16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The West's strategy of engagement with China has failed. More than three decades of trade and investment with the advanced democracies have left that country far richer and stronger than it would otherwise have been. But growth and development have not caused China's rulers to relax their grip on political power, abandon their mercantilist economic policies, or accept the rules and norms of the existing international system. To the contrary: China today is more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad, and more obviously intent on establishing itself as the world's preponderant power than at any time since the death of Chairman Mao. What went wrong? Put simply, the democracies underestimated the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party. For far too long, the United States and its allies failed to take seriously the Party's unwavering determination to crush opposition, build national power, and fulfill its ideological and geopolitical ambitions. In this timely and powerfully argued study, Aaron Friedberg identifies the assumptions underpinning engagement, describes the counterstrategy that China's Communist Party rulers devised in order to exploit the West's openness while defeating its plans, and explains what the democracies must do now if they wish to preserve their prosperity, protect their security, and defend their common values.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 470
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Ähnliche
CONTENTS
Cover
Endorsement
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Notes
1. The Origins of Engagement
Engagement 2.0
Notes
2. Rationales and Expectations
Geopolitics: from quasi-ally to “responsible stakeholder”
Economics: “markets over Mao”
Politics: China’s “short march” to democracy
Conclusion
Notes
3. Politics: “The Party Leads Everything”
Lenin’s legacy
The Party’s evolving strategy for survival
Was democracy ever possible?
The lingering trauma of Tiananmen
“Consultative Leninism” and the search for a “Harmonious Society”
The demise of “soft authoritarianism”
The totalitarian turn
“Xi Jinping Thought,” pseudo-Confucianism, and the birth of the “China Dream”
Conclusion
Notes
4. Economics: “A Bird in a Cage”
“Mercantilist Leninism”
The Party’s evolving strategy for growth
Deng crosses the river
Jiang engineers a miracle
Zhu Rongji and the transition illusion
Hu at the crossroads
“Indigenous innovation”
Xi recasts the cage
Seizing the “commanding heights”
“Dual circulation”
Conclusion
Notes
5. Strategy: “The Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”
The roots of revisionism
The Party’s evolving strategy for achieving regional preponderance and global power
“Hide and bide”
“Get some things done”
“Strive for achievement”
Conclusion
Notes
6. Getting China Right
The failure of engagement
The lexicon of strategic paralysis
Objectives
Objections
Mobilization
Partial disengagement
Counterbalancing
Waging “discursive struggle”
Conclusion
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
US–China trade, 1985–2020
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
US foreign direct investment flows to China
Figure 4.2
China GDP growth rate, 1980–2020
Figure 4.3
Made in China 2025
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Public attitudes towards China, 2002–2020
Figure 6.2
Shares of global GDP, 2020
List of Box
Chapter 3
Box 3.1
“Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” (Document 9)
List of Map
Chapter 5
Map 5.1
The Belt and Road Initiative
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Endorsement
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
a
ii
iii
iv
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
Praise for Aaron Friedberg
“A decade ago, Aaron Friedberg courted unpopularity with A Contest for Supremacy, a book anticipating the imminent failure of engaging China at any price. His warnings were demonstrably worth heeding. Now in Getting China Wrong he makes the case that the United States and other democracies still underestimate the struggle ahead. But this is no counsel of despair: instead, Friedberg articulates a multi-layered action agenda, arguing that the best form of defense could well involve a willingness to impose costs.”
Rory Medcalf, Head of the National Security College,Australian National University, and author of Indo-Pacific Empire
“A telling account of how and why policy-makers, academics, and business embraced a form of engagement with China that proved to be a sincerely optimistic but hopelessly wrong gamble. A trenchant and accessible foray into the geopolitics of our time and our future.”
George Magnus, Research Associate,China Centre, University of Oxford and SOAS
“In Getting China Wrong, Aaron Friedberg lays out a balanced and practical approach for managing relations with China. Most compellingly, he argues that liberal democracies must begin by taking their own side in this rivalry, making clear the stark differences of a future defined by the Chinese Communist Party. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to navigate a multipolar world order.”
