart from ambitions to shape China’s future. Nevertheless, we stand by the assertion that assumptions about how China would change have been deeply embedded in the fabric of U.S. policymaking. These were not merely rhetorical devices to justify alternative ends, as Stapleton Roy suggests. 

A careful reading of our essay should belie several reflexive and unfounded critiques. We did not argue that U.S. policy has been an “utter failure,” as Thomas Christensen and Patricia Kim claim. This misinterpretation stems in part from sins of omission. We should have more prominently underscored the consequential achievements of U.S. China policy, including the remarkable diplomatic opening that reshaped the contours of the Cold War. We did, however, acknowledge that Washington’s engagement with Beijing has produced tremendous commercial gains and led to critical Chinese contributions on major international issues, including efforts to curb the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. Critics are right to add multilateral cooperation on climate change and stability across the Taiwan Strait to that list of accomplishments, and we agree that the environment and global health are important areas for future U.S.-Chinese collaboration. 

That said, despite decades of diplomatic exchanges and a robust economic relationship, bilateral cooperation has remained hard fought and narrow, rarely enduring beyond particular moments when U.S. and Chinese interests happened to align. There are many reasons for this, but it is telling that China has been more willing to make concessions in response to the Trump administration’s threats of punitive action—for example, on North Korea and trade—than was often the case during the preceding decades of intense and respectful strategic engagement. This is less an endorsement of President Donald Trump’s approach than a recognition that Beijing rarely went to its bottom line under the policies pursued by previous U.S. administrations. Future U.S. officials will have to wrestle with this uncomfortable reality.

Nowhere do we assert that U.S. policymakers were naive or ill informed. For example, contrary to what some of our critics claim, we argued that U.S. engagement was grounded in modest expectations for gradual reforms, not rosy hopes for imminent Chinese democratization. In our view, many of these assessments were reasonable at the time, given the prevailing uncertainty over China’s development. Nonetheless, it is now clear that China is challenging core U.S. interests in ways that policymakers either did not anticipate or hoped to prevent.

Some critics have urged us to be more patient, arguing that China’s political evolution is not yet complete and that Washington should remain focused on efforts to empower reformers or, in the words of Christensen and Kim, “persuade Chinese leaders” to relinquish authoritarianism and China’s statist model. But continuing to base policy primarily on what the United States wants China to be, rather than what China is, will only inhibit Washington’s ability to respond effectively to the challenge. Although we concur that the Chinese people would benefit from a more representative system, near-term change does not appear likely. The United States needs a strategy to cooperate and compete with a China that is decidedly illiberal at home and abroad, even if we wish it were otherwise. 

We readily acknowledge, as Aaron Friedberg observes, that there has been a healthy debate on China policy over the years, with no shortage of dissenting voices, some of whom warned that U.S. decision-making was based on overly optimistic expectations. But none of those arguments carried the day. After pivotal events such as the fall of the Soviet Union, the Taiwan Strait crises of the mid-1990s, the 9/11 attacks, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the rise of Xi Jinping in 2012, Washington repeatedly returned to the same consensus approach. This current juncture, however, feels different, in part because the costs of being wrong about China’s future are now substantially larger than in previous decades. The combination of China’s increasing power and Beijing’s propensity to wield it in a manner that is out of step with global norms suggests that a true China reckoning has arrived. 

Some objections to our essay have centered on fears that rethinking U.S. China policy will necessarily lead to another Cold War. We did not call for the United States to contain China as it once contained the Soviet Union; in fact, we explicitly ruled out trying to isolate or weaken China as a sensible U.S. aim. That some commentators view containment as the default alternative to the traditional policy is itself a testament both to the urgent need for new ideas and to the paucity of strategic options in the current debate.

Furthermore, reexamining U.S. China policy does not require one to endorse Trump’s foreign policies. There are commendable elements of the Trump administration’s approach to Asia (even if much of it remains inchoate or incomplete), but an “America first” attitude to trade, alliances, human rights, and diplomacy runs the risk, as we wrote, of being “confrontational without being competitive.” Analysts at home and abroad should take care to separate a much-needed debate on U.S. China policy from critiques of Trump. 

We share the views of Wang Jisi and Joseph Nye that the foundations of American power are strong. The United States boasts top-notch universities, innovative companies, favorable demographic trends, strong alliances, and plentiful energy resources, all of which provide a sound basis to protect and advance U.S. values and interests. We further agree that Washington should address endemic political dysfunction, fiscal irresponsibility, and income inequality at home, which threaten the United States’ future at least as much as any foreign power does. 

Our objective in writing “The China Reckoning” was to interrogate the old consensus and spark a debate about the assumptions that have guided U.S. China policy, not to propose specific prescriptions. Analysts and policymakers need to refocus their lenses and grapple with new realities. We hope that our essay and these responses will mark a meaningful step in that direction.

 
 

China's New Revolution

The Reign of Xi Jinping

Standing onstage in the auditorium of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, against a backdrop of a stylized hammer and sickle, Xi Jinping sounded a triumphant note. It was October 2017, and the Chinese leader was addressing the 19th Party Congress, the latest of the gatherings of Chinese Communist Party elites held every five years. In his three-and-a-half-hour speech, Xi, who was appointed the CCP’s general secretary in 2012, declared his first term a “truly remarkable five years in the course of the development of the party and the country,” a time in which China had “stood up, grown rich, and become strong.” He acknowledged that the party and the country still confronted challenges, such as official corruption, inequality in living standards, and what he called “erroneous viewpoints.” But overall, he insisted, China was headed in the right direction—so much so, in fact, that he recommended that other countries draw on “Chinese wisdom” and follow “a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.” Not since Mao Zedong had a Chinese leader so directly suggested that others should emulate his country’s model.

Xi’s confidence is not without grounds. In the past five years, the Chinese leadership has made notable progress on a number of its priorities. Its much-heralded anticorruption campaign has accelerated, with the number of officials disciplined for graft increasing from some 150,000 in 2012 to more than 400,000 in 2016. Air quality in many of China’s famously smoggy cities has improved measurably. In the South China Sea, Beijing has successfully advanced its sovereignty claims by militarizing existing islands and creating new ones outright, and it has steadily eroded the autonomy of Hong Kong through a series of political and legal maneuvers. Across Asia, it has enhanced its influence through the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive regional infrastructure plan. All the while, the Chinese economy has continued to expand, and in 2017, GDP grew by 6.9 percent, the first time the growth rate had gone up in seven years.

But Xi’s ambitions extend beyond these areas to something more fundamental. In the 1940s, Mao led the communist revolution that created the contemporary Chinese party-state. Beginning in the late 1970s, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, oversaw a self-proclaimed “second revolution,” in which he ushered in economic reforms and the low-profile foreign policy that produced China’s economic miracle. Now, Xi has launched a third revolution. Not only has he slowed, and, in many cases, reversed, the process of “reform and opening up” set in motion by Deng, but he has also sought to advance the principles of this new China on the global stage. Moreover, in a striking move made in March, the government eliminated the constitutional provision limiting the president to two terms, allowing Xi to serve as president for life.  For the first time, China is an illiberal state seeking leadership in a liberal world order.

THE REVOLUTION BEGINS

Xi began his revolution as soon as he took power. For more than three decades, the Chinese political system had been run by a process of collective leadership, whereby decision-making authority was shared among officials in the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top ruling body. But Xi quickly moved to centralize political authority in his own hands. Within the first few years of his tenure, he assumed leadership of all the most important committees overseeing policy, such as those concerning cyber issues, economic reform, and national security. He secured public pronouncements of loyalty from top officials, such as People’s Liberation Army generals and provincial party secretaries, as well as from the media. And he has used an anticorruption campaign to root out not just self-serving officials but also his political enemies. In July 2017, for example, Sun Zhengcai, a rising star within the CCP who served as party secretary of the municipality of Chongqing, was charged with corruption and removed from office; months later, a senior official announced that Sun had plotted with others to overthrow Xi.

At the 19th Party Congress, Xi further cemented his hold on CCP institutions and consolidated his personal power. His name and his ideology—“Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism With Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”—were enshrined in the party’s constitution, an honor previously granted only to Mao. More allies of his were added to the CCP’s 25-member Politburo and its seven-member Standing Committee, such that more than half of each group is now composed of Xi loyalists. Then came the change that left open the possibility that Xi could serve as president indefinitely.

Xi has matched the dramatic growth of his personal power with an equally dramatic intensification of the CCP’s power in society and the economy. The China scholar David Shambaugh once noted, “If one of the hallmarks of the Maoist state was the penetration of society, then the Dengist state was noticeable for its withdrawal.” Now, under Xi, the pendulum has swung back toward a greater role for the party. No element of political and economic life has remained untouched.

In the political sphere, the CCP has taken advantage of new technology and put greater pressure on the private sector to restrict access to forbidden content online, sharply diminishing the vibrancy of China’s virtual public square. Even privately shared humor can trigger police action. In September 2017, authorities detained a man for five days after he sent a joke about a rumored love triangle involving a government official to a group over the messaging app WeChat. The government is also developing a massive biometric database that, thanks to state-of-the-art voice- and facial-recognition technologies, could be married to its vast telephone and video surveillance network and used to identify and retaliate against party critics. By 2020, Beijing plans to have rolled out a national system of “social credit,” integrating information from online payment and social media apps into a database that would allow it to punish or reward citizens based on their supposed trustworthiness. Those whose behavior falls short—defaulting on a loan, participating in a protest, even wasting too much time playing video games—will face a range of consequences. The government might slow their Internet connections or restrict their access to everything from restaurants to travel to jobs, while giving preferred access to those who abide by the CCP’s rules. 

For the first time, China is an illiberal state seeking leadership in a liberal world order.

On the economic front, Xi has defied expectations that he would accelerate market-based reforms. He has strengthened the position of state-owned enterprises, assigning them a leading role in economic development campaigns, and he has empowered the party committees that sit inside every Chinese firm. In recent years, those committees had only ill-defined roles, but thanks to a new requirement under Xi, management must seek their advice—and, in some cases, their approval—for all major decisions. The CCP has called for similar rules to apply in joint ventures with multinational corporations. Even private companies are no longer outside the party’s purview. In 2017, Beijing announced plans to expand an experiment in which the party takes small stakes in media and technology companies, including such giants as Alibaba and Tencent, and receives a degree of decision-making power.

AMBITIONS ABROAD

While Xi has limited political and economic openness at home, on the international stage, he has sought to position himself as globalizer in chief. At a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in November 2017, for example, he proclaimed, “Opening up will bring progress, and those who close down will inevitably lag behind.” Such rhetoric is misleading. In fact, one of the most distinctive elements of Xi’s rule has been his creation of a wall of regulations designed to control the flow of ideas, culture, and even capital between China and the rest of the world.

Although restrictions on foreign influence are nothing new in China, they have proliferated under Xi. In January 2017, Beijing enacted a stringent new law requiring nongovernmental organizations in China to register with the Ministry of Public Security, obtain permission for every activity they engage in, and refrain from fundraising within China. By March 2018, only 330-odd groups had registered, about four percent of the total that had been operating in China before the law. Meanwhile, Beijing has begun the process of formally blocking foreign-owned virtual private networks that allow users to circumvent China’s so-called Great Firewall.

A similar pattern has emerged in the economic realm. In 2015, in order to prevent China’s currency from depreciating and its foreign reserves from plummeting, Beijing placed strict controls on Chinese citizens’ and corporations’ ability to move foreign currency out of the country. That same year, the government launched its “Made in China 2025” program, a self-sufficiency drive that sets out ten key industries, from materials to artificial intelligence, in which Chinese firms are expected to control as much as 80 percent of the domestic market by 2025. To ensure that Chinese companies dominate, the government not only provides large subsidies but also puts in place a variety of barriers to foreign competition. In the electric car industry, for example, it has required Chinese automakers to use batteries made in Chinese factories that have been operating for more than a year, effectively eliminating the major Japanese and South Korean competitors.

Meanwhile, Xi has moved China further away from its traditional commitment to a low-profile foreign policy, accelerating a shift begun by his predecessor, Hu Jintao. Under Xi, China now actively seeks to shape international norms and institutions and forcefully asserts its presence on the global stage. As Xi colorfully put it in a 2014 speech, China should be capable of “constructing international playgrounds”—and “creating the rules” of the games played on them.

Xi’s most notable gambit on this front is his Belt and Road Initiative, a modern incarnation of the ancient Silk Road and maritime spice routes. Launched in 2013, the undertaking now encompasses as many as 900 projects, more than 80 percent of which are contracted to Chinese firms. But the effort goes far beyond mere infrastructure. In Pakistan, for example, the plan includes not only railroads, highways, and dams but also a proposal to develop a system of video and Internet surveillance similar to that in Beijing and a partnership with a Pakistani television channel to disseminate Chinese media content. The Belt and Road Initiative has also given China an opportunity to advance its military objectives. Chinese state-owned enterprises now run at least 76 ports and terminals out of 34 countries, and in Greece, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Chinese investment in ports has been followed by high-profile visits from Chinese naval vessels. Beijing has also announced that it will be establishing special arbitration courts for Belt and Road Initiative projects, thereby using the plan to promote an alternative legal system underpinned by Chinese rules.

Indeed, China is increasingly seeking to export its political values across the globe. In Ethiopia and Sudan, for example, the CCP is training officials on how to manage public opinion and the media, offering advice on what legislation to pass and which monitoring and surveillance technologies to use. Perhaps the most noteworthy effort is China’s campaign to promote its vision of a closed Internet. Under the banner of “cyber-sovereignty,” Beijing has promulgated the idea that countries should be allowed to, as one official document explained, “choose their own path of cyber development, model of cyber regulation and Internet public policies.” It has pushed for negotiations about Internet governance that would privilege states and exclude representatives from civil society and the private sector, and it hosts an annual conference to convince foreign officials and businesspeople of its view of the Internet.

China also dangles access to its massive domestic market to coerce corporations to play by its rules. In 2017, for example, Apple was convinced to open a data center in China in order to comply with new rules requiring foreign firms to store certain data inside the country (where it will presumably be easier to monitor). That same year, the company removed from its app store hundreds of programs that helped people get around the Great Firewall.

Ironically, for all the talk of sovereignty, part of Xi’s more assertive foreign policy involves unquestionable violations of it. The government’s Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms, which purvey Chinese language and culture abroad, have come under increasing scrutiny in the United States and elsewhere for spreading CCP propaganda, although they probably pose a lesser threat to U.S. interests than is commonly thought. More challenging is China’s effort to mobilize its overseas communities, particularly students, to protest visits by the Dalai Lama, inform on Chinese studying abroad who do not follow the CCP line, and vociferously represent the government’s position on sensitive issues such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. This effort contributes to a climate of intimidation and fear within the Chinese overseas student community (not to mention the broader university community), and it threatens to tar all Chinese students as representatives of the Chinese government. Of even greater concern, Chinese security officials have on several occasions abducted former Chinese nationals who are now citizens of other countries. After a Chinese Swedish bookseller was snatched from a train in China and detained earlier this year, the state-supported Global Times editorialized, “European countries and the U.S. should educate their newly naturalized citizens that the new passport cannot be their amulet in China.”

There may be more pushback against Xi than is commonly thought.

RETHINKING XI

Many observers view Xi as an economic reformer who has been thwarted by powerful opposition, as the best hope for positive global leadership, as overwhelmingly popular among the Chinese people, and as committed to stability abroad in order to focus on affairs at home. In fact, such assessments miss four fundamental truths about him.

First, Xi is playing a long game. His preference for control over competition often leads to policies that appear suboptimal in the short run. For example, his centralization of power and anticorruption campaign have slowed decision-making at the top of the Chinese political system, which in turn has led to paralysis at local levels of governance and lower rates of economic growth. Yet such policies have a long-term payoff. Chinese leaders tolerate the inefficiencies that come with nonmarket policies—say, slow Internet connections or money-losing state-owned enterprises—not only because the policies enhance their own political power but also because they afford them the luxury of making longer-term strategic investments. Thus, for example, the government encourages state-owned enterprises to invest in high-risk economies in support of the Belt and Road Initiative, in order to gain controlling stakes in strategic ports or set technical standards, such as railway track gauges or types of satellite navigation systems, for the next wave of global economic development. Decisions that may appear immediately irrational in the context of a liberal political system and a market economy often have a longer-term strategic logic within China.

Second, although he harbors ambitions on the global stage, Xi has only rarely demonstrated true global leadership, in the sense of showing a willingness to align his country’s interests with—or even subordinate them to—those of the broader international community. With a few exceptions, such as when it comes to UN peacekeeping contributions, China steps up to provide global public goods only when doing so serves its own short-term interests or when it has been pressured to do so. Moreover, it is increasingly seeking to ignore established norms and set its own rules of the road. In 2016, when the International Court of Arbitration rejected Chinese claims to wide swaths of the South China Sea, Beijing simply dismissed the ruling and carried on with its land-reclamation and militarization efforts there.

Third, Xi’s centralization of power and growing control over information make it hard to assess how much consensus there really is in China about the direction in which he and the rest of the Chinese leadership are taking the country. There may be more pushback against Xi than is commonly thought. In academic and official circles, a wide-ranging debate over the merits of many of the regime’s policies rages, even if it is less robust than during previous times. Many of China’s wealthiest and most talented citizens, concerned about the state’s heavier hand, have moved their money and families abroad. Chinese lawyers and others have condemned many of Xi’s initiatives, including the recent move to eliminate term limits. Even his signature Belt and Road Initiative has generated criticism from scholars and business leaders, who argue that many of the proposed investments have no economic rationale.

Finally, Xi has eliminated the dividing line between domestic and foreign policy. There may have been a time when the political and economic implications of China’s authoritarian system were confined largely to its own society. But now that the country is exporting its political values—in some cases, to buttress other authoritarian-leaning leaders, and in others, to undermine international law and threaten other states’ sovereignty—China’s governance model is front and center in its foreign policy.

CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE

At the heart of Xi’s revolution is a values-based challenge to the international norms promoted by the United States. The Trump administration must now advance an equivalent challenge to China—one that begins with a forceful assertion of enduring American principles. This means not only maintaining a strong military presence in the Asia-Pacific but also demonstrating a continued commitment to free trade and democracy. At the same time, the United States must mount a vigorous defense at home. Because it can no longer count on China to continue the process of reform and opening up, it should stop sacrificing its own economic and political security. In the past, Washington tolerated a degree of intellectual property theft and unequal market access because it believed that China was making some progress toward market principles and the rule of law. With that logic off the table, there is no reason the United States shouldn’t adopt more restrictive policies toward China.

Keeping up with Xi’s many new initiatives is not easy, and it is tempting to respond to each one as it arrives. In March, for example, reports that Djibouti—home of the U.S. military’s only permanent base in Africa—was planning to give China control over a port prompted senior U.S. officials to sound alarm bells and press Djibouti to reverse course. Yet the United States offered no constructive alternative, such as an economic development package. More important, nor did it put forth a broader U.S. strategy to address China’s ambitions in Africa and other places covered by its Belt and Road Initiative. (As events played out, Djibouti awarded management of the port to a Singaporean company.) Such a reactive and piecemeal approach will do little to respond to the longer-term challenge posed by Xi’s revolution. At the other extreme, although it may be tempting to react to Xi’s changes by demanding that Washington come up with an entirely new China strategy, what is actually required is not an outright rejection of the past four decades of U.S. policy but a careful rethinking of that policy so as to incorporate what works and reevaluate what does not.

An effective China policy must rest on a robust demonstration of the United States’ commitment to its own principles. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s protectionist impulses and praise for autocrats, recent moves suggest that the White House has not entirely forsaken its commitment to liberal values in Asia. On his trip to the region in November 2017, the president articulated his support for a “free and open Indo-Pacific” and revived the quadrilateral partnership with Australia, India, and Japan, a dormant grouping of like-minded Pacific democracies that could start pushing back against Chinese aggression in the region. Indeed, the administration’s National Defense Strategy calls for placing a renewed emphasis on alliances to counter “revisionist powers.”

As a useful first step toward making good on its word, the administration should elaborate on the substance of the renewed quadrilateral partnership and establish how it will work in conjunction with other U.S. partners in Asia and elsewhere. One potential area of collaboration centers on high-stakes security issues. That could mean undertaking joint freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea, providing alternative sources of investment for countries with strategically important ports, or supporting Taiwan in the face of Beijing’s increasingly coercive strategy.

Trump should also reopen discussions about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Although he withdrew the United States from the deal days after his inauguration, more recently, he has expressed a willingness to consider a modified version of it. A revived agreement would not only promote market-based reforms in countries with largely state-dominated economies, such as Vietnam, but also provide a beachhead from which the United States could advance its own economic interests over the long term.

To compete with the Belt and Road Initiative, the United States should draw on its strengths in urban planning and technology. In the field of “smart cities,” many of the world’s top corporations and most innovative start-ups are American. Washington should partner with developing countries on urban planning for smart cities and help finance the deployment of U.S. firms’ technology, just as it did in 2014, when it worked with India on an ambitious program to upgrade that country’s urban infrastructure. Part of this endeavor should include support for companies from the United States—or from U.S. allies—to help build up developing countries’ fiber-optic cables, GPS, and e-commerce systems. Doing that would undercut China’s attempt to control much of the world’s digital infrastructure, which would give the country a global platform for censorship and economic espionage.

China’s push to shape other countries’ political systems underscores the need for the Trump administration to support U.S. institutions that promote political liberalization abroad, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and the Asia Foundation. These institutions can partner with Australia, Japan, and South Korea, along with European allies, to help build the rule of law in quasi-authoritarian states and buttress nascent democracies. Legal, educational, and structural reform programs can provide a critical bulwark against Chinese efforts to project authoritarian values abroad.

