In its new national security strategy, US President Joe Biden’s administration recognizes that Russia and China present a different kind of challenge.
Whereas Russia “poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system … [with] its brutal war of aggression,” China is the only competitor to the US “with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective,” the strategy says.
The Pentagon thus refers to China as its “pacing challenge.”
That Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has used the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to consolidate his power, and to promote his ideological and nationalist objectives, it is worth reviewing the evolution of the US’ China strategy.
Some critics see the situation as proof that former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were naive to pursue a strategy of engagement, including granting China membership in the WTO.
However, while there was certainly excessive optimism about China two decades ago, it was not necessarily naive.
After the Cold War, the US, Japan and China were the three major powers in East Asia, and elementary realism suggested that the US ought to revive its alliance with Japan, rather than discounting it as an outdated relic of the post-World War II era.
ENGAGEMENT
Long before China was admitted to the WTO in 2001, the Clinton administration had reaffirmed the US-Japan alliance, which remains the bedrock of Biden’s strategy.
Clinton and Bush realized that Cold War-style containment of China would be impossible, because other countries, attracted to the huge Chinese market, would not have gone along with it. The US instead sought to create an environment in which China’s rising power would also reshape its behavior. Continuing Clinton’s policy, the Bush administration tried to coax China to contribute to global public goods and institutions by acting as what then-US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick called “a responsible stakeholder.”
The policy was to “engage, but hedge.”
While augmenting a policy of balancing power with engagement obviously did not guarantee Chinese friendship, it did keep alive possible scenarios other than full hostility.
Was engagement a failure? Cai Xia (蔡霞), a former professor at the CCP’s Central Party School in Beijing, thinks so.
He said that the party’s “fundamental interests and its basic mentality of using the US while remaining hostile to it have not changed over the past 70 years.”
“By contrast, since the 1970s, the two political parties in the United States and the US government have always had unrealistic good wishes for the Chinese communist regime, eagerly hoping that [it] would become more liberal, even democratic, and a ‘responsible’ power in the world,” he said.
Cai is well placed to judge a policy that began with former US president Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.
However, some of those who have described engagement as naive ignore that the “hedge” or insurance policy came first, and that the US-Japan alliance remains robust today.
Of course, there were some elements of naivete, as when Clinton famously predicted that China’s efforts to control the Internet would fail. He thought the task would be like “nailing Jell-O to a wall,” but we know that China’s “Great Firewall” works quite well.
It is also clear in retrospect that the administrations of former US presidents Barack Obama and Bush should have done more to punish China for its failure to comply with the spirit and rules of the WTO.
In any case, the Xi era has dashed the earlier expectations that rapid economic growth would produce greater liberalization, if not democratization.
For a while, China allowed greater freedom of travel, more foreign contacts, a wider range of opinions in publications and the development of non-governmental organizations, including some devoted to human rights.
However, all that has been curtailed.
COEXISTENCE
Were the basic assumptions of engagement wrong? Before taking office, two of the leading officials responsible for the Biden administration’s new strategy wrote that “the basic mistake of engagement was to assume that it could bring about fundamental changes to China’s political system, economy, and foreign policy.”
A more realistic goal, they concluded, is to seek “a steady state of clear-eyed coexistence on terms favorable to US interests and values.”
On balance, the Biden team is correct about being unable to force fundamental changes in China. In the first decade of this century, China was still moving toward greater openness, moderation and pluralization.
“When Mr. Xi took over in 2012, China was changing fast,” The Economist wrote. “The middle class was growing, private firms were booming, and citizens were connecting on social media. A different leader might have seen these as opportunities. Mr. Xi saw only threats.”
Even if Xi was the predictable product of a Leninist party system, there remains a question about timing. Modernization theory — and South Korea and Taiwan’s real-world experience — suggests that when per capita income approaches US$10,000, a middle class emerges and autocracy becomes harder to maintain, compared with the poor peasant society that came before.
CHANGE TAKES TIME
However, how long does this process take? While Karl Marx argued that it took time, Vladimir Lenin was more impatient, and believed that historical developments could be accelerated by a vanguard exercising control over society.
Despite Xi’s talk of Marxism-Leninism, it is clearly Lenin who is prevailing over Marx in today’s China.
Did the engagement strategy’s mistake lie in expecting meaningful change within two decades, rather than a half-century or more?
It is worth remembering that when it comes to generations of CCP leadership, Xi is only the fifth.
China expert Orville Schell said that it is “patronizing to assume that Chinese citizens will prove content to gain wealth and power alone without those aspects of life that other societies commonly consider fundamental to being human.”
Unfortunately, policymakers are always under time pressure and must formulate strategic objectives for the here and now. Biden has properly done that.
The question for the years ahead is whether he can implement his policies in ways that do not foreclose the possibility of more benign future scenarios, even while recognizing that they are distant.
Joseph Nye is a professor at Harvard University and a former US assistant secretary of defense.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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