Admiral John Richardson, USN (Ret.),31st Chief of Naval Operations
“Friedberg’s Getting China Wrong nails down half a century of mistaken American assumptions about China’s future path. This essential non-partisan primer highlights the increasingly bold strategy of the Chinese Communist Party to defeat Western expectations.”
François Godement, Senior Advisor for Asia,Institut Montaigne, Paris
“A splendid book with deep insights into the nature of the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship and an urgent message about the need to uphold and expand the liberal international order in Asia.”
Nobu Kanehara, former Deputy NationalSecurity Advisor to PM Abe of Japan
Dedication
For NadègeMa chère femme, je te remercie pour tout.
GETTING CHINA WRONG
Aaron L. Friedberg
polity
Copyright © Aaron L. Friedberg 2022
The right of Aaron L. Friedberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4513-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946893
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
Writing about contemporary China from the perspective of an American concerned with US and wider Western strategy towards that country is like trying to hit a very fast-moving object from the pitching deck of a ship at sea: both the target and the platform from which it is being observed are in constant, if irregular, motion.
This book was completed during the summer of 2021. Since that time, there have been a number of significant developments, many of which (like the US–UK–Australia nuclear submarine deal and Xi Jinping’s recent crackdown on China’s high-tech giants) are not discussed here. Between the writing of this preface (in the fall of 2021) and the publication of the book (spring 2022), there will no doubt be other noteworthy incidents and occurrences.
That said, the overall trajectory of events is already quite clear and, at least for the foreseeable future, nothing seems likely to deflect it. China is moving towards deepening political repression, expanded economic statism, and a more aggressive posture towards the United States, its partners and allies. Albeit belatedly and with an as yet insufficient sense of urgency and common purpose, the democracies have begun to face up to these facts and the dangers they pose, and to start the painful process of hammering out new policies with which to meet them. What remains to be seen is whether they can do so quickly enough to deter overt aggression while better defending their societies and economies against the subtler threats of penetration, manipulation, and exploitation.
As regards China, what has happened over the last several months is consistent with the broad patterns described here and with the overarching explanation offered for them. At home, the Chinese Communist Party brooks no opposition to its rule, claims for itself the authority to exert control over every aspect of social, political, and economic life, and uses that control to tighten its grip on its citizens and to build up the nation’s coercive power on the world stage. Xi Jinping’s recent directives extending ideological indoctrination down to the primary school level, cracking down on video games and pop culture, and reining in Alibaba, Tencent, and other nominally private companies are merely the latest manifestations of the normal functioning of China’s Leninist political system.
Similarly, Beijing’s stepped-up military pressure on Taiwan, dramatic test of a new type of hypersonic missile, and strikingly confrontational approach to dealing with a freshly elected US administration represent a continuation of trends that have become unmistakable over the course of the last two decades. As their assessments of China’s relative strength have grown more positive, its leaders have pushed harder and more openly to reshape the world in ways intended to insure the longevity of their regime, first by reestablishing their country as the dominant state in eastern Eurasia, and ultimately by displacing the United States as the preponderant global power.
In his first year in office, Joe Biden sought to shed some of the crude and counterproductive aspects of Donald Trump’s approach to dealing with China. As of this writing, however, Biden has continued in many respects to follow the main lines of policy laid down by his predecessor. At least in theory, his administration has accepted the need to reexamine the assumptions underpinning the entire US–China economic relationship, leaving in place for the moment most of the tariffs, export controls, and investment regulations that it inherited and even adding a few of its own. Top officials have also stressed the importance of shoring up the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, both by strengthening US military capabilities and by working with allies and partners in the region and beyond.
Together with these positive indications, however, there are also some worrying signs.