Of course, strength abroad begins with strength at home. China’s willingness to subordinate its short-term economic interests for longer-term strategic gains means that Washington must redouble its investment in science and technology, support the universities and national labs that serve as a wellspring of American innovation, and fund the development and deployment of new technologies by U.S. firms. Without such support, U.S. companies will be no match for better-funded Chinese ones, backed by Beijing’s long-term vision.

China is eager to restrict opportunities for outsiders to pursue their political and economic interests within its borders, even as it advances its own such interests outside China. Accordingly, it’s time for the Trump administration to take a fresh look at the notion of reciprocity—and do unto China as China does unto the United States. U.S. policymakers have long considered reciprocity a lose-lose proposition that harms relations with China without changing its behavior. Instead, they have acted under the assumption that if the United States remains true to its democratic values and demonstrates what responsible behavior looks like, China will eventually follow its lead. Xi has upended this understanding because he has stalled, and in some respects reversed, the political and economic reforms begun under Deng and has transformed the United States’ openness into a vulnerability.

Reciprocity could take a number of forms. In some cases, the punishment should be relatively light. For example, the Trump administration could bar China from establishing additional Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms in the United States unless China permits more American Centers for Cultural Exchange, organizations funded by the U.S. government on Chinese university campuses. Currently, there are fewer than 30 such centers in China and more than a hundred Confucius Institutes and over 500 Confucius Classrooms in the United States. U.S. universities, for their part, could refuse to host Confucius Institutes or forge other partnerships with Chinese institutions if any member of their faculty is banned from travel to China—a punishment Beijing has often meted out to critical scholars.

Washington should also consider constraining Chinese investment in the United States in areas that are out of bounds for U.S. businesses in China, such as telecommunications, transportation, construction, and media. That might take the form of limiting Chinese stakes in U.S. companies to the same level that Beijing permits foreign firms to have in Chinese companies. More provocatively, the United States could tacitly or explicitly support other Asian countries’ efforts to militarize islands in the South China Sea in an effort to raise the costs for China of doing the same. Reciprocity need not be an end in itself. Ideally, in fact, a reciprocal action (or even just the threat of one) would bring China to the negotiating table, where a better outcome could be reached.

While Xi poses new challenges for the United States, he also offers a distinct new opportunity: the chance for Washington to hold him publicly accountable for his claim that China is prepared to assume greater global leadership. In 2014, the Obama administration achieved some success in leveraging Xi’s ambitions when it pressured China to adopt limits on its carbon emissions and to increase substantially the amount of assistance it provided African countries struck by the Ebola crisis. Similarly, the Trump administration successfully pushed China to adopt tougher sanctions to try to rein in North Korea’s nuclear program. More such moves should follow. The administration should call on China to play a bigger role in addressing the global refugee crisis, particularly the part of it taking place in the country’s own backyard. In bordering Myanmar, more than 650,000 refugees from the Rohingya ethnic minority have fled to Bangladesh, overwhelming that impoverished country. China has offered to serve as a mediator between the two countries. But it also blocked a UN Security Council resolution to appoint a special envoy to Myanmar and has downplayed concerns about the plight of the Rohingya, focusing more on protecting Belt and Road Initiative projects from the violence in Myanmar. The United States and others should say it loud and clear: with global leadership comes greater global responsibility.

WILL XI SUCCEED?

Does China’s third revolution have staying power? History is certainly not on Xi’s side. Despite a weakening of democratic institutions in some parts of the world, all the major economies—save China—are democracies. And it is possible to map out, as many scholars have, potential paths to a Chinese democratic transition. One route is through an economic crisis, which could produce a demand for change. China’s economy is showing signs of strain, with Chinese household, corporate, and government debt as a proportion of GDP all having skyrocketed since the 2008 global financial crisis. Some Chinese economists argue that the country faces a sizable challenge from its rapidly aging population and massively underfunded pension system, coupled with its persistently low birthrate, even after the end of the one-child policy.

It’s also conceivable that Xi could overreach. At home, discontent with his repressive policies has spread within large parts of China’s business and intellectual communities. The number of labor protests has more than doubled during his tenure. Moreover, although often forgotten in China’s current political environment, the country is not without its champions of democracy. Prominent scholars, activists, journalists, retired officials, and wealthy entrepreneurs have all spoken out in favor of democratic reform in the recent past. At the same time, Xi’s move to eliminate term limits stirred a great deal of controversy within top political circles. As Chinese officials have admitted to the press, there have even been coup and assassination attempts against Xi.

Abroad, Beijing’s aggressive efforts to expand its influence have been met with frequent backlashes. In just the past year, widespread protests against Chinese investments have erupted in Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Kenya, and Sri Lanka. As China presses forward with its more ambitious foreign policy, more such instances will undoubtedly crop up, raising the prospect that Xi will been seen as failing abroad, thus undermining his authority at home.

Nonetheless, there is little compelling evidence that Xi’s revolution is in danger of being reversed. Many of his accomplishments have earned him widespread popular support. He has survived past crises, such as a major stock market crash in 2015, and at the 19th Party Congress, his consolidation of institutional power and mandate for change were only strengthened. For the foreseeable future, then, the United States will have to deal with China as it is: an illiberal state seeking to reshape the international system in its own image. The good news is that Xi has made his revolutionary intentions clear. There is no excuse now for the United States not to respond in equally unambiguous terms.

 
 

How China Sees America

The Sum of Beijing’s Fears

 
 
 
 
Great power" is a vague term, but China deserves it by any measure: the extent and strategic location of its territory, the size and dynamism of its population, the value and growth rate of its economy, the massive size of its share of global trade, and the strength of its military. China has become one of a small number of countries that have significant national interests in every part of the world and that command the attention, whether willingly or grudgingly, of every other country and every international organization. And perhaps most important, China is the only country widely seen as a possible threat to U.S. predominance. Indeed, China's rise has led to fears that the country will soon overwhelm its neighbors and one day supplant the United States as a global hegemon. 

But widespread perceptions of China as an aggressive, expansionist power are off base. Although China's relative power has grown significantly in recent decades, the main tasks of Chinese foreign policy are defensive and have not changed much since the Cold War era: to blunt destabilizing influences from abroad, to avoid territorial losses, to reduce its neighbors' suspicions, and to sustain economic growth. What has changed in the past two decades is that China is now so deeply integrated into the world economic system that its internal and regional priorities have become part of a larger quest: to define a global role that serves Chinese interests but also wins acceptance from other powers.

Chief among those powers, of course, is the United States, and managing the fraught U.S.-Chinese relationship is Beijing's foremost foreign policy challenge. And just as Americans wonder whether China's rise is good for U.S. interests or represents a looming threat, Chinese policymakers puzzle over whether the United States intends to use its power to help or hurt China. 

Americans sometimes view the Chinese state as inscrutable. But given the way that power is divided in the U.S. political system and the frequent power turnovers between the two main parties in the United States, the Chinese also have a hard time determining U.S. intentions. Nevertheless, over recent decades, a long-term U.S. strategy seems to have emerged out of a series of American actions toward China. So it is not a hopeless exercise -- indeed, it is necessary -- for the Chinese to try to analyze the United States. 

Most Americans would be surprised to learn the degree to which the Chinese believe the United States is a revisionist power that seeks to curtail China's political influence and harm China's interests. This view is shaped not only by Beijing's understanding of Washington but also by the broader Chinese view of the international system and China's place in it, a view determined in large part by China's acute sense of its own vulnerability. 

THE FOUR RINGS

The world as seen from Beijing is a terrain of hazards, beginning with the streets outside the policymaker's window, to land borders and sea-lanes thousands of miles away, to the mines and oil fields of distant continents. These threats can be described in four concentric rings. In the first ring, the entire territory that China administers or claims, Beijing believes that China's political stability and territorial integrity are threatened by foreign actors and forces. Compared with other large countries, China must deal with an unparalleled number of outside actors trying to influence its evolution, often in ways the regime considers detrimental to its survival. Foreign investors, development advisers, tourists, and students swarm the country, all with their own ideas about how China should change. Foreign foundations and governments give financial and technical support to Chinese groups promoting civil society. Dissidents in Tibet and Xinjiang receive moral and diplomatic support and sometimes material assistance from ethnic diasporas and sympathetic governments abroad. Along the coast, neighbors contest maritime territories that Beijing claims. Taiwan is ruled by its own government, which enjoys diplomatic recognition from 23 states and a security guarantee from the United States. 

At China's borders, policymakers face a second ring of security concerns, involving China's relations with 14 adjacent countries. No other country except Russia has as many contiguous neighbors. They include five countries with which China has fought wars in the past 70 years (India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and Vietnam) and a number of states ruled by unstable regimes. None of China's neighbors perceives its core national interests as congruent with Beijing's. 

But China seldom has the luxury of dealing with any of its neighbors in a purely bilateral context. The third ring of Chinese security concerns consists of the politics of the six distinct geopolitical regions that surround China: Northeast Asia, Oceania, continental Southeast Asia, maritime Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia. Each of these areas presents complex regional diplomatic and security problems. 

Finally, there is the fourth ring: the world far beyond China's immediate neighborhood. China has truly entered this farthest circle only since the late 1990s and so far for limited purposes: to secure sources of commodities, such as petroleum; to gain access to markets and investments; to get diplomatic support for isolating Taiwan and Tibet's Dalai Lama; and to recruit allies for China's positions on international norms and legal regimes. 

INSCRUTABLE AMERICA

In each of China's four security rings, the United States is omnipresent. It is the most intrusive outside actor in China's internal affairs, the guarantor of the status quo in Taiwan, the largest naval presence in the East China and South China seas, the formal or informal military ally of many of China's neighbors, and the primary framer and defender of existing international legal regimes. This omnipresence means that China's understanding of American motives determines how the Chinese deal with most of their security issues.

Beginning with President Richard Nixon, who visited China in 1972, a succession of American leaders have assured China of their goodwill. Every U.S. presidential administration says that China's prosperity and stability are in the interest of the United States. And in practice, the United States has done more than any other power to contribute to China's modernization. It has drawn China into the global economy; given the Chinese access to markets, capital, and technology; trained Chinese experts in science, technology, and international law; prevented the full remilitarization of Japan; maintained the peace on the Korean Peninsula; and helped avoid a war over Taiwan.

Yet Chinese policymakers are more impressed by policies and behaviors that they perceive as less benevolent. The American military is deployed all around China's periphery, and the United States maintains a wide network of defense relationships with China's neighbors. Washington continues to frustrate Beijing's efforts to gain control over Taiwan. The United States constantly pressures China over its economic policies and maintains a host of government and private programs that seek to influence Chinese civil society and politics. 

Beijing views this seemingly contradictory set of American actions through three reinforcing perspectives. First, Chinese analysts see their country as heir to an agrarian, eastern strategic tradition that is pacifistic, defense-minded, nonexpansionist, and ethical. In contrast, they see Western strategic culture -- especially that of the United States -- as militaristic, offense-minded, expansionist, and selfish. 

Second, although China has embraced state capitalism with vigor, the Chinese view of the United States is still informed by Marxist political thought, which posits that capitalist powers seek to exploit the rest of the world. China expects Western powers to resist Chinese competition for resources and higher-value-added markets. And although China runs trade surpluses with the United States and holds a large amount of U.S. debt, China's leading political analysts believe the Americans get the better end of the deal by using cheap Chinese labor and credit to live beyond their means. 

Third, American theories of international relations have become popular among younger Chinese policy analysts, many of whom have earned advanced degrees in the United States. The most influential body of international relations theory in China is so-called offensive realism, which holds that a country will try to control its security environment to the full extent that its capabilities permit. According to this theory, the United States cannot be satisfied with the existence of a powerful China and therefore seeks to make the ruling regime there weaker and more pro-American. Chinese analysts see evidence of this intent in Washington's calls for democracy and its support for what China sees as separatist movements in Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang.

Whether they see the United States primarily through a culturalist, Marxist, or realist lens, most Chinese strategists assume that a country as powerful as the United States will use its power to preserve and enhance its privileges and will treat efforts by other countries to protect their interests as threats to its own security. This assumption leads to a pessimistic conclusion: as China rises, the United States will resist. The United States uses soothing words; casts its actions as a search for peace, human rights, and a level playing field; and sometimes offers China genuine assistance. But the United States is two-faced. It intends to remain the global hegemon and prevent China from growing strong enough to challenge it. In a 2011 interview with Liaowang, a state-run Chinese newsmagazine, Ni Feng, the deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of American Studies, summed up this view. "On the one hand, the United States realizes that it needs China's help on many regional and global issues," he said. "On the other hand, the United States is worried about a more powerful China and uses multiple means to delay its development and to remake China with U.S. values."

A small group of mostly younger Chinese analysts who have closely studied the United States argues that Chinese and American interests are not totally at odds. In their view, the two countries are sufficiently remote from each other that their core security interests need not clash. They can gain mutual benefit from trade and other common interests. 

But those holding such views are outnumbered by strategists on the other side of the spectrum, mostly personnel from the military and security agencies, who take a dim view of U.S. policy and have more confrontational ideas about how China should respond to it. They believe that China must stand up to the United States militarily and that it can win a conflict, should one occur, by outpacing U.S. military technology and taking advantage of what they believe to be superior morale within China's armed forces. Their views are usually kept out of sight to avoid frightening both China's rivals and its friends. 

WHO IS THE REVISIONIST?

To peer more deeply into the logic of the United States' China strategy, Chinese analysts, like analysts everywhere, look at capabilities and intentions. Although U.S. intentions might be subject to interpretation, U.S. military, economic, ideological, and diplomatic capabilities are relatively easy to discover -- and from the Chinese point of view, they are potentially devastating.

U.S. military forces are globally deployed and technologically advanced, with massive concentrations of firepower all around the Chinese rim. The U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) is the largest of the United States' six regional combatant commands in terms of its geographic scope and nonwartime manpower. PACOM's assets include about 325,000 military and civilian personnel, along with some 180 ships and 1,900 aircraft. To the west, PACOM gives way to the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for an area stretching from Central Asia to Egypt. Before September 11, 2001, CENTCOM had no forces stationed directly on China's borders except for its training and supply missions in Pakistan. But with the beginning of the "war on terror," CENTCOM placed tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan and gained extended access to an air base in Kyrgyzstan. 

The operational capabilities of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific are magnified by bilateral defense treaties with Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea and cooperative arrangements with other partners. And to top it off, the United States possesses some 5,200 nuclear warheads deployed in an invulnerable sea, land, and air triad. Taken together, this U.S. defense posture creates what Qian Wenrong of the Xinhua News Agency's Research Center for International Issue Studies has called a "strategic ring of encirclement."

Chinese security analysts also take note of the United States' extensive capability to damage Chinese economic interests. The United States is still China's single most important market, unless one counts the European Union as a single entity. And the United States is one of China's largest sources of foreign direct investment and advanced technology. From time to time, Washington has entertained the idea of wielding its economic power coercively. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the United States imposed some limited diplomatic and economic sanctions on China, including an embargo, which is still in effect, on the sale of advanced arms. For several years after that, Congress debated whether to punish China further for human rights violations by canceling the low most-favored-nation tariff rates enjoyed by Chinese imports, although proponents of the plan could never muster a majority. More recently, U.S. legislators have proposed sanctioning China for artificially keeping the value of the yuan low to the benefit of Chinese exporters, and the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has promised that if elected, he will label China a currency manipulator on "day one" of his presidency.

Although trade hawks in Washington seldom prevail, flare-ups such as these remind Beijing how vulnerable China would be if the United States decided to punish it economically. Chinese strategists believe that the United States and its allies would deny supplies of oil and metal ores to China during a military or economic crisis and that the U.S. Navy could block China's access to strategically crucial sea-lanes. The ubiquity of the dollar in international trade and finance also gives the United States the ability to damage Chinese interests, either on purpose or as a result of attempts by the U.S. government to address its fiscal problems by printing dollars and increasing borrowing, acts that drive down the value of China's dollar-denominated exports and foreign exchange reserves.

Chinese analysts also believe that the United States possesses potent ideological weapons and the willingness to use them. After World War II, the United States took advantage of its position as the dominant power to enshrine American principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments and to install what China sees as Western-style democracies in Japan and, eventually, South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries. Chinese officials contend that the United States uses the ideas of democracy and human rights to delegitimize and destabilize regimes that espouse alternative values, such as socialism and Asian-style developmental authoritarianism. In the words of Li Qun, a member of the Shandong Provincial Party Committee and a rising star in the Communist Party, the Americans' "real purpose is not to protect so-called human rights but to use this pretext to influence and limit China's healthy economic growth and to prevent China's wealth and power from threatening [their] world hegemony."

In the eyes of many Chinese analysts, since the end of the Cold War the United States has revealed itself to be a revisionist power that tries to reshape the global environment even further in its favor. They see evidence of this reality everywhere: in the expansion of NATO; the U.S. interventions in Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo; the Gulf War; the war in Afghanistan; and the invasion of Iraq. In the economic realm, the United States has tried to enhance its advantages by pushing for free trade, running down the value of the dollar while forcing other countries to use it as a reserve currency, and trying to make developing countries bear an unfair share of the cost of mitigating global climate change. And perhaps most disturbing to the Chinese, the United States has shown its aggressive designs by promoting so-called color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. As Liu Jianfei, director of the foreign affairs division of the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote in 2005, "The U.S. has always opposed communist 'red revolutions' and hates the 'green revolutions' in Iran and other Islamic states. What it cares about is not 'revolution' but 'color.' It supported the 'rose,' 'orange', and 'tulip' revolutions because they served its democracy promotion strategy." As Liu and other top Chinese analysts see it, the United States hopes "to spread democracy further and turn the whole globe 'blue.'"

EXPLOITING TAIWAN

Although American scholars and commentators typically see U.S.-Chinese relations in the postwar period as a long, slow thaw, in Beijing's view, the United States has always treated China harshly. From 1950 to 1972, the United States tried to contain and isolate China. Among other actions, it prevailed on most of its allies to withhold diplomatic recognition of mainland China, organized a trade embargo against the mainland, built up the Japanese military, intervened in the Korean War, propped up the rival regime in Taiwan, supported Tibetan guerillas fighting Chinese control, and even threatened to use nuclear weapons during both the Korean War and the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis. Chinese analysts concede that the United States' China policy changed after 1972. But they assert that the change was purely the result of an effort to counter the Soviet Union and, later, to gain economic benefits by doing business in China. Even then, the United States continued to hedge against China's rise by maintaining Taiwan as a strategic distraction, aiding the growth of Japan's military, modernizing its naval forces, and pressuring China on human rights.

The Chinese have drawn lessons about U.S. China policy from several sets of negotiations with Washington. During ambassadorial talks during the 1950s and 1960s, negotiations over arms control in the 1980s and 1990s, discussions over China's accession to the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, and negotiations over climate change during the decade that followed, the Chinese consistently saw the Americans as demanding and unyielding. But most decisive for Chinese understandings of U.S. policy were the three rounds of negotiations that took place over Taiwan in 1971-72, 1978-79, and 1982, which created the "communiqué framework" that governs U.S. Taiwan policy to this day. When the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement began, Chinese policymakers assumed that Washington would give up its support for Taipei in exchange for the benefits of normal state-to-state relations with Beijing. At each stage of the negotiations, the Americans seemed willing to do so. Yet decades later, the United States remains, in Beijing's view, the chief obstacle to reunification. 

When Nixon went to China in 1972, he told the Chinese that he was willing to sacrifice Taiwan because it was no longer strategically important to the United States, but that he could not do so until his second term. On this basis, the Chinese agreed to the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, even though it contained a unilateral declaration by the United States that "reaffirm[ed] its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question," which was diplomatic code for a U.S. commitment to deter any effort by the mainland to take Taiwan by force. As events played out, Nixon resigned before he was able to normalize relations with Beijing, and his successor, Gerald Ford, was too weak politically to fulfill Nixon's promise. 

When the next president, Jimmy Carter, wanted to normalize relations with China, the Chinese insisted on a clean break with Taiwan. In 1979, the United States ended its defense treaty with Taiwan but again issued a unilateral statement restating its commitment to a "peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue." Congress then surprised both the Chinese and the administration by adopting the Taiwan Relations Act, which required the United States to "maintain [its] capacity . . . to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security . . . of the people on Taiwan." Once again, the deterrent intent was clear.

In 1982, when President Ronald Reagan sought closer relations with Beijing to ramp up pressure on Moscow, China prevailed on the United States to sign another communiqué, which committed Washington to gradually reducing its weapons sales to Taiwan. But once the agreement was in place, the Americans set the benchmark year at 1979, when arms sales had reached their highest level; calculated annual reductions at a small marginal rate, adjusting for inflation so that they were actually increases; claimed that the more advanced weapons systems that they sold Taiwan were the qualitative equivalents of older systems; and allowed commercial firms to cooperate with the Taiwanese armaments industry under the rubric of technology transfers rather than arms sales. By the time President George W. Bush approved a large package of advanced arms to Taiwan in April 2001, the 1982 communiqué was a dead letter. Meanwhile, as the United States prolonged its involvement with Taiwan, a democratic transition took place there, putting unification even further out of Beijing's reach.

Reviewing this history, Chinese strategists ask themselves why the United States remains so committed to Taiwan. Although Americans often argue that they are simply defending a loyal democratic ally, most Chinese see strategic motives at the root of Washington's behavior. They believe that keeping the Taiwan problem going helps the United States tie China down. In the words of Luo Yuan, a retired general and deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Society of Military Science, the United States has long used Taiwan "as a chess piece to check China's rise."

THE PERILS OF PLURALISM

The Taiwan Relations Act marked the beginning of a trend toward congressional assertiveness on U.S. China policy, and this continues to complicate Washington's relationship with Beijing. Ten years later, the 1989 Tiananmen incident, followed by the end of the Cold War, shifted the terms of debate in the United States. China had been perceived as a liberalizing regime; after Tiananmen, China morphed into an atavistic dictatorship. And the collapse of the Soviet Union vitiated the strategic imperative to cooperate with Beijing. What is more, growing U.S.-Chinese economic ties began to create frictions over issues such as the dumping of cheap manufactured Chinese goods on the U.S. market and the piracy of U.S. intellectual property. After decades of consensus in the United States, China quickly became one of the most divisive issues in U.S. foreign policy, partially due to the intense advocacy efforts of interest groups that make sure China stays on the agenda on Capitol Hill. 

Indeed, since Tiananmen, China has attracted the attention of more American interest groups than any other country. China's political system elicits opposition from human rights organizations; its population-control policies anger the antiabortion movement; its repression of churches offends American Christians; its inexpensive exports trigger demands for protection from organized labor; its reliance on coal and massive dams for energy upsets environmental groups; and its rampant piracy and counterfeiting infuriate the film, software, and pharmaceutical industries. These specific complaints add strength to the broader fear of a "China threat," which permeates American political discourse -- a fear that, in Chinese eyes, not only denies the legitimacy of Chinese aspirations but itself constitutes a kind of threat to China. 

Of course, there are also those in Congress, think tanks, the media, and academia who support positions favorable to China, on the basis that cooperation is important for American farmers, exporters, and banks, and for Wall Street, or that issues such as North Korea and climate change are more important than disputes over rights or religion. Those advocates may be more powerful in the long run than those critical of China, but they tend to work behind the scenes. To Chinese analysts trying to make sense of the cacophony of views expressed in the U.S. policy community, the loudest voices are the easiest to hear, and the signals are alarming. 

SUGARCOATED THREATS

In trying to ascertain U.S. intentions, Chinese analysts also look at policy statements made by senior figures in the executive branch. Coming from a political system where the executive dominates, Chinese analysts consider such statements reliable guides to U.S. strategy. They find that the statements often do two things: they seek to reassure Beijing that Washington's intentions are benign, and at the same time, they seek to reassure the American public that the United States will never allow China's rise to threaten U.S. interests. This combination of themes produces what Chinese analysts perceive as sugarcoated threats.

For example, in 2005, Robert Zoellick, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, delivered a major China policy statement on behalf of the George W. Bush administration. He reassured his American audience that the United States would "attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States or other friendly countries." But he also explained that China's rise was not a threat because China "does not seek to spread radical, anti-American ideologies," "does not see itself in a death struggle with capitalism," and "does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system." On that basis, he said, the two sides could have "a cooperative relationship." But cooperation would depend on certain conditions. China should calm what he called a "cauldron of anxiety" in the United States about its rise. It should "explain its defense spending, intentions, doctrine, and military exercises"; reduce its trade surplus with the United States; and cooperate with Washington on Iran and North Korea. Above all, Zoellick advised, China should give up "closed politics." In the U.S. view, he said, "China needs a peaceful political transition to make its government responsible and accountable to its people." 

The same ideas have been repeated in slightly gentler language by the Obama administration. In the administration's first major policy speech on China, in September 2009, James Steinberg, then deputy secretary of state, introduced the idea of "strategic reassurance." Steinberg defined the principle in the following way: "Just as we and our allies must make clear that we are prepared to welcome China's 'arrival' ... as a prosperous and successful power, China must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growing global role will not come at the expense of [the] security and well-being of others." China would need to "reassure others that this buildup does not present a threat"; it would need to "increase its military transparency in order to reassure all the countries in the rest of Asia and globally about its intentions" and demonstrate that it "respects the rule of law and universal norms." To Chinese analysts, such statements send the message that Washington wants cooperation on its own terms, seeks to deter Beijing from developing a military capability adequate to defend its interests, and intends to promote change in the character of the Chinese regime. 

To be sure, Beijing's suspicion of Washington must contend with the fact that the United States has done so much to promote China's rise. But for Chinese analysts, history provides an answer to this puzzle. As they see it, the United States contained China for as long as it could. When the Soviet Union's rising strength made doing so necessary, the United States was forced to engage with China in order to reinforce its hand against Moscow. Once the United States started to engage with China, it came to believe that engagement would turn China toward democracy and would win back for the United States the strategic base on the mainland of Asia that Washington lost in 1949, when the Communists triumphed in the Chinese Civil War. 

In the Chinese view, Washington's slow rapprochement with Beijing was not born of idealism and generosity; instead, it was pursued so that the United States could profit from China's economic opening by squeezing profits from U.S. investments, consuming cheap Chinese goods, and borrowing money to support the U.S. trade and fiscal deficits. While busy feasting at the Chinese table, U.S. strategists overlooked the risk of China's rise until the late 1990s. Now that the United States perceives China as a threat, these Chinese analysts believe, it no longer has any realistic way to prevent it from continuing to develop. In this sense, the U.S. strategy of engagement failed, vindicating the advice of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in 1991 advocated a strategy of "hiding our light and nurturing our strength." Faced with a China that has risen too far to be stopped, the United States can do no more than it is doing: demand cooperation on U.S. terms, threaten China, hedge militarily, and continue to try to change the regime.

HOW DO YOU HANDLE AN OFFENSIVE REALIST? 

Despite these views, mainstream Chinese strategists do not advise China to challenge the United States in the foreseeable future. They expect the United States to remain the global hegemon for several decades, despite what they perceive as initial signs of decline. For the time being, as described by Wang Jisi, dean of Peking University's School of International Studies, "the superpower is more super, and the many great powers less great." Meanwhile, the two countries are increasingly interdependent economically and have the military capability to cause each other harm. It is this mutual vulnerability that carries the best medium-term hope for cooperation. Fear of each other keeps alive the imperative to work together.

In the long run, however, the better alternative for both China and the West is to create a new equilibrium of power that maintains the current world system, but with a larger role for China. China has good reasons to seek that outcome. Even after it becomes the world's largest economy, its prosperity will remain dependent on the prosperity of its global rivals (and vice versa), including the United States and Japan. The richer China becomes, the greater will be its stake in the security of sea-lanes, the stability of the world trade and financial regimes, nonproliferation, the control of global climate change, and cooperation on public health. China will not get ahead if its rivals do not also prosper. And Chinese strategists must come to understand that core U.S. interests -- in the rule of law, regional stability, and open economic competition -- do not threaten China's security. 

The United States should encourage China to accept this new equilibrium by drawing clear policy lines that meet its own security needs without threatening China's. As China rises, it will push against U.S. power to find the boundaries of the United States' will. Washington must push back to establish boundaries for the growth of Chinese power. But this must be done with cool professionalism, not rhetorical belligerence. Hawkish campaign talk about trade wars and strategic competition plays into Beijing's fears while undercutting the necessary effort to agree on common interests. And in any case, putting such rhetoric into action is not a realistic option. To do so would require a break in mutually beneficial economic ties and enormous expenditures to encircle China strategically, and it would force China into antagonistic reactions.

Nevertheless, U.S. interests in relation to China are uncontroversial and should be affirmed: a stable and prosperous China, resolution of the Taiwan issue on terms Taiwan's residents are willing to accept, freedom of navigation in the seas surrounding China, the security of Japan and other Asian allies, an open world economy, and the protection of human rights. The United States must back these preferences with credible U.S. power, in two domains in particular. First, the United States must maintain its military predominance in the western Pacific, including the East China and South China seas. To do so, Washington will have to continue to upgrade its military capabilities, maintain its regional defense alliances, and respond confidently to challenges. Washington should reassure Beijing that these moves are intended to create a balance of common interests rather than to threaten China. That reassurance can be achieved by strengthening existing mechanisms for managing U.S.-Chinese military interactions. For example, the existing Military Maritime Consultative Agreement should be used to design procedures that would allow U.S. and Chinese aircraft and naval vessels to operate safely when in close proximity. 

Second, the United States should continue to push back against Chinese efforts to remake global legal regimes in ways that do not serve the interests of the West. This is especially important in the case of the human rights regime, a set of global rules and institutions that will help determine the durability of the liberal world order the United States has long sought to uphold.

China has not earned a voice equal to that of the United States in a hypothetical Pacific Community or a role in a global condominium as one member of a "G-2." China will not rule the world unless the United States withdraws from it, and China's rise will be a threat to the United States and the world only if Washington allows it to become one. For the United States, the right China strategy begins at home. Washington must sustain the country's military innovation and renewal, nurture its relationships with its allies and other cooperating powers, continue to support a preeminent higher-education sector, protect U.S. intellectual property from espionage and theft, and regain the respect of people around the world. As long as the United States addresses its problems at home and holds tight to its own values, it can manage China's rise.

 
 

Autocracy With Chinese Characteristics

Beijing's Behind-the-Scenes Reforms

Sooner or later this economy will slow,” the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared of China in 1998. He continued: “That’s when China will need a government that is legitimate. . . . When China’s 900 million villagers get phones, and start calling each other, this will inevitably become a more open country.” At the time, just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Friedman’s certainty was broadly shared. China’s economic ascent under authoritarian rule could not last; eventually, and inescapably, further economic development would bring about democratization.

Twenty years after Friedman’s prophecy, China has morphed into the world’s second-largest economy. Growth has slowed, but only because it leveled off when China reached middle-income status (not, as Friedman worried, because of a lack of “real regulatory systems”). Communications technology rapidly spread—today, 600 million Chinese citizens own smartphones and 750 million use the Internet—but the much-anticipated tsunami of political liberalization has not arrived. If anything, under the current regime of President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government appears more authoritarian, not less.

Most Western observers have long believed that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, that economic liberalization both requires and propels political liberalization. China’s apparent defiance of this logic has led to two opposite conclusions. One camp insists that China represents a temporary aberration and that liberalization will come soon. But this is mostly speculation; these analysts have been incorrectly predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for decades. The other camp sees China’s success as proof that autocracies are just as good as democracies at promoting growth—if not better. As Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad put it in 1992, “authoritarian stability” has enabled prosperity, whereas democracy has brought “chaos and increased misery.” But not all autocracies deliver economic success. In fact, some are utterly disastrous, including China under Mao. 

Both of these explanations overlook a crucial reality: since opening its markets in 1978, China has in fact pursued significant political reforms—just not in the manner that Western observers expected. Instead of instituting multiparty elections, establishing formal protections for individual rights, or allowing free expression, the CCP has made changes below the surface, reforming its vast bureaucracy to realize many of the benefits of democratization—in particular, accountability, competition, and partial limits on power—without giving up single-party control. Although these changes may appear dry and apolitical, in fact, they have created a unique hybrid: autocracy with democratic characteristics. In practice, tweaks to rules and incentives within China’s public administration have quietly transformed an ossified communist bureaucracy into a highly adaptive capitalist machine. But bureaucratic reforms cannot substitute for political reforms forever. As prosperity continues to increase and demands on the bureaucracy grow, the limits of this approach are beginning to loom large.

Tweaks to rules and incentives within China’s public administration have quietly transformed an ossified communist bureaucracy into a highly adaptive capitalist machine.

CHINESE BUREAUCRACY 101

In the United States, politics are exciting and bureaucracy is boring. In China, the opposite is true. As a senior official once explained to me, “The bureaucracy is political, and politics are bureaucratized.” In the Chinese communist regime, there is no separation between political power and public administration. Understanding Chinese politics, therefore, requires first and foremost an appreciation of China’s bureaucracy. That bureaucracy is composed of two vertical hierarchies—the party and the state—replicated across the five levels of government: central, provincial, county, city, and township. These crisscrossing lines of authority produce what the China scholar Kenneth Lieberthal has termed a “matrix” structure. In formal organizational charts, the party and the state are separate entities, with Xi leading the party and Premier Li Keqiang heading up the administration and its ministries. In practice, however, the two are intertwined. The premier is also a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top body, which currently has seven members. And at the local level, officials often simultaneously hold positions in both hierarchies. For example, a mayor, who heads the administration of a municipality, is usually also the municipality’s deputy chief of party. Moreover, officials frequently move between the party and the state. For instance, mayors may become party secretaries and vice versa. 

The Chinese public administration is massive. The state and party organs alone (excluding the military and state-owned enterprises) consist of over 50 million people, roughly the size of South Korea’s entire population. Among these, 20 percent are civil servants who perform management roles. The rest are street-level public employees who interact with citizens directly, such as inspectors, police officers, and health-care workers. 

The top one percent of the bureaucracy—roughly 500,000 people—make up China’s political elite. These individuals are directly appointed by the party, and they rotate through offices across the country. Notably, CCP membership is not a prerequisite for public employment, although elites tend to be CCP members.

Within each level of government, the bureaucracy is similarly disaggregated into the leading one percent and the remaining 99 percent. In the first category is the leadership, which comprises the party secretary (first in command), the chief of state (second in command), and members of an elite party committee, who simultaneously head key party or state offices that perform strategic functions such as appointing personnel and maintaining public security. In the second category are civil servants and frontline workers who are permanently stationed in one location.

Managing a public administration the size of a midsize country is a gargantuan task. It is also a critical one, since the Chinese leadership relies on the bureaucracy to govern the country and run the economy. Not only do bureaucrats implement policies and laws; they also formulate them by tailoring central mandates for local implementation and by experimenting with local initiatives.

REFORM AT THE TOP

When Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, unleashed reforms, he maintained the CCP’s monopoly on power. Instead of introducing Western-style democracy, he focused on transforming the Chinese bureaucracy into a driver of economic growth. To achieve this, he injected democratic characteristics into the bureaucracy, namely, accountability, competition, and partial limits on power. 

Perhaps the most significant of Deng’s reforms was a shift in the bureaucracy away from one-man rule toward collective leadership and the introduction of term limits and a mandatory retirement age for elite officials. These changes constrained the accumulation of personal power and rejuvenated the party-state with younger officials. Lower down, the reformist leadership changed the incentives of local leaders by updating the cadre evaluation system, which assesses local leaders according to performance targets. Since Chinese officials are appointed rather than popularly elected, these report cards serve an accountability function similar to elections in democracies. Changing the targets for evaluating cadres redefined the bureaucracy’s goals, making clear to millions of officials what they were expected to deliver, as well as the accompanying rewards and penalties.  

Breaking from Mao’s fixation on class background and ideological fervor, Deng, ever the pragmatist, used this system to turn local leaders into more productive economic agents. From the 1980s onward, officials were assigned a narrow list of quantifiable deliverables, focused primarily on the economy and revenue generation. Tasks unrelated to the economy, such as environmental protection and poverty relief, were either relegated to a lower priority or not mentioned at all. Meanwhile, the goal of economic growth was always paired with an indispensable requisite: maintaining political stability. Failing this requirement (for instance, allowing a mass protest to break out) could cause leaders to flunk their entire test in a given year. 

In short, during the early decades of reform, the new performance criteria instructed local leaders to achieve rapid economic growth without causing political instability. Reformers reinforced this stark redefinition of bureaucratic success with incentives. High scores improved the prospects of promotion, or at least the chances of being laterally transferred to a favorable office. Local leaders were also entitled to performance-based bonuses, with the highest performers sometimes receiving many times more than the lower performers. The government also began publicly ranking localities. Officials from the winning ones earned prestige and honorary titles; officials from those at the bottom lost face in their community. In this culture of hypercompetition, nobody wanted to be left behind. 

Newly incentivized, local leaders dove headlong into promoting industrialization and growth. Along the way, they devised strategies and solutions that even party bosses in Beijing had not conceived. A famous example from the 1980s and 1990s are township and village enterprises, companies that circumvented restrictions on private ownership by operating as collectively owned enterprises. Another, more recent example is the creation of “land quota markets” in Chengdu and Chongqing, which allow developers to buy quotas of land from villages for urban use.

Through these reforms, the CCP achieved some measure of accountability and competition within single-party rule. Although no ballots were cast, lower-level officials were held responsible for the economic development of their jurisdictions. To be sure, Deng’s reforms emphasized brute capital accumulation rather than holistic development, which led to environmental degradation, inequality, and other social problems. Still, they undoubtedly kicked China’s growth machine into gear by making the bureaucracy results-oriented, fiercely competitive, and responsive to business needs, qualities that are normally associated with democracies.

Bureaucratic reforms among local leaders were critical but not sufficient. Below them are the street-level bureaucrats who run the daily machinery of governance. And in the Chinese bureaucracy, these inspectors, officers, and even teachers are not merely providers of public services but also potential agents of economic change. For example, they might use personal connections to recruit investors to their locales or use their departments to provide commercial services as state-affiliated agencies.

Career incentives do not apply to rank-and-file public employees, as there is little chance of being promoted to the elite level; most civil servants do not dream of becoming mayors. Instead, the government has relied on financial incentives, through an uncodified system of internal profit sharing that links the bureaucracy’s financial performance to individual remuneration. Although profit sharing is usually associated with capitalist corporations, it is not new to China’s bureaucracy or, indeed, to any premodern state administration. As the sociologist Max Weber noted, before the onset of modernization, instead of receiving sufficient, stable salaries from state budgets, most public agents financed themselves through the prerogatives of office—for example, skimming off a share of fees and taxes for themselves. Modern observers may frown on such practices, considering them corrupt, but they do have some benefits. 

Before Deng’s reforms, the Chinese bureaucracy was far from modern or technocratic; it was a mishmash of traditional practices and personal relationships, inserted into a Leninist structure of top-down commands. So when Chinese markets opened up, bureaucratic agents naturally revived many traditional practices, but with a twentieth-century capitalist twist. Within the vast Chinese bureaucracy, formal salaries for officials and public employees were standardized at abysmally low rates. For instance, President Hu Jintao’s official salary in 2012 was the equivalent of only about $1,000 a month. An entry-level civil servant received far less, about $150 a month. But in practice, these low salaries were supplemented by an array of additional perks, such as allowances, bonuses, gifts, and free vacations and meals. 

And unlike in other developing countries, supplemental compensation in China’s bureaucracy was pegged to financial performance: the central government granted local authorities partial autonomy to spend the funds they earned. The more tax revenue a local government generated and the more nontax revenue (such as fees and profits) that party and state offices earned, the more compensation they could provide to their staff members. 

What emerged was essentially a variant of profit sharing: public employees took a cut of the revenue produced by their organizations. These changes fueled a results-oriented culture in the bureaucracy, although results in the Chinese context were measured purely in economic terms. These strong incentives propelled the bureaucracy to help transition the economy toward capitalism. 

A profit-oriented public bureaucracy has drawbacks, of course, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese complained endlessly about arbitrary payments and profiteering. In response, from the late 1990s on, reformers rolled out a suite of measures aimed at combating petty corruption and the theft of public funds. Central authorities abolished cash payments of fees and fines and allowed citizens to make payments directly through banks. These technical reforms were not flashy, yet their impact was significant. Police officers, for example, are now far less likely to extort citizens and privately pocket fines. Over time, these reforms have made the Chinese people less vulnerable to petty abuses of power. In 2011, Transparency International found that only nine percent of Chinese citizens reported having paid a bribe in the past year, compared with 54 percent in India, 64 percent in Nigeria, and 84 percent in Cambodia. To be sure, China has a serious corruption problem, but the most significant issue is collusion among political and business elites, not petty predation. 

Although none of these bureaucratic reforms fits the bill of traditional political reforms, their effects are political. They have changed the priorities of government, introduced competition, and altered how citizens encounter the state. Above all, they have incentivized economic performance, allowing the CCP to enjoy the benefits of continued growth while evading the pressures of political liberalization.

Substituting bureaucratic reform for political reform has bought the CCP time. For the first few decades of China’s market transition, the party’s reliance on the bureaucracy to act as the agent of change paid off. But can this approach forestall pressure for individual rights and democratic freedoms forever? Today, there are increasing signs that the bureaucracy has come close to exhausting its entrepreneurial and adaptive functions. Since Xi took office in 2012, the limits of bureaucratic reform have become increasingly clear.

Substituting bureaucratic reform for political reform has bought the CCP time.

The Xi era marks a new stage in the country’s development. China is now a middle-income economy with an increasingly educated, connected, and demanding citizenry. And the political pressures that have come with prosperity are, in fact, beginning to undermine the reforms that propelled China’s rapid growth.

The cadre evaluation system has come under particular stress. Over time, the targets assigned to local leaders have steadily crept upward. In the 1980s and 1990s, officials were evaluated like CEOs, on their economic performance alone. But today, in addition to economic growth, leaders must also maintain social harmony, protect the environment, supply public services, enforce party discipline, and even promote happiness. These changes have paralyzed local leaders. Whereas officials used to be empowered to do whatever it took to achieve rapid growth, they are now constrained by multiple constituents and competing demands, not unlike democratically elected politicians. 

Xi’s sweeping anticorruption campaign, which has led to the arrest of an unprecedented number of officials, has only made this worse. In past decades, assertive leadership and corruption were often two sides of the same coin. Consider the disgraced party secretary Bo Xilai, who was as ruthless and corrupt as he was bold in transforming the western backwater of Chongqing into a thriving industrial hub. Corrupt dealings aside, all innovative policies and unpopular decisions entail political risk. If Xi intends to impose strict discipline—in his eyes, necessary to contain the political threats to CCP rule—then he cannot expect the bureaucracy to innovate or accomplish as much as it has in the past. 

Moreover, sustaining growth in a high-income economy requires more than merely constructing industrial parks and building roads. It demands fresh ideas, technology, services, and cutting-edge innovations. Government officials everywhere tend to have no idea how to drive such developments. To achieve this kind of growth, the government must release and channel the immense creative potential of civil society, which would necessitate greater freedom of expression, more public participation, and less state intervention.

Yet just as political freedoms have become imperative for continued economic growth, the Xi administration is backpedaling. Most worrying is the party leadership’s decision to remove term limits among the top brass, a change that will allow Xi to stay in office for the rest of his life. So long as the CCP remains the only party in power, China will always be susceptible to what the political scientist Francis Fukuyama has called “the bad emperor problem”—that is, extreme sensitivity to leadership idiosyncrasies. This means that under a leader like Deng, pragmatic and committed to reform, China will prosper and rise. But a more absolutist and narcissistic leader could create a nationwide catastrophe.