Despite growing recognition of the harmful effects of China’s predatory trade and industrial policies, there appears still to be hope in some quarters that these can be changed through the patient application of mild pressure and a few more rounds of what the chief US trade negotiator recently described as “frank conversations” with her counterparts in Beijing.1 While Biden’s advisors struggle to formulate an economic strategy that better serves the nation as a whole, an assortment of industrial and financial groups are hard at work defending their particular interests, lobbying Congress and the executive branch to roll back some if not all of the restrictions put in place over the last several years, and urging Washington to get back to business as usual. Governments in all of the advanced democracies face similar pressures.
Having acknowledged the centrality of an intensifying military rivalry with China, the Biden administration has thus far been reluctant to make the public case for increasing defense budgets rather than holding them steady. This will become even more important as non-defense spending soars and debt rises. The absence of a clearly articulated and widely shared assessment of the nature and severity of the challenge has also contributed to problems in rallying support from other countries for a more unified effort to balance China’s rising power and counter its growing influence. Beijing’s heightened belligerence and Cold War-style “rocket rattling” seem intended in part to intimidate the democracies and discourage closer collaboration among them.
Instead of sounding the alarm, at least some in the new administration have appeared overly eager to improve the tenor of diplomatic exchanges with Beijing, and unduly optimistic about their ability to disaggregate the overall relationship into clearly delineated areas of cooperation and competition. The notion that the two powers can somehow agree on the rules of a more-or-less stable and “responsible” rivalry without first passing through a period of heightened tension and danger understates the intensity of the ideological and geopolitical forces at play.2
All of these concerns point to a deeper problem. Most Western observers now recognize that, despite years of intensive engagement, China today is far from the liberal, open, market-oriented, status quo power that many had expected to emerge. But acknowledging what China is not, and coming fully to grips with what it has in fact become, are two very different things. Without an adequate understanding of why past policies failed to transform the nation’s Leninist political system, and absent a realistic assessment of its current strengths, weaknesses, and intentions, the United States and its allies will struggle to devise effective counter-strategies. Persistent illusions about the depths of the regime’s determination, the extent of its capacity for brutality, and the scope of its ambitions will result in more inadequate half-measures and more lost time. For the better part of the past thirty years, the democracies have gotten China wrong. They can no longer afford that luxury.
Aaron L. FriedbergPrinceton, New JerseyOctober 2021
1.
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery of Ambassador Katherine Tai Outlining the Biden–Harris Administration’s “New Approach to the US–China Trade Relationship,” October 4, 2021.
2.
“Readout of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s Meeting with Politburo Member Yang Jiechi,” October 4, 2021.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Louise Knight of Polity Press for suggesting that I write a book on this topic. Louise and Inès Boxman were helpful and encouraging at every step along the way. Justin Dyer edited the manuscript with a deft touch. Margaret Commander found documents, tracked down citations, and generated graphs with alacrity and precision.
I am extremely grateful to Jacqueline Deal, Richard Ellings, James Mann, Stephen Rosen, Gabriel Schoenfeld, David Shambaugh, and Julian Snelder for taking the time to read the manuscript closely and for providing insightful comments and detailed suggestions. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation that remain.
Most of all, I thank Nadège Rolland for her careful reading of every draft, for her help in locating and translating a number of Chinese sources, and for her enduring love, patient encouragement, and unstinting support in all things. I am the luckiest of men.
Portions of Chapter 6 draw from Aaron L. Friedberg, “An Answer to Aggression,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2020), pp. 150–64. Adapted by permission of Foreign Affairs. Copyright 2020 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. www.ForeignAffairs.com.
Introduction
The history of the last half-century of relations between China and the West1 can be briefly summarized. The United States and the other liberal democracies opened their doors to China in the belief that, by doing so, they would cause its system to converge more closely with their own. As anticipated, access to the markets, resources, technology, educational systems, and managerial know-how of the advanced industrial nations of Western Europe, North America, and East Asia helped China grow richer more rapidly than would otherwise have been possible. But trade and societal interaction did not yield the broader benefits for which the democracies had hoped. Instead of a liberal and cooperative partner, China has become an increasingly wealthy and powerful competitor, repressive at home and aggressive abroad.