Xi has been variously described as an aspiring reformer and an absolute dictator. But regardless of his predilections, Xi cannot force the genie of economic and social transformation back into the bottle. China today is no longer the impoverished, cloistered society of the 1970s. Further liberalization is both inevitable and necessary for China’s continued prosperity and its desire to partake in global leadership. But contrary to Friedman’s prediction, this need not take the form of multiparty elections. China still has tremendous untapped room for political liberalization on the margins. If the party loosens its grip on society and directs, rather than commands, bottom-up improvisation, this could be enough to drive innovation and growth for at least another generation. 

CHINA AND DEMOCRACY

What broader lessons on democracy can be drawn from China? One is the need to move beyond the narrow conception of democratization as the introduction of multiparty elections. As China has shown, some of the benefits of democratization can be achieved under single-party rule. Allowing bureaucratic reforms to unfold can work better than trying to impose political change from the outside, since over time, the economic improvements that the bureaucratic reforms generate should create internal pressure for meaningful political reform. This is not to say that states must delay democracy in order to experience economic growth. Rather, China’s experience shows that democracy is best introduced by grafting reforms onto existing traditions and institutions—in China’s case, a Leninist bureaucracy. Put simply, it is better to promote political change by building on what is already there than by trying to import something wholly foreign.

A second lesson is that the presumed dichotomy between the state and society is a false one. American observers, in particular, tend to assume that the state is a potential oppressor and so society must be empowered to combat it. This worldview arises from the United States’ distinct political philosophy, but it is not shared in many other parts of the world. 

In nondemocratic societies such as China, there has always been an intermediate layer of actors between the state and society. In ancient China, the educated, landholding elite filled this role. They had direct access to those in power but were still rooted in their communities. China’s civil service occupies a similar position today. The country’s bureaucratic reforms were successful because they freed up space for these intermediate actors to try new initiatives.

Additionally, observers should drop the false dichotomy between the party and the state when reading China. The American notion of the separation of powers is premised on the assumption that officeholders possess only one identity, belonging either to one branch of government or another. But this doesn’t hold in China or in most traditional societies, where fluid, overlapping identities are the norm. In these settings, whether officials are embedded in their networks or communities can sometimes matter more than formal checks and electoral competition in holding them accountable. For example, profit-sharing practices within China’s bureaucracy gave its millions of public employees a personal stake in their country’s capitalist success.

Challenging these unspoken assumptions sheds light on why China has repeatedly defied expectations. It should also prompt the United States to rethink its desire to export democracy around the world and its state-building efforts in traditional societies. Everyone everywhere wants the benefits of democracy, but policymakers would be dearly mistaken to think that these can be achieved only by transplanting the U.S. political system wholesale. 

As for other authoritarian governments keen to emulate China, their leaders should not pick up the wrong lessons. China’s economic success is not proof that relying on top-down commands and suppressing bottom-up initiative work. In fact, it’s the exact opposite: the disastrous decades under Mao proved that this kind of leadership fails. In Deng’s era, the CCP managed a capitalist revolution only insofar as it introduced democratizing reforms to ensure bureaucratic accountability, promote competition, and limit the power of individual leaders. The current Chinese leadership should heed this lesson, too.

 

The Future of U.S.-Chinese Relations

Conflict Is a Choice, Not a Necessity

 
 
 
 
On January 19, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao issued a joint statement at the end of Hu’s visit to Washington. It proclaimed their shared commitment to a “positive, cooperative, and comprehensive U.S.-China relationship.” Each party reassured the other regarding his principal concern, announcing, “The United States reiterated that it welcomes a strong, prosperous, and successful China that plays a greater role in world affairs. China welcomes the United States as an Asia-Pacific nation that contributes to peace, stability and prosperity in the region.”

Since then, the two governments have set about implementing the stated objectives. Top American and Chinese officials have exchanged visits and institutionalized their exchanges on major strategic and economic issues. Military-to-military contacts have been restarted, opening an important channel of communication. And at the unofficial level, so-called track-two groups have explored possible evolutions of the U.S.-Chinese relationship.

Yet as cooperation has increased, so has controversy. Significant groups in both countries claim that a contest for supremacy between China and the United States is inevitable and perhaps already under way. In this perspective, appeals for U.S.-Chinese cooperation appear outmoded and even naive.

The mutual recriminations emerge from distinct yet parallel analyses in each country. Some American strategic thinkers argue that Chinese policy pursues two long-term objectives: displacing the United States as the preeminent power in the western Pacific and consolidating Asia into an exclusionary bloc deferring to Chinese economic and foreign policy interests. In this conception, even though China’s absolute military capacities are not formally equal to those of the United States, Beijing possesses the ability to pose unacceptable risks in a conflict with Washington and is developing increasingly sophisticated means to negate traditional U.S. advantages. Its invulnerable second-strike nuclear capability will eventually be paired with an expanding range of antiship ballistic missiles and asymmetric capabilities in new domains such as cyberspace and space. China could secure a dominant naval position through a series of island chains on its periphery, some fear, and once such a screen exists, China’s neighbors, dependent as they are on Chinese trade and uncertain of the United States’ ability to react, might adjust their policies according to Chinese preferences. Eventually, this could lead to the creation of a Sinocentric Asian bloc dominating the western Pacific. The most recent U.S. defense strategy report reflects, at least implicitly, some of these apprehensions.

No Chinese government officials have proclaimed such a strategy as China’s actual policy. Indeed, they stress the opposite. However, enough material exists in China’s quasi-official press and research institutes to lend some support to the theory that relations are heading for confrontation rather than cooperation.

U.S. strategic concerns are magnified by ideological predispositions to battle with the entire nondemocratic world. Authoritarian regimes, some argue, are inherently brittle, impelled to rally domestic support by nationalist and expansionist rhetoric and practice. In these theories -- versions of which are embraced in segments of both the American left and the American right -- tension and conflict with China grow out of China’s domestic structure. Universal peace will come, it is asserted, from the global triumph of democracy rather than from appeals for cooperation. The political scientist Aaron Friedberg writes, for example, that “a liberal democratic China will have little cause to fear its democratic counterparts, still less to use force against them.” Therefore, “stripped of diplomatic niceties, the ultimate aim of the American strategy [should be] to hasten a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, that will sweep away China’s one-party authoritarian state and leave a liberal democracy in its place.”

On the Chinese side, the confrontational interpretations follow an inverse logic. They see the United States as a wounded superpower determined to thwart the rise of any challenger, of which China is the most credible. No matter how intensely China pursues cooperation, some Chinese argue, Washington’s fixed objective will be to hem in a growing China by military deployment and treaty commitments, thus preventing it from playing its historic role as the Middle Kingdom. In this perspective, any sustained cooperation with the United States is self-defeating, since it will only serve the overriding U.S. objective of neutralizing China. Systematic hostility is occasionally considered to inhere even in American cultural and technological influences, which are sometimes cast as a form of deliberate pressure designed to corrode China’s domestic consensus and traditional values. The most assertive voices argue that China has been unduly passive in the face of hostile trends and that (for example, in the case of territorial issues in the South China Sea) China should confront those of its neighbors with which it has disputed claims and then, in the words of the strategic analyst Long Tao, “reason, think ahead and strike first before things gradually run out of hand . . . launch[ing] some tiny-scale battles that could deter provocateurs from going further.”

THE PAST NEED NOT BE PROLOGUE

Is there, then, a point in the quest for a cooperative U.S.-Chinese relationship and in policies designed to achieve it? To be sure, the rise of powers has historically often led to conflict with established countries. But conditions have changed. It is doubtful that the leaders who went so blithely into a world war in 1914 would have done so had they known what the world would be like at its end. Contemporary leaders can have no such illusions. A major war between developed nuclear countries must bring casualties and upheavals impossible to relate to calculable objectives. Preemption is all but excluded, especially for a pluralistic democracy such as the United States.

If challenged, the United States will do what it must to preserve its security. But it should not adopt confrontation as a strategy of choice. In China, the United States would encounter an adversary skilled over the centuries in using prolonged conflict as a strategy and whose doctrine emphasizes the psychological exhaustion of the opponent. In an actual conflict, both sides possess the capabilities and the ingenuity to inflict catastrophic damage on each other. By the time any such hypothetical conflagration drew to a close, all participants would be left exhausted and debilitated. They would then be obliged to face anew the very task that confronts them today: the construction of an international order in which both countries are significant components.

The blueprints for containment drawn from Cold War strategies used by both sides against an expansionist Soviet Union do not apply to current conditions. The economy of the Soviet Union was weak (except for military production) and did not affect the global economy. Once China broke off ties and ejected Soviet advisers, few countries except those forcibly absorbed into the Soviet orbit had a major stake in their economic relationship with Moscow. Contemporary China, by contrast, is a dynamic factor in the world economy. It is a principaltrading partner of all its neighbors and most of the Western industrialpowers, including the United States. A prolonged confrontation between China and the United States would alter the world economy with unsettling consequences for all. 

Nor would China find that the strategy it pursued in its own conflict with the Soviet Union fits a confrontation with the UnitedStates. Only a few countries -- and no Asian ones -- would treat an American presence in Asia as “fingers” to be “chopped off” (in Deng Xiaoping’s graphic phrase about Soviet forward positions). Even those Asian states that are not members of alliances with the United States seek the reassurance of an American political presence in the region and of American forces in nearby seas as the guarantor of the world to which they have become accustomed.Their approach was expressed by a senior Indonesian official to an American counterpart: “Don’t leave us, but don’t make us choose.”

China’s recent military buildup is not in itself an exceptional phenomenon: the more unusual outcome would be if the world’s second-largest economy and largest importer of natural resources did not translate its economic power into some increased military capacity. The issue is whether that buildup is open ended and to what purposes it is put. If the United States treats every advance in Chinese military capabilities as a hostile act, it will quickly find itself enmeshed in an endless series of disputes on behalf of esoteric aims. But China must be aware, from its own history, of the tenuous dividing line between defensive and offensive capabilities and of the consequences of an unrestrained arms race.

China’s leaders will have their own powerful reasons for rejecting domestic appeals for an adversarial approach -- as indeed they have publicly proclaimed. China’s imperial expansion has historically been achieved by osmosis rather than conquest, or by the conversionto Chinese culture of conquerors who then added their own territoriesto the Chinese domain. Dominating Asia militarily would be a formidable undertaking. The Soviet Union, during the Cold War, bordered on a string of weak countries drained by war and occupation and dependent on American troop commitments for their defense. China today faces Russia in the north; Japan and South Korea, with American military alliances, to the east; Vietnam and India to the south; and Indonesia and Malaysia not far away. This is not a constellation conducive to conquest. It is more likely to raise fears of encirclement. Each of these countries has a long military tradition and would pose a formidable obstacle if its territory or its ability to conduct an independent policy were threatened. A militant Chinese foreign policy would enhance cooperation among all or at least some of these nations, evoking China’s historic nightmare, as happened in the period 2009–10.

DEALING WITH THE NEW CHINA

Another reason for Chinese restraint in at least the medium term is the domestic adaptation the country faces. The gap in Chinese society between the largely developed coastal regions and the undeveloped western regions has made Hu’s objective of a “harmonious society” both compelling and elusive. Cultural changes compound the challenge. The next decades will witness, for the first time, the full impact of one-child families on adult Chinese society. This is bound to modify cultural patterns in a society in which large families have traditionally taken care of the aged and the handicapped. When four grandparents compete for the attention of one child and invest him with the aspirations heretofore spread across many offspring, a new pattern of insistent achievement and vast, perhaps unfulfillable, expectations may arise.

All these developments will further complicate the challenges of China’s governmental transition starting in 2012, in which the presidency; the vice-presidency; the considerable majority of the positions in China’s Politburo, State Council, and Central Military Commission; and thousands of other key national and provincial posts will be staffed with new appointees. The new leadership group will consist, for the most part, of members of the first Chinese generation in a century and a half to have lived all their lives in a country at peace. Its primary challenge will be finding a way to deal with a society revolutionized by changing economic conditions, unprecedented and rapidly expanding technologies of communication, a tenuous global economy, and the migration of hundreds of millions of people from China’s countryside to its cities. The model of government that emerges will likely be a synthesis of modern ideas and traditional Chinese political and cultural concepts, and the quest for that synthesis will provide the ongoing drama of China’s evolution.

These social and political transformations are bound to be followed with interest and hope in the United States. Direct American intervention would be neither wise nor productive. The United States will, as it should, continue to make its views known on human rights issues and individual cases. And its day-to-day conduct will express its national preference for democratic principles. But a systematic project to transform China’s institutions by diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions is likely to backfire and isolate the very liberals it is intended to assist. In China, it would be interpreted by a considerable majority through the lens of nationalism, recalling earlier eras of foreign intervention. 

What this situation calls for is not an abandonment of American values but a distinction between the realizable and the absolute. The U.S.-Chinese relationship should not be considered as a zero-sum game, nor can the emergence of a prosperous and powerful China be assumed in itself to be an American strategic defeat. 

A cooperative approach challenges preconceptions on both sides. The United States has few precedents in its national experience of relating to a country of comparable size, self-confidence, economic achievement, and international scope and yet with such a different culture and political system. Nor does history supply China with precedents for how to relate to a fellow great power with a permanent presence in Asia, a vision of universal ideals not geared toward Chinese conceptions, and alliances with several of China’s neighbors. Prior to the United States, all countries establishing such a position did so as a prelude to an attempt to dominate China.

The simplest approach to strategy is to insist on overwhelming potential adversaries with superior resources and materiel. But in the contemporary world, this is only rarely feasible. China and the United States will inevitably continue as enduring realities for each other. Neither can entrust its security to the other -- no great power does, for long -- and each will continue to pursue its own interests, sometimes at the relative expense of the other. But both have the responsibility to take into account the other’s nightmares, and both would do well to recognize that their rhetoric, as much as their actual policies, can feed into the other’s suspicions.

China’s greatest strategic fear is that an outside power or powers will establish military deployments around China’s periphery capable of encroaching on China’s territory or meddling in its domestic institutions. When China deemed that it faced such a threat in the past, it went to war rather than risk the outcome of what it saw as gathering trends -- in Korea in 1950, against India in 1962, along the northern border with the Soviet Union in 1969, and against Vietnam in 1979.

The United States’ fear, sometimes only indirectly expressed, is of being pushed out of Asia by an exclusionary bloc. The United States fought a world war against Germany and Japan to prevent such an outcome and exercised some of its most forceful Cold War diplomacy under administrations of both political parties to this end against the Soviet Union. In both enterprises, it is worth noting, substantial joint U.S.-Chinese efforts were directed against the perceived threat of hegemony.

Other Asian countries will insist on their prerogatives to develop their capacities for their own national reasons, not as part of a contest between outside powers. They will not willingly consign themselves to a revived tributary order. Nor do they regard themselves as elements in an American containment policy or an American project to alter China’s domestic institutions. They aspire to good relations with both China and the United States and will resist any pressure to choose between the two.

Can the fear of hegemony and the nightmare of military encirclement be reconciled? Is it possible to find a space in which both sides can achieve their ultimate objectives without militarizing their strategies? For great nations with global capabilities and divergent, even partly conflicting aspirations, what is the margin between conflict and abdication?

That China will have a major influence in the regions surrounding it is inherent in its geography, values, and history. The limits of that influence, however, will be shaped by circumstance and policy decisions. These will determine whether an inevitable quest for influence turns into a drive to negate or exclude other independent sources of power.

For nearly two generations, American strategy relied on local regional defense by American ground forces -- largely to avoid the catastrophic consequences of a general nuclear war. In recent decades, congressional and public opinion have impelled an end to such commitments in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, fiscal considerations further limit the range of such an approach. American strategy has been redirected from defending territory to threatening unacceptable punishment against potential aggressors. This requires forces capable of rapid intervention and global reach, but not bases ringing China’s frontiers. What Washington must not do is combine a defense policy based on budgetary restraints with a diplomacy based on unlimited ideological aims.

Just as Chinese influence in surrounding countries may spur fears of dominance, so efforts to pursue traditional American national interests can be perceived as a form of military encirclement. Both sides must understand the nuances by which apparently traditional and apparently reasonable courses can evoke the deepest worries of the other. They should seek together to define the sphere in which their peaceful competition is circumscribed. If that is managed wisely, both military confrontation and domination can be avoided; if not, escalating tension is inevitable. It is the task of diplomacy to discover this space, to expand it if possible, and to prevent the relationship from being overwhelmed by tactical and domestic imperatives. 

COMMUNITY OR CONFLICT

The current world order was built largely without Chinese participation, and hence China sometimes feels less bound than others by its rules. Where the order does not suit Chinese preferences, Beijing has set up alternative arrangements, such as in the separate currency channels being established with Brazil and Japan and other countries. If the pattern becomes routine and spreads into many spheres of activity, competing world orders could evolve. Absent common goals coupled with agreed rules of restraint, institutionalized rivalry is likely to escalate beyondthe calculations and intentions of its advocates. In an era in which unprecedented offensive capabilities and intrusive technologies multiply, the penalties of such a course could be drastic and perhaps irrevocable.

Crisis management will not be enough to sustain a relationship so global and beset by so many differing pressures within and between both countries, which is why I have argued for the concept of a Pacific Community and expressed the hope that China and the United States can generate a sense of common purpose on at least some issues of general concern. But the goal of such a community cannot be reached if either side conceives of the enterprise as primarily a more effective way to defeat or undermine the other. Neither China nor the United States can be systematically challenged without its noticing, and if such a challenge is noted, it will be resisted. Both need to commit themselves to genuine cooperation and find a way to communicate and relate their visions to each other and to the world. 

Some tentative steps in that direction have already been undertaken. For example, the United States has joined several other countries in beginning negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free-trade pact linking the Americas with Asia. Such an arrangement could be a step toward a Pacific Community because it would lower trade barriers among the world’s most productive, dynamic, and resource-rich economies and link the two sides of the ocean in shared projects. 

Obama has invited China to join the TPP. However, the terms of accession as presented by American briefers and commentators have sometimes seemed to require fundamental changes in China’s domestic structure. To the extent that is the case, the TPP could be regarded in Beijing as part of a strategy to isolate China. For its part, China has put forward comparable alternative arrangements. It has negotiated a trade pact with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and has broached a Northeast Asian trade pact with Japan and South Korea.

Important domestic political considerations are involved for all parties. But if China and the United States come to regard each other’s trade-pact efforts as elements in a strategy of isolation, the Asia-Pacific region could devolve into competing adversarial power blocs. Ironically, this would be a particular challenge if China meets frequent American calls to shift from an export-led to a consumption-driven economy, as its most recent five-year plan contemplates. Such a development could reduce China’s stake in the United States as an export market even as it encourages other Asian countries to further orient their economies toward China.

The key decision facing both Beijing and Washington is whether to move toward a genuine effort at cooperation or fall into a new version of historic patterns of international rivalry. Both countries have adopted the rhetoric of community. They have even established a high-level forum for it, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which meets twice a year. It has been productive on immediate issues, but it is still in the foothills of its ultimate assignment to produce a truly global economic and political order. And if a global order does not emerge in the economic field, barriers to progress on more emotional and less positive-sum issues, such as territory and security, may grow insurmountable.

THE RISKS OF RHETORIC

As they pursue this process, both sides need to recognize the impact of rhetoric on perceptions and calculations. American leaders occasionally launch broadsides against China, including specific proposals for adversarial policies, as domestic political necessities. This occurs even -- perhaps especially -- when a moderate policy is the ultimate intention. The issue is not specific complaints, which should be dealt with on the merits of the issue, but attacks on the basic motivations of Chinese policy, such as declaring China a strategicadversary. The target of these attacks is bound to ask whether domestic imperatives requiring affirmations of hostility will sooner or later require hostile actions. By the same token, threatening Chinese statements, including those in the semiofficial press, are likely to be interpreted in terms of the actions they imply, whatever the domestic pressures or the intent that generated them.

The American debate, on both sides of the political divide, often describes China as a “rising power” that will need to “mature” and learn how to exercise responsibility on the world stage. China, however, sees itself not as a rising power but as a returning one, predominant in its region for two millennia and temporarily displaced by colonial exploiters taking advantage of Chinese domestic strife and decay. It views the prospect of a strong China exercising influence in economic, cultural, political, and military affairs not as an unnatural challenge to world order but rather as a return to normality. Americans need not agree with every aspect of the Chinese analysis to understand that lecturing a country with a history of millennia about its need to “grow up” and behave “responsibly” can be needlessly grating.

On the Chinese side, proclamations at the governmental and the informal level that China intends to “revive the Chinese nation” to its traditional eminence carry different implications inside China and abroad. China is rightly proud of its recent strides in restoring its sense of national purpose following what it sees as a century of humiliation. Yet few other countries in Asia are nostalgic for an era when they were subject to Chinese suzerainty. As recent veterans of anticolonial struggles, most Asian countries are extremely sensitive to maintaining their independence and freedom of action vis-à-vis any outside power, whether Western or Asian. They seek to be involved in as many overlapping spheres of economic and political activity as possible; they invite an American role in the region but seek equilibrium, not a crusade or confrontation.

The rise of China is less the result of its increased military strength than of the United States’ own declining competitive position, driven by factors such as obsolescent infrastructure, inadequate attention to research and development, and a seemingly dysfunctional governmental process. The United States should address these issues with ingenuity and determination instead of blaming a putative adversary. It must take care not to repeat in its China policy the pattern of conflicts entered with vast public support and broad goals but ended when the American political process insisted on a strategy of extrication that amounted to an abandonment, if not a complete reversal, of the country’s proclaimed objectives.

China can find reassurance in its own record of endurance and in the fact that no U.S. administration has ever sought to alter the reality of China as one of the world’s major states, economies, and civilizations. Americans would do well to remember that even when China’s GDP is equal to that of the United States, it will need to be distributed over a population that is four times as large, aging, and engaged in complex domestic transformations occasioned by China’s growth and urbanization. The practical consequence is that a great deal of China’s energy will still be devoted to domestic needs

Both sides should be open to conceiving of each other’s activities as a normal part of international life and not in themselves as a cause for alarm. The inevitable tendency to impinge on each other should not be equated with a conscious drive to contain or dominate, so long as both can maintain the distinction and calibrate their actions accordingly. China and the United States will not necessarily transcend the ordinary operation of great-power rivalry. But they owe it to themselves, and the world, to make an effort to do so.

 
 

The Real China Model

It's Not What You Think It Is

 
 
 
 
n 2016, the South Sudanese politician Anthony Kpandu led a delegation to China. What he saw there blew him away: modern industrial parks, high-speed trains, gleaming infrastructure, dazzling skylines. “It was magnificent,” he enthused. “You can’t believe it, but it’s there. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Such reactions contribute to a growing fear in the West that developing countries are finding the so-called "China model" more appealing than liberal democracy. The Chinese leadership has inadvertently exacerbated these fears. At the 19th Party Congress in 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping confidently declared that other states should learn from “the Chinese solution for tackling the problems facing mankind.” In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the journalist Richard McGregor wrote that Xi is promoting the idea that “authoritarian political systems are not only legitimate but can outperform Western democracies.” Beijing’s real goal, he warned, “is encouraging the spread of authoritarianism.”

Yet for all of the panic and paranoia over this development, some basic questions remain unanswered. What exactly is the China model? It is clear that China’s economy has boomed despite its decision to spurn Western-style democracy, but does this mean that authoritarianism was responsible for the country’s capitalist success?

In reality, different parts of China have followed many different paths to economic and social development over the last several decades. The China model changes depending on where and when one looks for it. More important, it is inaccurate—and indeed misleading—to equate the China model with conventional authoritarianism. As I have argued in this magazine, the political foundation of China’s economic success since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping opened markets in 1978 was not autocracy, but autocracy with democratic characteristics. By reforming China’s bureaucracy, Deng introduced democratic features, specifically accountability, competition, and partial limits on power, into the country’s single-party system. China’s experience in the reform era shows that even a partial injection of democratic qualities into an autocratic system can unleash tremendous initiative and adaptive capacity. Western democracies do not need to fear the China model. Instead, they should worry about the widespread misinterpretation of this model by the West, the developing world, and China’s own political elites. 

DEFINING THE CHINA MODEL

Today, it seems as if everyone has an opinion about the China model. To media outlets in the West, it is simply authoritarian capitalism—single-party rule combined with extensive state ownership and control over the economy. Many experts echo variants of this interpretation. McGregor defines China’s system as “a Leninist-style party with a centuries-old bureaucratic culture.” The economist Barry Eichengreen distills it to “strong political control.”

But others disagree. The analyst Joshua Cooper Ramo coined the term “the Beijing Consensus” to describe a model of innovation-based development in which economic success is measured “not by GDP growth but by sustainability and equality” (a surprise to anyone familiar with China’s serious inequality problem). The Chinese commentator Zhang Weiwei, on the other hand, says that “super” conditions—“a super-large population, super-sized territory, a super-long history, and a super-rich culture”—have created a model that is characterized by a mixed economy, incremental reforms, and an enlightened state. The theorist Daniel Bell, meanwhile, casts China as a meritocracy, in which officials are selected by competence rather than multiparty elections.

All of these interpretations are partially correct, but none of them is complete. China is a vast country that has changed rapidly over the past four decades. As a result, there are numerous and sometimes contradictory China models depending on where and when one looks. 

Consider, for example, one of the most prosperous counties in Zhejiang Province (in my book, I use the pseudonym "Blessed County" to ensure anonymity). Between 1978 and 1993, when private capitalism was still forbidden, this county relied upon collective enterprises, which were owned by village and township governments. Despite the lack of formal private property rights, industrial output grew 33 times during this period as collective economic units were allowed to fully retain profits. Viewed in isolation, this snapshot demonstrates that incremental reforms on the margins of a planned economy were enough to fuel growth.

But the story doesn’t end here. Between 1993 and 1995, as Beijing further liberalized markets, the county government privatized collective enterprises en masse. Although the lack of private property rights had not prevented industrial production from taking off, it had hindered business expansion. By facilitating privatization and refraining from intervening directly in the economy, local officials supported the emergence of the county’s first generation of private entrepreneurs, several of whom went on to become globally competitive corporate titans. This second snapshot validates “the Washington Consensus,” the belief that private property rights and a limited government are the necessary preconditions for economic growth.

Moving into the first decade of this century, as local industries flourished, the county became congested and chaotic. This led private businesses to call for government intervention to coordinate the zoning of various industries and provide urban planning. To do so, the local leadership had to relocate factories and residents, sometimes through coercion. But this forceful step created a new business district in the heart of the county, where companies could congregate. This move stimulated the spread of services such as financial management and marketing that helped industries upgrade. It also vastly improved traffic and the quality of residential life. Such extensive measures took the county’s prosperity to a new level, not simply by increasing production but by transforming the economy’s structure. This third snapshot from 2000 to 2010 provides evidence for the theory that heavy-handed state intervention and planning can spur economic growth.

In one small area of China with a population of less than a million people, it is possible to observe three radically different models of development, each of which played an important role in the area’s economic and social transformation.

DIRECTED IMPROVISATION

Most explanations of the China model highlight qualities that prevailed only in certain locations at certain points of time. This does not mean there is no China model, however. Since 1978, the most consistent feature of China’s development has been the governing system that has allowed continuous change to emerge, often in unexpected ways.

This adaptive system, bequeathed by Deng, is what I call “directed improvisation.” Three disastrous decades under Mao Zedong’s dictatorship taught the reformists who took over about the limits and dangers of top-down control. Although Deng rejected Western-style democracy, he was also determined to remove ideological shackles and liberate bottom-up initiative within China’s vast bureaucracy.

Under Deng, Beijing became a director, not a dictator. Instead of trying to command their way to rapid industrialization and growth, reformers focused on creating the right conditions for lower-level officials to kick-start development in their own communities using local resources. This entailed more than just decentralization. Simply allowing localities to do whatever they pleased would have bred chaos; Beijing was highly involved in setting boundaries, initiating reforms across policy areas that complemented one another, and defining the criteria of bureaucratic success. Later, it also began intervening to balance rich and poor regions by encouraging the domestic transfer of industry and capital.

Although the Chinese leadership did not grant formal political rights to civil society, these changes liberated China’s vast civil service, which is as populous as a midsize country, to take initiative and innovate. In this environment, regions across China collectively improvised a large variety of development models that were tailored to local conditions and needs.

It was not simply single-party rule and state ownership that fueled China’s dramatic economic rise.

Once the full picture is revealed, it becomes clear that it was not simply single-party rule and state ownership that fueled China’s dramatic economic rise. To be sure, Beijing has swerved back and forth on the control barometer over the last several decades, and Xi now exercises more control than his predecessors. But experience has shown that imposing tight political oversight and relying on top-down commands have usually backfired for Beijing. For example, in an attempt to save falling stock prices in 2015, Xi’s administration rolled out a series of dictates, such as making state banks pledge to buy stocks and not to sell them. In the end, these efforts not only failed, they wasted billions of dollars. For the ruling elites, this was a fresh reminder that markets can be guided, but they cannot be precisely controlled. 

THE REAL CHINA MODEL

Visitors impressed by the gleaming infrastructure and rising wealth of China’s first-tier cities may be tempted to conclude that such prosperity is the result of authoritarianism. But since the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, single-party rule has coincided with abject failure as well as dramatic success. Mao’s effort to catch up with the United Kingdom’s industrial output in seven years culminated in the world’s largest man-made famine: 30 million peasants starved to death within three years. 

It is important to note that even Chinese policymakers cannot come to a consensus on what the China model is. In Beijing, elites are still debating whether it was Maoism or Dengism, central planning or decentralization, public investment or private capital, that played a larger role in China’s development—and what the right balance ought to be going forward. Despite urging other countries to learn from “Chinese wisdom” and “the China solution,” Xi never specifies what this means. It is not surprising that China’s attempts to share lessons from its development with other countries are often reduced to showing off model sites, invoking Confucianism, or idealistically portraying the party as “meritocratic." More worrying, by centralizing power and clamping down on freedom, the current regime is moving away from directed improvisation, which has enabled China's adaptability over the past four decades, and toward top-down control, which failed during the Maoist era.  

There are certainly valuable lessons to draw from China’s development—the country achieved an unprecedented duration of sustained economic growth and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the process. But it is crucial to draw the right lessons. Autocracy alone was not the key to China’s impressive growth. Rather, it was the introduction of some democratic qualities through bureaucratic reforms and Beijing’s willingness to allow and direct local improvisation that enabled the nation’s economic dynamism. Instead of relying on top-down commands, the country leveraged local knowledge and resources, promoted diversity, and motivated people to contribute their ideas and effort. These characteristics should be familiar to any democracy; China just incorporated them into single-party rule.

 
 

Stop Obsessing About China

Why Beijing Will Not Imperil U.S. Hegemony

 
The United States is a deeply polarized nation, yet one view increasingly spans the partisan divide: the country is at imminent risk of being overtaken by China. Unless Washington does much more to counter the rise of its biggest rival, many argue, it may soon lose its status as the world’s leading power. According to this emerging consensus, decades of U.S. investment and diplomatic concessions have helped create a geopolitical monster. China now boasts the world’s largest economy and military, and it is using its growing might to set its own rules in East Asia, hollow out the U.S. economy, and undermine democracy around the globe. In response, many Democrats and Republicans agree, the United States must ramp up its military presence in Asia, slap tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods, and challenge China’s influence worldwide.

But this emerging consensus is wrong and the policy response misguided. China is not about to overtake the United States economically or militarily—quite to the contrary. By the most important measures of national wealth and power, China is struggling to keep up and will probably fall further behind in the coming decades. The United States is and will remain the world’s sole superpower for the foreseeable future, provided that it avoids overextending itself abroad or underinvesting at home.

The greatest risk for U.S. strategy, accordingly, lies not in doing too little but in overreacting to fears of Chinese ascent and American decline. Instead of hyping China’s rise and gearing up for a new Cold War, Washington should take more modest steps to reinforce the existing balance of power in East Asia and reinvigorate the U.S. economy. To keep the peace, U.S. leaders should seek to engage rather than alienate Beijing, safe in the knowledge that long-term geopolitical trends will favor the United States.

MEASURING WHAT MATTERS

The main piece of evidence typically cited for China’s supposedly inexorable rise is its large gross domestic product (GDP), along with various other statistics that are essentially sub-components of GDP, including industrial and manufacturing output; trade and financial flows; and spending on military, research and development (R&D), and infrastructure. These gross indicators, however, are terrible measures of a country’s power. As I show in a new book, they fail to track the rise and fall of great powers over the past 200 years and perform little better than a coin toss at predicting the winners and losers of international disputes and wars. 

In fact, by these very measures, China was at the top once before: in the nineteenth century, China had the world’s largest economy and the largest military. It also ran a trade surplus with other great powers. Yet many Chinese citizens today think of this era as a “century of humiliation” during which their country lost huge chunks of territory and most of its sovereign rights to smaller rivals, most notably the United Kingdom and Japan. Similarly, nineteenth-century Russia had Europe’s largest GDP and military, but it suffered a series of crushing defeats by the United Kingdom, France, and Germany that culminated in the collapse of the Russian empire in 1917. In the last century, the Soviet Union outpaced the United States by most measures of gross resources, including industrial output, military and R&D spending, and the number of troops, nuclear weapons, scientists, and engineers. It still lost the Cold War.

Gross indicators, such as GDP, are terrible measures of a country’s power.

These and hundreds of other cases illustrate a simple but crucial point: gross indicators such as GDP and military spending exaggerate the power of populous countries, because they count the benefits of having a large workforce and a big military but not the costs of having many people to feed, police, protect, and serve.

A big population is obviously an important asset. Luxembourg, for example, will never be a major power, because its economy is a blip in world markets and its military is smaller than Cleveland’s police department. But a big population is no guarantee of great power, because people both produce and consume resources. One billion peasants will produce immense output, but they also will consume most of that output on the spot, leaving few resources left over for power projection abroad.

To become a superpower, by contrast, a country needs to amass a large stock of economic and military resources. To do this, in turn, it must be big and efficient at the same time—not one or the other. It must not only mobilize vast inputs but also extract as much as possible from these inputs. In short, a nation’s power stems not from its gross resources but from its net resources—the resources left over after subtracting the costs of making them.

MIGHT MAKES RIGHT, BUT WHAT MAKES MIGHT?

The list of these costs is long. For starters, there are production costs, which include the raw materials consumed to generate wealth and military capabilities, as well as any negative byproducts of that process (think pollution). Then, add welfare costs—the expenses a nation pays to keep its people from dying in the streets, including spending on food, health care, education, and social security. Finally, there’s the price of security: the government has to police and protect its citizens from enemies foreign and domestic. Needless to say, these costs add up. In fact, they usually consume most of a nation’s resources.

To get an accurate sense of a country’s overall power, then, analysts need to account for these costs. In recent years, the World Bank and the United Nations have taken up this task and published rough estimates of countries’ net stocks of resources. Their analyses focus on three areas: produced capital (man-made items such as machines, buildings, fighter aircraft, and software), human capital (the population’s education, skills, and working life span), and natural capital (water, energy resources, and arable land). In addition, the investment bank Credit Suisse has published data on countries’ net stocks of privately held wealth. Although these three databases use different data and methods, they largely paint the same picture: the United States’ net stocks of resources are several times the size of China’s, and its lead is growing each year, possibly by trillions of dollars.

It gets even more astonishing. These numbers are conservative estimates, because they rely on Chinese government statistics, which exaggerate China’s output by as much as 30 percent and ignore numerous costs that erode its wealth and military capabilities. Chinese businesses, for instance, use roughly two times more capital and five times more labor than U.S. companies to generate the same level of output. More than one-third of China’s industrial capacity is wasted. More than half of its R&D spending is stolen. Nearly two-thirds of its infrastructure projects cost more to build than they will ever generate in economic returns. China also spends hundreds of billions of dollars more than the United States every year to feed, police, and provide social services to its population.

The United States’ net stocks of resources are several times the size of China’s, and its lead is growing each year, possibly by trillions of dollars.

These same inefficiencies and barriers drag down China’s military might. On average, Chinese weapons systems are roughly half as capable as those of the United States in terms of range, firepower, and accuracy. Chinese troops, pilots, and sailors lack combat experience and receive less than half the training of their American counterparts. Moreover, border defense and internal security consume at least 35 percent of China’s military budget and bog down half of its active-duty force, whereas the U.S. military enjoys a secure home base and can focus almost entirely on power projection abroad.  

The U.S. military, of course, disperses its assets around the world, whereas China’s are concentrated in East Asia, making it a formidable regional power. But the United States’ military presence in many far-flung corners of the globe is a matter of policy preference rather than necessity, meaning that Washington can quickly redeploy forces from one area to another without seriously jeopardizing its security. China, by contrast, has to keep most of its military on guard at home. For one, it suffers much higher levels of domestic unrest than the United States. It also shares sea or land borders with 19 countries, five of which have fought wars against China within the last century and ten of which still claim parts of Chinese territory as their own. Crucially, many of these countries have developed advanced air, naval, and missile capabilities that could prevent China from establishing sea or air control in most of the East China and South China Seas.

In sum, the United States maintains a huge economic and military lead over China. To catch up, China will need to grow its power resources faster. This, however, is a long shot, not only given its massive debts, dwindling resources, and rampant corruption but also because of its eroding work force. By some estimates, China will lose a quarter of its working-age population—more than 200 million workers—over the next 30 years, while the number of Chinese aged 65 years or older will more than triple. As a result, China’s ratio of workers to retirees, which today stands at seven to one, will shrink to two to one. In the same period, the U.S. work force is expected to grow by 30 percent and the American worker-to-retiree ratio will remain around three to one.

THE PRICE OF FEAR

On top of being wrong, the conventional wisdom that China is a juggernaut set to overtake the United States as the world’s dominant power has dangerous policy implications. It creates the impression that the United States and China are locked in Thucydides’ Trap, in which a rising power challenges the ruling hegemon, and the two slide into a major war. This misguided notion, widespread in both countries, is already driving a spiral of hostility. Emboldened by the global hype about its rise, China has embarked on the greatest territorial expansion of any nation since World War II, staking claim to roughly 80 percent of the East China and South China Seas and pouring resources into its military. The United States has responded by labeling China a rival, imposing steep tariffson Chinese goods, gutting the State Department to free up funds for the military, inserting U.S. forces into East Asian territorial disputes, and making plans to hit China early and hard in the event of war.

Slowing this spiral requires both sides to take a clear-eyed look at the real balance of power. China must recognize that its economy and military are not strong enough to support grand ambitions for territorial conquest and regional hegemony. Its best option, therefore, is to become a responsible stakeholder in the existing international order. The United States, on the other hand, must recognize that China is nowhere close to achieving regional hegemony, let alone to challenging U.S. global primacy. The most sensible path, therefore, is to maintain deep economic, diplomatic, and cultural ties with China while taking sensible steps to keep it in check. 

Instead of spending trillions of dollars building a 355-ship navy, for example, the United States should strengthen existing power relationships in East Asia by helping China’s neighbors develop defensive military capabilities and deploying U.S. antiship and surface-to-air missile launchers on allied shores along the East and South China Seas. Instead of rushing into a 1930s-style tariff war, the United States should punish Chinese trade violations and espionage through a reformed WTO, regional free trade pacts, and targeted export controls and investment restrictions. Rather than reflexively opposing China’s international initiatives, as the United States did with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Washington should join and shape them from within, as China did with the World Bank. Instead of combatting Chinese sharp power by imitating Beijing and shutting down media, cultural exchanges, and private organizations, the United States should use its free press and open civil society as soft power tools to expose and discredit Chinese meddling. Instead of countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative by spending billions of dollars on dubious infrastructure abroad, Washington would do better to spend those funds on infrastructure, scientific research, and job training at home.   

The main threat to U.S. primacy is not China’s rise but geopolitical hyperventilating that emboldens Beijing while encouraging reckless U.S. foreign adventures and domestic underinvestment. The United States' longstanding policy of engagement may not have democratized China, but it has preserved U.S. primacy and made the world a more peaceful place. To let exaggerated fears undermine this achievement is a tragic misstep that will ultimately leave the United States less secure, powerful, and prosperous.

 

 
 

Was Letting China Into the WTO a Mistake?

Why There Were No Better Alternatives

 
 
 
 
As President Donald Trump’s recent $60 billion-a-year trade tariffs against China have made abundantly clear, there has been growing discontent in the United States with Beijing’s failure to conform to liberal economic and democratic norms. The dismay over Chinese protectionism, and its negative impact on developed economies, has emanated not just from the White House, but from voters as well as from diplomatic, commercial, and academic quarters. The chorus of outrage has even raised doubts over whether the West should have ever admitted China to the World Trade Organization, whose rules-based system seemingly enabled Beijing to prosper even as it engaged in questionable behavior. Was letting China into the WTO a strategic mistake?

In a report released earlier this year, the U.S. Trade Representative argued rather provocatively that the United States had indeed “erred in supporting China’s entry into the WTO on terms that have proven to be ineffective in securing China’s embrace of an open, market-oriented trade regime.” But did it? It would be poor decision making to reject a policy solely on the basis of the unfortunate outcomes that followed. Such an approach fails to address whether there were any superior alternatives at the time when such a policy was made. In the case of China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, the reality is that identifying a preferable alternative, even with the benefit of hindsight, is surpassingly difficult.

BACK TO THE DRAWING TABLE

To reconsider the merits of supporting China’s WTO membership, we must set the scene. During the 15 years of negotiations leading up to 2001, the United States and other countries set several conditions for China’s admission, including an extensive series of liberalization commitments. These involved concessions such as dropping tariffs on many categories of goods, opening up agricultural trade, and allowing in foreign service providers. In contrast, the United States did not need to make any new market-opening concessions; it just needed to guarantee that it would offer China most-favored-nation status (MFN)—basically, the same levels of tariffs that the United States had been offering Beijing since 1980. Before China joined the WTO, the United States essentially provided Beijing MFN treatment through its regular waiver of the 1974 Jackson–Vanik amendment, a law intended to restrict the trade benefits the United States offered to Communist nations. Thus, when China joined the WTO, the United States Congress voted to discontinue the regular review and made permanent the privileges it had bestowed upon Beijing over the previous 20 years.

What, then, were the policy alternatives at the time?

One option would have been to refuse China permanent MFN status, while maintaining existing trade policy. In 2000, granting China permanent MFN was highly controversial for the U.S. Congress because of objections to Chinese human rights practices. Arguing in favor, ex ante, President Bill Clinton said, “Congress will not be voting on whether China will join the WTO. Congress can only decide whether the United States will share in the economic benefits of China joining the WTO.” Indeed, had the United States not supported Chinese entry, it would not have received the benefits of the Chinese opening. China could have maintained all its high trade barriers against the United States while dropping them against other countries. The United States would have had the “grandfather” ability to apply higher non-MFN tariffs on China, but it had already decided against doing so in the previous two decades.

A policy of denying MFN would thus have been clearly inferior, as it would have forsaken the benefits of Chinese membership while having retained all the costs that accompanied low barriers toward Chinese goods. Further, this move would have divided the international community on China, given most OECD countries supported its accession at the time. This split would have dramatically weakened the WTO in its early stages, thus undermining a major U.S. foreign policy goal to strengthen the global trading system.

Had the United States chosen to reverse its longstanding openness to Chinese goods, a tougher policy would have been to forsake MFN treatment and to raise barriers against imports from China. This could have been accomplished in a number of ways, but they all look highly problematic.

At the simplest level, the United States could have just raised tariffs on finished Chinese products. However, this would have not only hurt U.S. consumers and businesses that benefited from those imports, but would have also been interpreted as an act of enmity by Beijing. And on top of this, it would likely have been ineffective in stopping China’s rise. As China drove down the prices of toys and t-shirts in other global markets, it would have been very difficult for the United States to insulate itself from the effects. Further, China has ultimately emerged as a major global economic player by tapping into global value chains. Since China is the last stage in the chain, a finished product can appear to have come from China, even if Chinese value-added is relatively small. Since U.S. tariffs are applied based on where a good is finished, not based on value-added, China could have easily affected U.S. markets by performing earlier-stage tasks and then having the goods finished in Malaysia or some other neighboring country. This is the problem with conducting bilateral policy in a multilateral world. In sum, this second alternative is no better than the first, and decidedly worse than the current policy.

As a final alternative, the United States could have shored up the “leaks” in its China containment strategy and sought to rally other countries to exclude China from the global economy, thereby preventing its rise. This might have addressed some of the concerns of the second alternative, but it appears dangerous, implausible, and infeasible: dangerous because trying to isolate China with the open intent of blocking Chinese growth would likely have elicited a hostile response; implausible because the United States was, in late 2001, trying to rally the world to respond to terrorism emerging from the Middle East; and infeasible because the United States has had a difficult time trying to isolate countries with much smaller economies, such as Iran and North Korea. Trying to isolate China would have been orders of magnitude more difficult.

China continues to pose economic policy challenges, but there is no indication these would be any easier to resolve were China unbound by WTO rules.

WHAT WAS CHINA’S IMPACT?

In the absence of any superior policy, the admission of China into the WTO does not appear to have been a mistake. Nonetheless, it may be worth examining several of the consequences that have prompted such concerns today.

Before getting to the concerns, it is worth noting that, in the wake of China’s WTO accession, U.S. GDP per person, adjusted for inflation, grew from $44,400 in the fourth quarter of 2001 to $52,800 in the fourth quarter of 2017, an increase of roughly 19 percent. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted manufacturing sector output in the United States rose by more than 15 percent.

U.S. critics of trade with China, however, are most likely to focus on its impact on manufacturing employment. One useful measure to assess this is the share of manufacturing employment in total U.S. nonfarm payrolls, which is the primary indicator used to assess U.S. job creation. This did fall sharply in the wake of China’s WTO accession, from 12 percent in December 2001 to 8.5 percent in December 2017, a drop of just over 29 percent. Yet that decline actually represents a slowing of a preexisting trend. If we take the 16 years before China’s accession, the share of labor in U.S. manufacturing fell by more than 33 percent, from a level of 17.9 percent in 1985. One might argue that China was at least starting to engage with the global trading system over that time, if not yet in the WTO, so perhaps it played some role in the decrease in manufacturing jobs. But looking at the preceding 16-year period, we can see the same trend in the United States: a 31 percent drop from an initial labor share of 25.9 percent in 1969. That occurred during a period in which China was largely isolated from the global economy and it therefore cannot be held responsible.

The challenge, of course, is to try to isolate China’s impact from the broader trends. The ideal way to do this would be to compare China’s track record as a WTO member to an estimated outcome under an alternative scenario—but as we see, of the three possible alternatives outlined above, none of them would have provided better outcomes. There is simply no plausible counterfactual. This is a problem that plagues much of the academic literature that has developed around the “China trade shock,” a theory that claims China’s rise negatively impacted workers and manufacturing in developed nations. But not only does this line of thinking fail to test against a policy alternative, it fails to model a world in which other low-cost suppliers would have emerged to challenge Chinese dominance in labor-intensive manufacturing.

Rather than focusing on the economic impact, one might consider the constraints that Chinese WTO membership has put on the United States. Specifically, the inability to impose tariffs and the requirement to pursue disputes under the WTO.

In fact, in the 15 years following China’s accession, the United States enjoyed broad freedom to apply tariffs on imports from China. As part of China’s accession, the United States had the right to apply a special China safeguard if imports from China were found to be disrupting U.S. markets. (This is known as Sec. 421.) There were a total of seven such cases filed under this provision. Five made it past the U.S. International Trade Commission but only one resulted in U.S. tariffs—specifically, against Chinese tires. The case of the tire tariffs, in retrospect, looks to have been a policy failure, however, because the United States mostly resorted to importing tires from other countries at somewhat higher prices. The evidence is thus clear that the United States was not particularly constrained in its ability to apply bilateral tariffs; it just wisely chose not to.

What about China’s willingness to follow WTO rules? The United States has filed 12 WTO complaints that have resulted in rulings against China. In all of these cases, China has taken some action to comply. In none of them has there been an Article 22 suspension request, in which a party threatens trade sanctions due to a failure to comply. This indicates that the WTO has had success in holding China to its commitments.

The problem with the U.S. Trade Representative’s January 2018 report—in which it claimed that the United States had erred in letting China into the WTO—is that the commitments China made in 2001 do not cover all of the behaviors that are now of concern. Neither China’s WTO accession protocol nor the structure of the organization in 2001 was sufficient to ensure ideal Chinese economic behavior in the decades that followed. This is an indictment of the subsequent failure to pass new multilateral rules, however, rather than of the decision to admit China to the global system. China continues to pose economic policy challenges, but there is no indication these would be any easier to resolve were China unbound by WTO rules.

 
 

Course Correction

How to Stop China's Maritime Advance

By
The South China Sea is fast becoming the world’s most important waterway. As the main corridor between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the sea carries one-third of global maritime trade, worth over $5 trillion, each year, $1.2 trillion of it going to or from the United States. The sea’s large oil and gas reserves and its vast fishing grounds, which produce 12 percent of the world’s annual catch, provide energy and food for Southeast Asia’s 620 million people.

But all is not well in the area. Six governments—in Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam—have overlapping claims to hundreds of rocks and reefs that scatter the sea. Sovereignty over these territories not only serves as a source of national pride; it also confers hugely valuable rights to drill for oil, catch fish, and sail warships in the surrounding waters. For decades, therefore, these countries have contested one another’s claims, occasionally even resorting to violence. No single government has managed to dominate the area, and the United States has opted to remain neutral on the sovereignty disputes. In recent years, however, China has begun to assert its claims more vigorously and is now poised to seize control of the sea. Should it succeed, it would deal a devastating blow to the United States’ influence in the region, tilting the balance of power across Asia in China’s favor.

In early 2014, China’s efforts to assert authority over the South China Sea went from a trot to a gallop.

Time is running out to stop China’s advance. With current U.S. policy faltering, the Trump administration needs to take a firmer line. It should supplement diplomacy with deterrence by warning China that if the aggression continues, the United States will abandon its neutrality and help countries in the region defend their claims. Washington should make clear that it can live with an uneasy stalemate in Asia—but not with Chinese hegemony. 

ON THE MARCH

China has asserted “indisputable sovereignty” over all the land features in the South China Sea and claimed maritime rights over the waters within its “nine-dash line,” which snakes along the shores of the other claimants and engulfs almost the entire sea. Although China has long lacked the military power to enforce these claims, that is rapidly changing. After the 2008 financial crisis, moreover, the West’s economic woes convinced Beijing that the time was ripe for China to flex its muscles.

Since then, China has taken a series of actions to exert control over the South China Sea. In 2009, Chinese ships harassed the U.S. ocean surveillance ship Impeccable while it was conducting routine operations in the area. In 2011, Chinese patrol vessels cut the cables of a Vietnamese ship exploring for oil and gas. In 2012, the Chinese navy and coast guard seized and blockaded Scarborough Shoal, a contested reef in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. In 2013, China sent an armed coast guard ship into Indonesian waters to demand the return of a Chinese crew detained by the Indonesian authorities for illegally fishing around Indonesia’s Natuna Islands.

Then, in early 2014, China’s efforts to assert authority over the South China Sea went from a trot to a gallop. Chinese ships began massive dredging projects to reclaim land around seven reefs that China already controlled in the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in the sea’s southern half. In an 18-month period, China reclaimed nearly 3,000 acres of land. (By contrast, over the preceding several decades, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam had reclaimed a combined total of less than 150 acres.) Despite assurances by Chinese President Xi Jinping in September 2015 that China had “no intention to militarize” the South China Sea, it has been rapidly transforming its artificial islands into advanced military bases, replete with airfields, runways, ports, and antiaircraft and antimissile systems. In short order, China has laid the foundation for control of the South China Sea. 

Should China succeed in this endeavor, it will be poised to establish a vast zone of influence off its southern coast, leaving other countries in the region with little choice but to bend to its will. This would hobble U.S. alliances and partnerships, threaten U.S. access to the region’s markets and resources, and limit the United States’ ability to project military power and political influence in Asia.

 

MISSING: AMERICA

Despite the enormous stakes, the United States has failed to stop China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea. For the most part, Washington has believed that as China grew more powerful and engaged more with the world, it would naturally come to accept international rules and norms. For over a decade, the lodestar of U.S. policy has been to mold China into what U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick described in 2005 as “a responsible stakeholder”—which would uphold the international system or, at the least, cooperate with established powers to revise the global order. U.S. policymakers argued that they could better address most global challenges with Beijing on board. 

The United States complemented its plan to integrate China into the prevailing system with efforts to reduce the odds of confrontation. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of the need to “write a new answer to the question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet.” She was referring to the danger of falling into “the Thucydides trap,” conflict between an existing power and an emerging one. As the Athenian historian wrote, “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.” Wary of a similar outcome, U.S. policymakers looked for ways to reduce tensions and avoid conflict whenever possible. 

This approach has had its successes. The Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal were both the direct result of bilateral efforts to solve global problems together. Meanwhile, U.S. and Chinese officials interacted frequently, reducing misperceptions and perhaps even warding off major crises that could have led to outright conflict. 

Applying this playbook to the South China Sea, the Obama administration put diplomatic pressure on all the claimants to resolve their disputes peacefully in accordance with international law. To deter China from using force, the United States augmented its military presence in the region while deepening its alliances and partnerships as part of a larger “rebalance” to Asia. And although Beijing rarely saw it this way, the United States took care not to pick sides in the sovereignty disputes, for example, sending its ships to conduct freedom-of-navigation operations in waters claimed by multiple countries, not just by China.

U.S. risk aversion has allowed China to reach the brink of total control over the South China Sea.

Although this strategy helped the United States avoid major crises, it did not arrest China’s march in the South China Sea. In 2015, repeating a view that U.S. officials have conveyed for well over a decade, U.S. President Barack Obama said in a joint press conference with Xi, “The United States welcomes the rise of a China that is peaceful, stable, prosperous, and a responsible player in global affairs.” Yet Washington never made clear what it would do if Beijing failed to live up to that standard—as it often has in recent years. The United States’ desire to avoid conflict meant that nearly every time China acted assertively or defied international law in the South China Sea, Washington instinctively took steps to reduce tensions, thereby allowing China to make incremental gains. 

This would be a sound strategy if avoiding war were the only challenge posed by China’s rise. But it is not. U.S. military power and alliances continue to deter China from initiating a major military confrontation with the United States, but they have not constrained China’s creeping sphere of influence. Instead, U.S. risk aversion has allowed China to reach the brink of total control over the South China Sea.

U.S. policymakers should recognize that China’s behavior in the sea is based on its perception of how the United States will respond. The lack of U.S. resistance has led Beijing to conclude that the United States will not compromise its relationship with China over the South China Sea. As a result, the biggest threat to the United States today in Asia is Chinese hegemony, not great-power war. U.S. regional leadership is much more likely to go out with a whimper than with a bang.

THE FINAL SPRINT

The good news is that although China has made huge strides toward full control of the South China Sea, it is not there yet. To complete its takeover, it will need to reclaim more land, particularly at Scarborough Shoal, in the eastern part of the sea, where it currently lacks a base of operations. Then, it will need to develop the ability to deny foreign militaries access to the sea and the airspace above it, by deploying a range of advanced military equipment to its bases—fighter aircraft, antiship cruise missiles, long-range air defenses, and more. 

The United States has previously sought to prevent China from taking such steps. In recent years, Washington has encouraged Beijing and the other claimants to adopt a policy of “three halts”: no further land reclamation, no new infrastructure, and no militarization of existing facilities. But it never explained the consequences of defying these requests. On several occasions, the United States, along with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the G-7, and the EU, criticized China’s moves. But each time, Beijing largely ignored the condemnation, and other countries did not press the issue for long. 

Consider Beijing’s reaction to the landmark decision handed down in July 2016 by an international tribunal constituted under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which ruled that most of China’s claims in the South China Sea were illegal under international law. The United States and other countries called on China to abide by the decision but took no steps to enforce it. So China simply shrugged it off and continued to militarize the islands and police the waters around them. Although the United States has continued to make significant shows of force in the region through military exercises and patrols, it has never made clear to China what these are meant to signal. U.S. officials have often considered them “demonstrations of resolve.” But they never explained what, exactly, the United States was resolved to do. With that question unanswered, the Chinese leadership has had little reason to reverse course. 

For the same reason, U.S. President Donald Trump’s idea of reviving President Ronald Reagan’s strategy of “peace through strength” by beefing up the U.S. military will not hold China back on its own. The problem has never been that China does not respect U.S. military might. On the contrary, it fears that it would suffer badly in a war with the United States. But China also believes that the United States will impose only small costs for misdeeds that stop short of outright aggression. No matter how many more warships, fighter jets, and nuclear weapons the United States builds, that calculus will not change.

DARE TO ACT

In order to alter China’s incentives, the United States should issue a clear warning: that if China continues to construct artificial islands or stations powerful military assets, such as long-range missiles or combat aircraft, on those it has already built, the United States will fundamentally change its policy toward the South China Sea. Shedding its position of neutrality, Washington would stop calling for restraint and instead increase its efforts to help the region’s countries defend themselves against Chinese coercion. 

In this scenario, the United States would work with the other countries with claims in the sea to reclaim land around their occupied territories and to fortify their bases. It would also conduct joint exercises with their militaries and sell them the type of weapons that are known to military specialists as “counterintervention” capabilities, to give them affordable tools to deter Chinese military coercion in and around the area. These weapons should include surveillance drones, sea mines, land-based antiship missiles, fast-attack missile boats, and mobile air defenses.

A program like this would make China’s efforts to dominate the sea and the airspace above it considerably riskier for Beijing. The United States would not aim to amass enough collective firepower to defeat the People’s Liberation Army, or even to control large swaths of the sea; instead, the goal would be for partners in the region to have the ability to deny China access to important waterways, nearby coastlines, and maritime chokepoints. 

Beijing will not compromise as long as it finds itself pushing on an open door.

The United States should turn to allies and partners that already have close security ties in Southeast Asia for help. Japan could prove especially valuable, since it already sees China as a threat, works closely with several countries around the South China Sea, and is currently developing its own defenses against Chinese encroachment on its outer islands in the East China Sea. Australia, meanwhile, enjoys closer relations with Indonesia and Malaysia than does the United States, as does India with Vietnam—ties that would allow Australia and India to give these countries significantly more military heft than Washington could provide on its own.

Should Beijing refuse to change course, Washington should also negotiate new agreements with countries in the region to allow U.S. and other friendly forces to visit or, in some cases, be permanently stationed on their bases in the South China Sea. It should consider seeking access to Itu Aba Island (occupied by Taiwan), Thitu Island (occupied by the Philippines), and Spratly Island (occupied by Vietnam)—members of the Spratly Islands archipelago and the first-, second-, and fourth-largest naturally occurring islands in the sea, respectively. In addition to making it easier for the United States and its partners to train together, having forces on these islands would create new tripwires for China, increasing the risks associated with military coercion.

This new deterrent would present Beijing with a stark choice: on the one hand, it can further militarize the South China Sea and face off against countries with increasingly advanced bases and militaries, backed by U.S. power, or, on the other hand, it can stop militarizing the islands, abandon plans for further land reclamation, and start working seriously to find a diplomatic solution.

KEEPING THE PEACE

For this strategy to succeed, countries in the region will need to invest in stronger militaries and work more closely with the United States. Fortunately, this is already happening. Vietnam has purchased an expensive submarine fleet from Russia to deter China; Taiwan recently announced plans to build its own. Indonesia has stepped up military exercises near its resource-rich Natuna Islands. And despite President Rodrigo Duterte’s hostile rhetoric, the Philippines has not canceled plans to eventually allow the United States to station more warships and planes at Philippine ports and airfields along the eastern edge of the South China Sea.

But significant barriers remain. Many countries in the region fear that China will retaliate with economic penalties if they partner with the United States. In the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, Southeast Asian countries are increasingly convinced that it is inevitable that China will dominate the economic order in the region, even as many are concerned by that prospect. This growing perception will make countries in the region reluctant to enter into new military activities with the United States for fear of Chinese retribution. The only way for Washington to prevent this dangerous trend is to offer a viable alternative to economic dependence on China. That could mean reviving a version of the TPP or proposing a new and equally ambitious initiative on regional trade and investment. The United States cannot beat something with nothing. 

Washington should also do more to shape the domestic politics of countries with claims in the South China Sea by publicly disseminating more information about China’s activities in the sea. Journalists and defense specialists currently have to rely on sporadic and incomplete commercial satellite images to understand China’s actions. The U.S. government should supplement these with regular reports and images of China’s weapons deployments, as well as of Chinese navy and coast guard ships and Chinese state-backed fishing vessels illegally operating in other countries’ exclusive economic zones and territorial waters. 

Countries in the region will also be more likely to cooperate with Washington if they can count on the United States to uphold international law. To that end, the U.S. Navy should conduct freedom-of-navigation patrols in the South China Sea regularly, not just when Washington wants to make a diplomatic point. 

Critics of a more muscular deterrent argue that it would only encourage China to double down on militarization. But over the last few years, the United States has proved that by communicating credible consequences, it can change China’s behavior. In 2015, when the Obama administration threatened to impose sanctions in response to Chinese state-sponsored theft of U.S. commercial secrets, the Chinese government quickly curbed its illicit cyber-activities. And in the waning months of the Obama administration, Beijing finally began to crack down on Chinese firms illegally doing business with North Korea after Washington said that it would otherwise impose financial penalties on Chinese companies that were evading the sanctions against North Korea.

 

Moreover, greater pushback by the United States will not, as some have asserted, embolden the hawks in the Chinese leadership. In fact, those in Beijing advocating more militarization of the South China Sea have done so on the grounds that the United States is irresolute, not that it is belligerent. The only real chance for a peaceful solution to the disputes lies in stopping China’s momentum. Beijing will not compromise as long as it finds itself pushing on an open door. 

And in the event that China failed to back down from its revisionist path, the United States could live with a more militarized South China Sea, as long as the balance of power did not tilt excessively in China’s favor. This is why China would find a U.S. threat to ratchet up military support for other countries with claims in the sea credible. Ensuring that countries in the region can contribute to deterring Chinese aggression would provide more stability than relying solely on Chinese goodwill or the U.S. military to keep the peace. Admittedly, with so many armed forces operating in such a tense environment, the countries would need to develop new mechanisms to manage crises and avoid unintended escalation. But in recent years, ASEAN has made significant progress on this front by devising new measures to build confidence among the region’s militaries, efforts that the United States should support.

Finally, some critics of a more robust U.S. strategy claim that the South China Sea simply isn’t worth the trouble, since a Chinese sphere of influence would likely prove benign. But given Beijing’s increasing willingness to use economic and military pressure for political ends, this bet is growing riskier by the day. And even if Chinese control began peacefully, there would be no guarantee that it would stay peaceful. The best way to keep the sea conflict free is for the United States to do what has served it so well for over a century: prevent any other power from commanding it.

 

A Counterproductive Cold War With China

Washington's "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" Strategy Will Make Asia Less Open and Less Free

AN UNBALANCED SEQUEL TO THE REBALANCE

Like the Obama era’s rebalance to Asia, FOIP aims to reassure regional allies wary of China’s rise by responding vigorously to the risks that its dominance might pose: to the security of Asian nations, to open regional free trade, and to international norms such as peaceful dispute resolution. But unlike the rebalance, FOIP does not seek to reassure China on critical regime issues (such as the long-standing U.S. “one China” policy toward Taiwan) or strengthen positive-sum Sino-U.S. cooperation on transnational threats such as climate change. And it offers no comparable alternative to the Obama administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potentially transformative regional trade deal that U.S. President Donald Trump jettisoned on his third day in office. 

Instead, FOIP portrays China as a hostile existential threat to regional order, prosperity, and Western interests. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson introduced this characterization in an October 2017 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Trump administration then elaborated on this portrayal of China in its December 2017 National Security Strategy and in relevant parts of the January 2018 unclassified summary of the National Defense Strategy. These documents repeatedly conflate Beijing with Moscow, painting it as another full-fledged adversarial “revisionist” state. The 2017 NSS baldly states that “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” and it further claims that “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” Elsewhere, the document accuses China of “seek[ing] to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region” and of “expand[ing] its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others.” The 2018 NDS summary similarly posits that Beijing “seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”

Consequently, the 2017 NSS frames U.S. policies toward China solely around countering Beijing, with no consideration for selective cooperation coupled with selective competition and deterrence. Given these documents’ unqualified depictions of a hostile China, the 2017 NSS and 2018 NDS summaries unsurprisingly present FOIP as a vehicle for countering a “repressive vision of world order” with an alternative “free” vision of world order. Like the Tillerson speech, the NSS and the NDS summaries nonsensically depict FOIP both as an all-inclusive vision intended to make all regional actors prosperous and secure and as a network of U.S. allies and partners aimed at countering China. The reality is that such security and prosperity hardly qualify as inclusive if Washington and its allies mean to treat one of the largest, most economically dynamic nations in the Asia-Pacific as an adversary. 

Rallying other Asian nations against Beijing in an oversimplified, winner-take-all fashion grossly misinterprets the challenges of an increasingly interdependent region, one that requires a varied approach of deepening engagement and of hedging by all sides.

Indeed, the Trump White House has dismissed China’s past, and potentially future, contributions to regional and global stability and prosperity. It has also ignored Beijing’s collaboration on common transnational problems and the general need to adapt some global norms to better reflect the views and interests of China and other developing states. Instead, these documents pit the United States and other democracies against China by accusing it of deliberately striving to overturn the entire global order, a preposterous notion belied by the historical record and scholarly consensus.

In marked contrast, previous NSS documents and NDS summaries described Washington’s relations with Beijing in measured, nuanced terms that acknowledged elements of both cooperation and competition. These documents “welcome[d] the rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China” and “reject[ed] the inevitability of [U.S.-China] confrontation,” while “hedg[ing] against other possibilities.” It is highly implausible—in the two scant years preceding the latest NSS and NDS documents—that Beijing has become an unambiguous opponent of the international system, the United States, and its allies. This sudden shift in the U.S. strategic posture toward China is more likely the result of a new U.S. administration intent on defining its policies in opposition to those of its predecessors.

A PROBLEMATIC RELIANCE ON OTHER ASIAN DEMOCRACIES

Beyond its logical pitfalls and unwarranted departure from long-standing U.S. policy, FOIP’s misappraisal of India, Japan, and other key Asian allies’ interests and capabilities provokes serious doubts about whether the strategy is even workable. New Delhi and Tokyo are poorly suited to serve as the western and eastern anchors of an Indo-Pacific bloc or to operate in lockstep with a U.S.-led coalition antagonistic to Beijing.

India has long resisted being drawn into alliances against third parties and recognizes the need to maintain substantive cooperation with Beijing for its own strategic ends. Also, New Delhi’s naval ambitions are arguably hamstrung by an economy and military budget far smaller than China’s and by a long-standing dependence on foreign-made weapons systems. And despite significant economic liberalization since the early 1990s, India still ranks below China on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index. Moreover, New Delhi’s normative views on how to respond to foreign militaries within its exclusive economic zone are much closer to Beijing’s than Washington’s.

Even an economically robust, dedicated U.S. ally such as Japan, with a potent navy and a willing prime minister, could help implement FOIP only in circumscribed ways. Japan is likely to remain highly dependent on its growing economic ties with China. Equally important, Japanese citizens remain strongly opposed to the constitutional revisions Tokyo would need to create a full-blown conventional military capable of securing the Indo-Pacific alongside the U.S. Navy. Although open to a more hard-line approach to China, Japan would likely hedge to avoid an overtly hostile stance toward Beijing.

Other U.S. allies—including Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand—would have perhaps even greater reason to avoid endorsing an untempered adversarial stance toward China. Like Japan, these countries all depend, to varying degrees, on Chinese trade for continued growth and domestic stability—a role the United States cannot fulfill in the foreseeable future. Seoul and Bangkok are probably least likely to help implement FOIP. Neither country views China as an implacable threat, and both benefit significantly from continued cooperation with Beijing in many areas. Meanwhile, economic dependence on China would likely dissuade Australia and the Philippines from participating substantively in FOIP.

AN ILL-ADVISED DEPARTURE FROM PAST U.S. POLICY

The FOIP concept, if implemented, would overturn decades of U.S. policy toward China and Asia in ways that severely misread the region’s geopolitical terrain. Its divisive vision of rallying other Asian nations against Beijing in an oversimplified, winner-take-all fashion grossly misinterprets the challenges of an increasingly interdependent region, one that requires a varied approach of deepening engagement and of hedging by all sides. Fundamentally, FOIP risks profoundly undermining the foundations of the very open, democratic regional order it seeks to uphold. 

Undoubtedly, China’s undemocratic governing structure, its affinity for greater state economic control, and its heightened sensitivity to perceived infringements on sovereignty all signify real disagreements with Washington and some U.S. allies. Indeed, these substantial differences drive competing efforts by Beijing and Washington to define and apply their own versions of global and regional norms. Nonetheless, this competition does not justify the zero-sum worldview that FOIP espouses. 

Although China certainly exhibits some revisionist tendencies, it is simultaneously committed to many elements of the established order and contributes enormously to overall global and regional growth. According to the World Bank, “China has been the largest contributor to world global growth since the global financial crisis of 2008.” Meanwhile, Beijing seeks to create new regional and global financial, trade, and investment structures such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative that may be of great benefit to a number of states. China is also leading efforts to develop renewable energy technologies to help mitigate climate change.

Equally important, and contrary to unsubstantiated claims by some U.S. scholars and officials, China holds a highly unresolved, contingent sense of its overall long-term relationship with the United States and its partners. No substantive evidence indicates that Beijing is committed to replacing Washington as the global hegemon. It would be highly ill-advised to mistake China’s complex self-identity, as both a revisionist and a status quo state, for an outlandish existential struggle between two world powers with radically opposing visions of the future.

China’s differences with the West pale before the overwhelming need for the world’s two leading powers to cooperate deeply on transnational problems such as climate change, global financial instability, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,. No individual states, or coalition of democracies, can single-handedly address these systemic issues. Rather, such challenges require a measure of mutual trust and long-term commitment among all major powers, which FOIP cannot impart.

FOIP risks profoundly undermining the foundations of the very open, democratic regional order it seeks to uphold.

A MORE REALISTIC BUT UNTRIED PATH FORWARD

Rather than competing as implacable adversaries, Washington and Beijing must address the challenges that come with Asia’s complex, rapidly changing environment and the broader evolving regional and global order. They must do so by defining and implementing a strategy that builds on the common interest of all regional states in long-term growth and stability. The chief goals would be to enhance economic integration, create a mutually beneficial balance of military power, and reach a set of understandings on hot-button issues such as Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula that are acceptable both to the United States and its allies and to China and its supporters. Such a strategy—presented in detail in an October 2016 Carnegie report entitled “Creating a Stable Asia: An Agenda for a U.S.-China Balance of Power”—would require all governments concerned to make considerable compromises, recognize that neither of the two great powers will dominate Asia, and curb chauvinistic, zero-sum nationalism.

Unfortunately, neither Washington nor Beijing is progressing in any of these areas, and this portends serious future problems for Asia. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing has increased domestic repression, more assertively employed its economic and military power to pressure and intimidate Asian nations over sovereignty disputes, and explicitly (albeit somewhat vaguely) presented its economic development experience—and by implication its political system—as an example for other developing states to emulate. All these actions provide ammunition for those seeking to justify a confrontational, zero-sum approach to China, including proponents of FOIP. Hence, Beijing certainly needs to moderate its behavior to more credibly convince other Asian states, and the United States in particular, that it genuinely seeks the “win-win” outcomes it constantly espouses.

Yet Beijing is far less likely to compromise if Washington adopts an unqualifiedly adversarial stance. Given China’s size, influence, and overall strength, only the foolhardy would expect such a U.S. posture to chasten Beijing into compliance, rather than push it to use its considerable, and in some respects growing, economic, military, and political leverage in the hope of greatly reducing American influence in the region and beyond. In fact, a highly confrontational U.S. stance would almost guarantee that China itself adopts a zero-sum policy and eventually does seek to dominate the Indo-Pacific.

Despite its serious domestic political and economic problems, the United States is still the region’s strongest and, arguably, most influential power and, therefore, bears a unique responsibility and capacity to alter today’s ominous trends. Washington must abandon quixotic efforts to sustain a rapidly disappearing status quo by treating Beijing as a foe. FOIP is a self-destructive concept that must be discarded in favor of more constructive alternatives.

 

China and the International Monetary System

Does Beijing Really Want to Challenge the Dollar?

Zhou’s call for a greater role for the SDR attracted attention around the world. Many observers viewed his comments as a sign of China’s readiness to challenge the U.S.-dominated international monetary order. Indeed, several years later, in 2015, China got its own currency, the renminbi (RMB), admitted to the SDR basket, which the year before had included only the dollar, the pound sterling, the yen, and the euro. Some Western analysts saw that measure, too, as a sign of China’s interest in challenging the international monetary system.

In fact, Zhou’s 2009 statement was not as revolutionary as it seemed. His comments reflected China’s long-standing position that the SDR should play a greater role in the international monetary system, making it less detrimental to developing countries and easing some of the instability produced by its dependence on national currencies as reserves. That position says more about China’s national identity than about its interest in challenging the U.S.-dominated international monetary system.  

THE EMERGENCE OF THE SDR

The international monetary system created at the end of World War II was based on fixed exchange rates and a strong link between the dollar and gold. By the early 1960s, the economist Robert Triffin had identified a major weakness in this system: the country that issued the global reserve currency (in this case, the United States) had to supply the world with liquidity in its currency—but to do so, it had to run balance-of-payments deficits, which would erode the world’s confidence in the currency. Over the course of the decade, the so-called Triffin dilemma became a widely recognized reality. In 1969, to address the problem, the IMF created the SDR to supplement the U.S. dollar as a source of international liquidity; in 1970, it made its first allocation of SDR 9.3 billion. (The value of the SDR fluctuates with the value of the currencies on which it is based.)

The new synthetic currency was a marginal factor in the international monetary system—and it became only more so over time. Indeed, from the 1970s to the 1990s, the share of SDRs in global nongold reserves declined from nine percent to between one and two percent. By the early years of this century, the SDR seemed mostly irrelevant.

That trend underwent a dramatic reversal in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Many observers, such as the political economist Eric Helleiner, credited Zhou’s comments for the revived interest. But did Zhou’s views really represent a radical break from China’s earlier approach to the reform of the global monetary system? History suggests otherwise. 

CHINA JOINS THE CLUB

 

By the time the People’s Republic of China joined the IMF in 1980, the original Bretton Woods system had gone through tumultuous changes. The United States had broken the link between gold and the U.S. dollar in 1971, rendering moot the original purpose of the SDR—that is, to supplement the dollar under a fixed exchange rate. In 1978, the IMF set forth the objective of making the SDR a principal reserve currency; the next year, it made a second allocation of about SDR 12 billion.

In its first years as a member of the IMF and the World Bank, Beijing showed itself to be a modest, cooperative newcomer. When it came to the SDR, China tended to rely on reports and studies issued by the IMF’s staff, largely agreeing with their recommendations. But over the years that followed, Beijing began to lobby for the allocation of more SDRs, a more equitable distribution of the synthetic currency, and an expanded use of the SDR more generally.

Why did China push for these policies? In the early 1980s, Chinese representatives at the IMF contended that Western official development assistance was not meeting the growing financing needs of most poorer countries. China argued that more SDR allocations could reduce those countries’ need to borrow abroad, help them expand their imports, and let their economies grow. Around a decade later, in a 1992 speech at the IMF, China’s representative to the organization, Che Peiqin, made a similar case. Che argued that countries in sub-Saharan Africa and eastern Europe had seen a considerable decline in the ratio of nongold reserves to imports. Without easy access to the international capital markets, they struggled to restore their reserve ratios, at the expense of imports and growth. It would be in the interest of all, Che argued, to make more official resources available to those states.

After the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, foreign direct investment in developing economies was slowing, the balance of payments among many poorer countries was taking a hit, and such countries were facing high costs to borrow in international markets. So China again called for more SDR allocations. Increasing the allocation of SDRs, Beijing argued, would help stabilize the international financial system by providing a safeguard against liquidity crises among developing countries.  

The distribution of SDRs was another focus of Chinese policy. According to the IMF’s Articles of Agreement, new allocations of SDRs would be distributed according to members’ IMF quotas, meaning that developed countries, which hold the biggest quotas, would get more SDRs than would developing countries. China took issue with this distribution, and on several occasions, Beijing’s representatives to the IMF called for the organization to redistribute some of the SDRs so that they would benefit developing countries. 

The first two drivers of China’s interest in SDRs—liquidity and distribution—thus took preference over what today’s observers regard as the core of Chinese policy: expanding the role of the SDR in the international monetary system.

Yet that third theme was present as far back as 1986. In a speech at the IMF in that year, China’s representative, Huang Fanzhang, argued that because creditworthy countries (generally developed ones) could augment their reserves by borrowing in the market without having to undertake specific adjustment measures, they could delay correcting the imbalances that had led to the borrowing until they had reached a point where they had to take tough measures. Huang also pointed out that financial markets tend to overreact, oscillating between overlending and panicking. That meant that the SDR held great potential to improve the management of international liquidity: by increasing the share of the SDR in international reserves, the reserve-generating process would become less volatile, since it would be less dependent on private capital markets.

In 1989, China’s representative to the IMF, Dai Qianding, called on the agency to broaden the use of the SDR by permitting private entities to employ it and by simplifying the processes by which it could be used. In the long term, Dai told the IMF, “there is no firm assurance in relying on a national currency as an international reserve asset,” so it was appropriate to explore making the SDR the international monetary system’s principal reserve asset. In 1994, Wei Benhua, the Chinese representative at the IMF, went further. “We must make efforts in moving toward the objective of making the SDR the principal reserve asset of the international monetary system,” he said.

CHALLENGING WHAT’S IN THE BASKET

Since 1980, the SDR basket had included the currencies of the five IMF members with the largest exports of goods and services between 1975 and 1979: the U.S. dollar, German mark, French franc, Japanese yen, and British pound sterling. (The mark and the franc were replaced by the euro after the introduction of that currency.) In the 1980s and 1990s, China went along with the method and basket used by the IMF to decide the value and the interest rate of the SDR. 

But China’s position began to change in the years that followed.  In 2005, a statement China submitted to the IMF criticized the IMF for using “backward-looking indicators” in developing the SDR basket and suggested that the institution discuss China’s rapid growth as an exporter. The implication was clear: the IMF should consider the RMB for inclusion in the SDR basket. By 2009, after Zhou’s statement, Chinese representatives at the IMF again argued that in order to improve the liquidity and attractiveness of the SDR as a reserve asset, IMF staff should study how to broaden the role of the SDR, expanding and realigning the currencies in the SDR basket.

In 2010, in a review of the SDR basket, the IMF rejected the RMB’s attempt to enter. But China did not give up. At the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping again called on the IMF to reform the SDR basket, and in 2015 the Chinese government intensified its push. Finally, in November 2015, the IMF decided to accept the RMB into the SDR basket, assigning it 10.92 percent of the total weight, below the U.S. dollar and the euro, but above the yen and the pound sterling.

CURRENCY POLITICS IN CONTEXT

Contrary to widely held impressions, then, Zhou’s 2009 statement was not a major departure from China’s long-standing positions regarding the SDR or the dollar-led order. Instead, it represented a reprisal of ideas that Beijing had pushed for decades: namely, that the international monetary system was burdened by its dependence on private capital markets and a few national currencies, the dollar chief among them.

What was notable about Zhou’s statement was not its content but its timing. In the late 1990s, when the IMF decided to allocate more SDRs for the first time since the early 1980s, China’s economy was the world’s seventh largest, ranking behind Italy’s. By 2009, however, China’s GDP had become the third largest in the world, after the United States’ and Japan’s. More important, the global financial crisis, which originated in the United States, had dealt a heavy blow to the prestige of many developed countries: China stood almost alone as the world’s remaining major engine of growth. So when Zhou had something to say about reforming the international monetary system, the world listened—even though Chinese representatives had been saying similar things for quite a while and even though others, such as a commission of economists led by the American Joseph Stiglitz, were making similar proposals about the SDR.

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND CHINA’S SDR POLICY

China’s long-standing support for the SDR can’t be neatly explained in terms of its economic interests. For years, the Chinese government advocated new SDR allocations and a more equitable SDR distribution, arguing that those changes would help developing countries deal with their balance-of-payments problems. From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, when China had limited export capacity and was itself a developing country, this position could have benefited China. But since the early 1990s, China has been a massive exporter, with a current account surplus to match. Its support for the expansion of the SDR thus seems to have diverged from its own economic interests. It is also unclear how China’s economic goals are being served by Beijing’s calls to make the SDR a more reliable and stable source of international liquidity, thereby eventually making it the world’s principal reserve asset. In fact, there is good reason for Beijing to eschew a bigger role for the SDR. A more important SDR would spell a decline in the dollar’s role and value, and that would cost China, which is a major holder of dollar assets.

Nor is this all. In order for the RMB to enter the SDR basket, it would need to meet the IMF’s standards of being “widely used” and “freely usable.” China had to take some big steps toward financial liberalization to get it there. Some analysts cautioned that these radical adjustments would bring considerable risks to China’s financial system. Others pointed out that the RMB’s inclusion in the SDR basket would neither turn the RMB into a major reserve currency nor make the SDR a substitute for the U.S. dollar. 

After Beijing began to push for the RMB’s entry into the SDR basket in the first decade of this century, the prevailing opinion in China remained cautious. Although some argued that the SDR would gain more relevance once it included China’s currency, many commentators continued to point out the SDR’s limitations, and influential observers, such as the former central bank governor Dai Xianglong, predicted that the future of the international monetary system would involve a number of national currencies rather than a suprasovereign one such as the SDR.

 

If Beijing’s SDR policy seems inexplicable in light of the country’s material interests, it makes a good deal of sense when China’s national identity is taken into account. When Beijing joined the IMF in 1980, it identified as a member of the developing world, and it stuck to that identity in international forums. Indeed, according to research by the political scientists Harold Karan Jacobson and Michel Oksenberg, Chinese officials at both the World Bank and the IMF were under instructions from Beijing not to raise demands that might be seen as costly to any developing country. Supporting the SDR as a tool of economic development went hand in hand with China’s identification with the global South.

Since the late 1990s, another identity has gradually taken hold in the Chinese imagination: that of a major power. Beijing’s performance during the Asian financial crisis played a big part. As its neighboring countries’ currencies took a dive in 1997 and 1998, China faced tremendous pressure to devalue the RMB. It refused to do so, and although Chinese exports suffered heavily, Beijing drew praise from around the world, affirming its self-perception as a “responsible great power.” Then came the years after 2007, when China hosted the Olympics, sent its first astronauts to walk in space, and preserved the growth of its economy as the United States fell into its worst financial crisis in decades. Joining the SDR basket may have involved financial risks, but it also promised an intangible reward in the form of international prestige. In late 2015, when the IMF finally approved the Chinese currency’s entry into the SDR basket, it was warmly celebrated in China. For China’s leaders and for the Chinese public, the news was a clear sign of China’s rising international status.

China’s advocacy of a greater role for the SDR in the international monetary system since the global financial crisis, then, has not been as revolutionary as it seems. Nor is it necessarily meant to challenge the dollar-dominated order. Beijing’s SDR policy has been more about affirming China’s national identity than about advancing its material interests.

 

Playing the Taiwan Card

Trump Is Needlessly Provoking China

On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law the Taiwan Travel Act, a bill that gives the president political cover to significantly shift U.S. policy toward Taiwan in a manner that would deeply rile Beijing. The legislation, which congressional Republicans introduced a year ago, and which both houses passed unanimously this February, argues that it “should be U.S. policy” to allow American officials at all levels to travel to Taiwan to meet with their Taiwanese counterparts and for high-level Taiwanese officials to enter the United States “to meet with U.S. officials, including officials from the Departments of State and Defense.” By signing the bill, Trump signaled to Beijing that he would consider allowing high-level U.S.-Taiwanese contacts of a sort normally reserved for nations with official diplomatic ties.

Since the United States derecognized Taiwan and established relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1979, Washington has maintained only unofficial relations with the Taiwanese government. Sino-U.S. relations are underpinned by three joint communiqués (agreed upon in 1972, 1979, and 1982) in which the United States “acknowledged,” but did not explicitly accept, the Chinese position that there is only one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States would continue to maintain unofficial relations with “the people of Taiwan,” including those in Taiwan’s government, through the American Institute in Taiwan, an embassy-like entity established through the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. This law states that Washington’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with the PRC “rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.” To promote a peaceful solution, the United States would sell Taiwan arms of a defensive nature and maintain the military capacity to resist Chinese coercion.

From the early 1990s until about 2008, the PRC rapidly ratcheted up its military pressure on Taiwan. Beijing did not stop threatening Taiwan after 2008 but directed most of its military energies to securing its expansive claim to nearly all of the land features in the South China Sea. Concerns about Chinese irredentism and expansionism led to calls for strengthening the U.S. commitment to Taiwan. The proposal to encourage high-level U.S.-Taiwanese official contact emerged out of these concerns—dangling the possibility that such contact could, in theory, serve to restrain Beijing. Unfortunately, the Taiwan Travel Act is now entangled in the chaos of the Trump administration, and its implementation would thus be more likely to undermine Taiwan’s security than enhance it. At best, China will view the TTA as a gratuitous slap in the face. But at worst, it will see it as a ploy to permanently separate Taiwan from China, a scenario that Beijing will not accept.

Because of the Trump administration’s unpredictability and instability, China, already on the edge of a trade war with the United States, has to consider the very real possibility that Trump might consider implementing the act and allow for high-level official exchanges with Taiwan. This would be all the more likely if, as is rumored, a figure such as John Bolton were to become the next national security adviser. In 2016, Bolton called upon Washington to play the “Taiwan card,” going all the way as to recommend recognizing Taiwan’s statehood, in order to coerce Beijing to withdraw from the South China Sea and dismantle its military bases there. Given this possibility, the Chinese embassy in Washington issued a strong statement denouncing the TTA, warning that “relevant clauses [of it] severely violate the one-China principle, the political foundation of the China-U.S. relationship, and the three joint communiqués.” The statement urged the United States to “stop pursuing any official ties with Taiwan or improving its current relations with Taiwan in any substantive way.”

Because of Beijing’s avowed determination to “unify” democratic Taiwan by force if necessary, maintaining stability in the Taiwan Strait was always going to be difficult after Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s fourth directly elected president in May 2016. The foundational principle of Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which also won the legislature in the January 2016 elections, is that Taiwan is an independent, sovereign nation that will never become a part of China. With strong popular support, Tsai refused to accept, unlike her immediate predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang party, the so-called 1992 Consensus, a policy that proclaims both sides of the Strait belong to “one China” but that each side can offer its own interpretation of what “one China” is.

Tsai’s rejection of the 1992 Consensus angered Beijing, which responded to her defiance by cutting off hotline communications and inflicting a degree of economic pain by sharply reducing the number of Chinese tour groups allowed to travel to Taiwan. China’s general response to Tsai’s election, however, was initially milder than expected—likely a function of Tsai’s determination to go the extra mile to avoid provoking Beijing or overreacting to its provocations. Unlike the first DPP president, Chen Shui-bian (who governed from 2000 to 2008), Tsai refrained from securitizing China’s behavior by declining to discuss the hotline or tourist issues in alarmist tones. Tsai seems to understand that Taiwan’s security can best be enhanced by deflecting PRC moves and responding to them calmly and with self-assurance. In the initial months of her presidency, there was reason to feel cautiously optimistic about stability in the Taiwan Strait.

But Tsai’s presidency has not been without its stumbles. Perhaps coming under pressure from the hard-core Taiwan independence wing of the DPP, Tsai worked with a group of Republicans to place a congratulatory telephone call in December 2016 to Trump who was then only the president-elect. The call further strained Taiwan’s relations with Beijing. In the 15 months since the phone call, tensions between the two have reached their highest levels since the mid-2000s, when Chen was president. Although after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017, Trump pledged never to speak with Tsai again without first consulting Xi, Beijing has grown increasingly assertive with Taipei over the past year. The Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports that China “interfered in Taiwan’s foreign affairs” 42 times during 2017, the most such incidents since 2007. The interference has ranged from poaching diplomatic allies (the number of countries now recognizing Taiwan is down to 20 from 22 in 2016) to compelling the building managers at the United Nations in New York to deny entry to Taiwanese tourists unless they first apply for the Mainland Travel Permit for Taiwan Residents.

Even more seriously, Chinese military aircraft, including bombers and advanced fighter jets, repeatedly menaced Taiwan over the course of 2017 by flying provocatively close to Taiwanese air space. There were ten such incursions in October through December alone. It is unclear how many incursions there were before 2017, but Taiwanese military officials pronounced the most recent number as “unprecedented.” Meanwhile, the Taiwan Ministry of National Defense reported that the PLA Air Force staged 16 military exercises near Taiwan in 2017. Chinese military exercises threatening Taiwan are common, but the provocative way in which the PLA aircraft and naval vessels encircled the island was viewed by some analysts as highly unusual. Further rattling nerves, China sailed its aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait in January and July 2017 and then again in January 2018. The only other time this happened was in 2013. In the year after the Trump-Tsai telephone call, China was surely trying to signal not just to Taiwan but also the hawkish factions surrounding Trump that it would not accept a situation in which the United States treated Taiwan as a sovereign nation.

 

With the passage of the TTA, there is a very real possibility that at some point Trump might play the Taiwan card in a way that risks military conflict with China.

Adding to Beijing’s fury, the Trump administration announced a $1.4 billion arms sales package for Taiwan in June 2017, and then in December Congress passed (and Trump signed into law) the National Defense Authorization Act for 2018. This legislation calls for the United States to invite Taiwan to participate in joint U.S.-Taiwanese military exercises and to “consider the advisability and feasibility of reestablishing port of call exchanges between the United States navy and the Taiwan navy.” The “suggestions” are not binding for the Department of Defense. But either move would be unprecedented and would be seen by Beijing as incendiary. China, unable to predict what the Pentagon will actually do under Trump, has felt the need to warn and threaten the United States in anticipation of worst-case possibilities. In late December, a Chinese diplomat visiting Washington vowed that “the day a U.S. Navy vessel arrives in Kaohsiung is the day that our People’s Liberation Army unifies Taiwan with military force,” an unusually explicit warning of a sort not heard in a decade or more.

Now with the passage of the TTA, and given the recent and possibly pending personnel changes in the Trump administration, there is a very real possibility that at some point Trump might play the Taiwan card in a way that risks military conflict with China. While there would probably be jubilation in Taiwan if Trump were to radically upgrade U.S. relations with the island nation, it would be wiser for Tsai to resist the temptation to accept such a change. She should recognize that doing so would turn Taiwan into a pawn in Washington’s struggle with Beijing. The Trump administration is too unfocused and chaotic to be a reliable partner, and Trump’s nativist political base would likely reject the United States going to war on Taiwan’s behalf. Taiwan would best be served if Tsai were to return to her cautious roots and keep Taiwan’s comprehensive, long-term security foremost in her mind.

 

China vs. America

Managing the Next Clash of Civilizations

 
As Americans awaken to a rising China that now rivals the United States in every arena, many seek comfort in the conviction that as China grows richer and stronger, it will follow in the footsteps of Germany, Japan, and other countries that have undergone profound transformations and emerged as advanced liberal democracies. In this view, the magic cocktail of globalization, market-based consumerism, and integration into the rule-based international order will eventually lead China to become democratic at home and to develop into what former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick once described as “a responsible stakeholder” abroad.

Samuel Huntington disagreed. In his essay “The Clash of Civilizations?,” published in this magazine in 1993, the political scientist argued that, far from dissolving in a global liberal world order, cultural fault lines would become a defining feature of the post–Cold War world. Huntington’s argument is remembered today primarily for its prescience in spotlighting the divide between “Western and Islamic civilizations”—a rift that was revealed most vividly by the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. But Huntington saw the gulf between the U.S.-led West and Chinese civilization as just as deep, enduring, and consequential. As he put it, “The very notion that there could be a ‘universal civilization’ is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another.”

The years since have bolstered Huntington’s case. The coming decades will only strengthen it further. The United States embodies what Huntington considered Western civilization. And tensions between American and Chinese values, traditions, and philosophies will aggravate the fundamental structural stresses that occur whenever a rising power, such as China, threatens to displace an established power, such as the United States.

The reason such shifts so often lead to conflict is Thucydides’ trap, named after the ancient Greek historian who observed a dangerous dynamic between a rising Athens and ruling Sparta. According to Thucydides, “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this instilled in Sparta, that made war inevitable.” Rising powers understandably feel a growing sense of entitlement and demand greater influence and respect. Established powers, faced with challengers, tend to become fearful, insecure, and defensive. In such an environment, misunderstandings are magnified, empathy remains elusive, and events and third-party actions that would otherwise be inconsequential or manageable can trigger wars that the primary players never wanted to fight.

In the case of the United States and China, Thucydidean risks are compounded by civilizational incompatibility between the two countries, which exacerbates their competition and makes it more difficult to achieve rapprochement. This mismatch is most easily observed in the profound differences between American and Chinese conceptions of the state, economics, the role of individuals, relations among nations, and the nature of time.

Americans see government as a necessary evil and believe that the state’s tendency toward tyranny and abuse of power must be feared and constrained. For Chinese, government is a necessary good, the fundamental pillar ensuring order and preventing chaos. In American-style free-market capitalism, government establishes and enforces the rules; state ownership and government intervention in the economy sometimes occur but are undesirable exceptions. In China’s state-led market economy, the government establishes targets for growth, picks and subsidizes industries to develop, promotes national champions, and undertakes significant, long-term economic projects to advance the interests of the nation.

Chinese culture does not celebrate American-style individualism, which measures society by how well it protects the rights and fosters the freedom of individuals. Indeed, the Chinese term for “individualism”—gerenzhuyi—suggests a selfish preoccupation with oneself over one’s community. China’s equivalent of “give me liberty or give me death” would be “give me a harmonious community or give me death.” For China, order is the highest value, and harmony results from a hierarchy in which participants obey Confucius’ first imperative: Know thy place.

This view applies not only to domestic society but also to global affairs, where the Chinese view holds that China’s rightful place is atop the pyramid; other states should be arranged as subordinate tributaries. The American view is somewhat different. Since at least the end of World War II, Washington has sought to prevent the emergence of a “peer competitor” that could challenge U.S. military dominance. But postwar American conceptions of international order have also emphasized the need for a rule-based global system that restrains even the United States.

Finally, the Americans and the Chinese think about time and experience its passage differently. Americans tend to focus on the present and often count in hours or days. Chinese, on the other hand, are more historical-minded and often think in terms of decades and even centuries.

 

Of course, these are sweeping generalizations that are by necessity reductive and not fully reflective of the complexities of American and Chinese society. But they also provide important reminders that policymakers in the United States and China should keep in mind in seeking to manage this competition without war.

WE'RE NUMBER ONE

The cultural differences between the United States and China are aggravated by a remarkable trait shared by both countries: an extreme superiority complex. Each sees itself as exceptional—indeed, without peer. But there can be only one number one. Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, had doubts about the United States’ ability to adapt to a rising China. “For America to be displaced, not in the world, but only in the western Pacific, by an Asian people long despised and dismissed with contempt as decadent, feeble, corrupt, and inept is emotionally very difficult to accept,” he said in a 1999 interview. “The sense of cultural supremacy of the Americans will make this adjustment most difficult.”

In some ways, Chinese exceptionalism is more sweeping than its American counterpart. “The [Chinese] empire saw itself as the center of the civilized universe,” the historian Harry Gelber wrote in his 2001 book, Nations Out of Empires. During the imperial era, “the Chinese scholar-bureaucrat did not think of a ‘China’ or a ‘Chinese civilization’ in the modern sense at all. For him, there were the Han people and, beyond that, only barbarism. Whatever was not civilized was, by definition, barbaric.”

To this day, the Chinese take great pride in their civilizational achievements. “Our nation is a great nation,” Chinese President Xi Jinping declared in a 2012 speech. “During the civilization and development process of more than 5,000 years, the Chinese nation has made an indelible contribution to the civilization and advancement of mankind.” Indeed, Xi claimed in his 2014 book, The Governance of China, that “China’s continuous civilization is not equal to anything on earth, but a unique achievement in world history.”

Americans, too, see themselves as the vanguard of civilization, especially when it comes to political development. A passion for freedom is enshrined in the core document of the American political creed, the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” The declaration specifies that these rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” and asserts that these are not matters for debate but rather “self-evident” truths. As the American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.” In contrast, order is the central political value for Chinese—and order results from hierarchy. Individual liberty, as Americans understand it, disrupts hierarchy; in the Chinese view, it invites chaos.

DO AS I SAY . . . AND AS I DO?

These philosophical differences find expression in each country’s concept of government. Although animated by a deep distrust of authority, the founders of the United States recognized that society required government. Otherwise, who would protect citizens from foreign threats or violations of their rights by criminals at home? They wrestled, however, with a dilemma: a government powerful enough to perform its essential functions would tend toward tyranny. To manage this challenge, they designed a government of “separated institutions sharing power,” as the historian Richard Neustadt described it. This deliberately produced constant struggle among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, which led to delay, gridlock, and even dysfunction. But it also provided checks and balances against abuse.

The Chinese conception of government and its role in society could hardly be more different. As Lee observed, “The country’s history and cultural records show that when there is a strong center (Beijing or Nanjing), the country is peaceful and prosperous. When the center is weak, then the provinces and their counties are run by little warlords.” Accordingly, the sort of strong central government that Americans resist represents to the Chinese the principal agent advancing order and the public good at home and abroad.

 

In some ways, Chinese exceptionalism is more sweeping than its American counterpart.

 

For Americans, democracy is the only just form of government: authorities derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. That is not the prevailing view in China, where it is common to believe that the government earns or losses political legitimacy based on its performance. In a provocative TED Talk delivered in 2013, the Shanghai-based venture capitalist Eric Li challenged democracy’s presumed superiority. “I was asked once, ‘The party wasn’t voted in by election. Where is the source of legitimacy?’” he recounted. “I said, ‘How about competency?’” He went on to remind his audience that in 1949, when the Chinese Community Party took power, “China was mired in civil war, dismembered by foreign aggression, [and] average life expectancy at that time [was] 41 years. Today [China] is the second-largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity.”

Washington and Beijing also have distinctly different approaches when it comes to promoting their fundamental political values internationally. Americans believe that human rights and democracy are universal aspirations, requiring only the example of the United States (and sometimes a neoimperialist nudge) to be realized everywhere. The United States is, as Huntington wrote in his follow-on book, The Clash of Civilizations, “a missionary nation,” driven by the belief “that the non-Western peoples should commit themselves to the Western values . . . and should embody these values in their institutions.” Most Americans believe that democratic rights will benefit anyone, anywhere in the world.

Over the decades, Washington has pursued a foreign policy that seeks to advance the cause of democracy—even, on occasion, attempting to impose it on those who have failed to embrace it themselves. In contrast, although the Chinese believe that others can look up to them, admire their virtues, and even attempt to mimic their behavior, China’s leaders have not proselytized on behalf of their approach. As the American diplomat Henry Kissinger has noted, imperial China “did not export its ideas but let others come to seek them.” And unsurprisingly, Chinese leaders have been deeply suspicious of U.S. efforts to convert them to the American creed. In the late 1980s, Deng Xiaoping, who led China from 1978 until 1989 and began the country’s process of economic liberalization, complained to a visiting dignitary that Western talk of “human rights, freedom, and democracy is designed only to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony and practice power politics.”

THINKING FAST AND SLOW

The American and Chinese senses of the past, present, and future are fundamentally distinct. Americans proudly celebrated their country turning 241 in July; the Chinese are fond of noting that their history spans five millennia. U.S. leaders often refer to “the American experiment,” and their sometimes haphazard policies reflect that attitude. China, by contrast, sees itself as a fixture of the universe: it always was; it always will be.

Because of their expansive sense of time, Chinese leaders are careful to distinguish the acute from the chronic and the urgent from the merely important. It is difficult to imagine a U.S. political leader suggesting that a major foreign policy problem should be put on the proverbial shelf for a generation. That, however, is precisely what Deng did in 1979, when he led the Chinese side in negotiations with Japan over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and accepted an eventual, rather than an immediate, solution to the dispute.

Ever more sensitive to the demands of the news cycle and popular opinion, U.S. politicians take to Twitter or announce alliterative, bullet-point policy plans that promise quick solutions. In contrast, Chinese leaders are strategically patient: as long as trends are moving in their favor, they are comfortable waiting out a problem. Americans think of themselves as problem solvers. Reflecting their short-termism, they see problems as discrete issues to be addressed now so that they can move on to the next ones. The American novelist and historian Gore Vidal once called his country “the United States of Amnesia”—a place where every idea is an innovation and every crisis is unprecedented. This contrasts sharply with the deep historical and institutional memory of the Chinese, who assume that there is nothing new under the sun.

Indeed, Chinese leaders tend to believe that many problems cannot be solved and must instead be managed. They see challenges as long term and iterative; issues they face today resulted from processes that have evolved over the past year, decade, or century. Policy actions they take today will simply contribute to that evolution. For instance, since 1949, Taiwan has been ruled by what Beijing considers rogue Chinese nationalists. Although Chinese leaders insist that Taiwan remains an integral part of China, they have pursued a long-term strategy involving tightening economic and social entanglements to slowly suck the island back into the fold.

WHO'S THE BOSS?

The civilizational clash that will make it hardest for Washington and Beijing to escape Thucydides’ trap emerges from their competing conceptions of world order. China’s treatment of its own citizens provides the script for its relations with weaker neighbors abroad. The Chinese Communist Party maintains order by enforcing an authoritarian hierarchy that demands the deference and compliance of citizens. China’s international behavior reflects similar expectations of order: in an unscripted moment during a 2010 meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, then Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi responded to complaints about Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea by telling his regional counterparts and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”

By contrast, American leaders aspire to an international rule of law that is essentially U.S. domestic rule of law writ large. At the same time, they also recognize the realities of power in the Hobbesian global jungle, where it is better to be the lion than the lamb. Washington often tries to reconcile this tension by depicting a world in which the United States is a benevolent hegemon, acting as the world’s lawmaker, policeman, judge, and jury.

Washington urges other powers to accept the rule-based international order over which it presides. But through Chinese eyes, it looks like the Americans make the rules and others obey Washington’s commands. General Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, became familiar with the predictable resentment this elicited from China. “One of the things that fascinated me about the Chinese is whenever I would have a conversation with them about international standards or international rules of behavior, they would inevitably point out that those rules were made when they were absent from the world stage,” Dempsey remarked in an interview with this magazine last year.

YOU CAN GO YOUR OWN WAY

The United States has spent nearly three decades as the world’s most powerful country. During that time, Washington’s massive influence on world affairs has made it crucial for elites and leaders in other nations to understand American culture and the U.S. approach to strategy. Americans, on the other hand, have often felt that they have the luxury of not needing to think too hard about the worldviews of people elsewhere—a lack of interest encouraged by the belief, held by many American elites, that the rest of the world has been slowly but surely becoming more like the United States anyway.

In recent years, however, the rise of China has challenged that indifference. Policymakers in the United States are beginning to recognize that they must improve their understanding of China—especially Chinese strategic thinking. In particular, U.S. policymakers have begun to see distinctive traits in the way their Chinese counterparts think about the use of military force. In deciding whether, when, and how to attack adversaries, Chinese leaders have for the most part been rational and pragmatic. Beyond that, however, American policymakers and analysts have identified five presumptions and predilections that offer further clues to China’s likely strategic behavior in confrontations.

First, in both war and peace, Chinese strategy is unabashedly driven by realpolitik and unencumbered by any serious need to justify Chinese behavior in terms of international law or ethical norms. This allows the Chinese government to be ruthlessly flexible, since it feels few constraints from prior rationales and is largely immune to criticisms of inconsistency. So, for example, when Kissinger arrived in China in 1971 to begin secret talks about a U.S.-Chinese rapprochement, he found his interlocutors unblinkered by ideology and brutally candid about China’s national interests. Whereas Kissinger and U.S. President Richard Nixon felt it necessary to justify the compromise they ultimately reached to end the Vietnam War as “peace with honor,” the Chinese leader Mao Zedong felt no need to pretend that in establishing relations with the capitalist United States to strengthen communist China’s position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, he was somehow bolstering a larger socialist international movement.

Just as China’s practical approach to international politics arguably gives China an edge over the United States, so, too, does China’s obsessively holistic strategic worldview. Chinese planners see everything as connected to everything else. The evolving context in which a strategic situation occurs determines what the Chinese call shi. This term has no direct English translation but can be rendered as the “potential energy” or “momentum” inherent in any circumstance at a given moment. It comprises geography and terrain, weather, the balance of forces, surprise, morale, and many other elements. “Each factor influences the others,” as Kissinger wrote in his 2011 book, On China, “giving rise to subtle shifts in momentum and relative advantage.” Thus, a skilled Chinese strategist spends most of his time patiently “observing and cultivating changes in the strategic landscape” and moves only when everything is in optimal alignment. Then he strikes swiftly. To an observer, the result appears inevitable.

War for Chinese strategists is primarily psychological and political. In Chinese thinking, an opponent’s perception of facts on the ground may be just as important as the facts themselves. For imperial China, creating and sustaining the image of a civilization so superior that it represented “the center of the universe” served to deter enemies from challenging Chinese dominance. Today, a narrative of China’s inevitable rise and the United States’ irreversible decline plays a similar role.

Traditionally, the Chinese have sought victory not in a decisive battle but through incremental moves designed to gradually improve their position. David Lai, an expert on Asian military affairs, has illustrated this approach by comparing the Western game of chess with its Chinese equivalent, weiqi (often referred to as go). In chess, players seek to dominate the center of the board and conquer the opponent. In weiqi, players seek to surround the opponent. If the chess master sees five or six moves ahead, the weiqi master sees 20 or 30. Attending to every dimension in the broader relationship with an adversary, the Chinese strategist resists rushing prematurely toward victory, instead aiming to build incremental advantage. “In the Western tradition, there is a heavy emphasis on the use of force; the art of war is largely limited to the battlefields; and the way to fight is force on force,” Lai wrote in a 2004 analysis for the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. By contrast, “the philosophy behind go . . . is to compete for relative gain rather than seeking complete annihilation of the opponent forces.” In a wise reminder, Lai warns that “it is dangerous to play go with the chess mindset.”

LET'S MAKE A DEAL

 

Washington would do well to heed that warning. In the coming years, any number of flash points could produce a crisis in U.S.-Chinese relations, including further territorial disputes over the South China Sea and tensions over North Korea’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program. Since it will take at least another decade or more for China’s military capabilities to fully match those of the United States, the Chinese will be cautious and prudent about any lethal use of force against the Americans. Beijing will treat military force as a subordinate instrument in its foreign policy, which seeks not victory in battle but the achievement of national objectives. It will bolster its diplomatic and economic connections with its neighbors, deepening their dependency on China, and use economic leverage to encourage (or coerce) cooperation on other issues. Although China has traditionally viewed war as a last resort, should it conclude that long-term trend lines are no longer moving in its favor and that it is losing bargaining power, it could initiate a limited military conflict to attempt to reverse the trends.

The last time the United States faced extremely high Thucydidean risks was during the Cold War—especially during the Cuban missile crisis. Reflecting on the crisis a few months after its resolution, U.S. President John F. Kennedy identified one enduring lesson: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or nuclear war.” In spite of Moscow’s hard-line rhetoric, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ultimately concluded that he could compromise on nuclear arms in Cuba. Likewise, Kissinger and Nixon later discovered that the Chinese ideologue Mao was quite adept at giving ground when it served China’s interests.

Xi and U.S. President Donald Trump have both made maximalist claims, especially when it comes to the South China Sea. But both are also dealmakers. The better the Trump administration understands how Beijing sees China’s role in the world and the country’s core interests, the better prepared it will be to negotiate. The problem remains psychological projection: even seasoned State Department officials too often mistakenly assume that China’s vital interests mirror those of the United States. The officials now crafting the Trump administration’s approach to China would be wise to read the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun-tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

 

 
 
 
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