When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the United States adopted a two-part strategy for dealing with China. On the one hand, in a continuation and expansion of policies that began twenty years earlier with the Nixon/Kissinger opening to Beijing, successive US administrations sought to promote “engagement”: ever-deepening commercial, diplomatic, scientific, educational, and cultural ties between China and the West. At the same time, together with a collection of allies and strategic partners, from the mid-1990s Washington worked to maintain a favorable balance of military power in what has now come to be referred to as the Indo-Pacific region. While most non-Asian democracies did not participate actively in the balancing portion of US strategy, all embraced engagement, and especially its economic component, with vigor and enthusiasm.
The two elements of this dual-edged strategy were expected to work together. Balancing would preserve stability and deter aggression, even as China grew richer and stronger. Meanwhile, engagement would transform the country in ways that reduced the danger it might someday pose a threat to the interests of the United States and its democratic allies. By welcoming Beijing into the US-dominated, post-Cold War international system, American policy-makers hoped to persuade China’s leaders that their interests lay in preserving the existing order, adapting to its rules and adopting its values, rather than seeking to modify or overthrow it. Drawing China fully into an increasingly integrated global economy was also expected to accelerate its transition away from state-directed economic planning and towards a more open, market-driven model of development. Finally, US and other Western leaders hoped that by encouraging the growth of a middle class, the spread of liberal ideas, and strengthening the rule of law and the institutions of civil society, engagement would lead eventually to liberalizing political reforms.
Optimism on all of these counts reached a peak at the turn of the twentyfirst century with Beijing’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its full, formal incorporation into the Western-built global economic system. The subsequent two decades – and, in particular, the years since the 2008 financial crisis – have been marked by a darkening mood and accumulating evidence that things have not gone according to plan. Instead of moving steadily towards greater openness and more reliance on markets, as most observers predicted and expected, Beijing has expanded its use of state-directed trade, technology promotion, and industrial policies. Despite the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime’s ceaseless rhetoric about the glories of globalization and the wonders of “win-win cooperation,” these policies now threaten the future prosperity of the advanced industrial nations.
Rather than loosen up, the Chinese party-state has cracked down on its own citizens, stifling the slightest hint of dissent, laying the foundations for a pervasive, nationwide high-tech surveillance system, and consigning at least a million of the country’s Uighur Muslims to forced labor and concentration camps. China today is more repressive than at any time since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and arguably since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Finally, far from becoming a satisfied supporter of the international status quo, Beijing is now pursuing openly revisionist aims: it seeks to displace the United States as the preponderant power in eastern Eurasia and hopes eventually to challenge its position as the world’s richest, strongest, most technologically advanced, and most influential nation. In addition to eroding the advantages in wealth and material power that the United States and the other Western democracies have long enjoyed, China now poses an explicit challenge to the efficacy, moral authority, and supposed universality of the principles on which their political systems are based. In the words of a 2019 report by the European Union, China is a “systemic rival” that claims to have developed “alternative models of governance” superior to those put forward by the liberal democratic West.2
Why did the policy of engagement fail to achieve its objectives? The simplest answer to this question is that US and other Western policy-makers misunderstood the character of China’s domestic political regime: they underestimated the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness of the CCP, misjudged the depths of its resolve to retain domestic political power, and failed to recognize the extent and seriousness of its revisionist international ambitions. Put plainly, engagement failed because its architects and advocates got China wrong.
Even before the Cold War ended, China’s leaders believed that they were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the democratic world, led by the United States. As viewed from Beijing, offers of engagement were merely a clever Western stratagem designed to weaken China by exposing its people to dangerous liberal ideas and unleashing societal forces that would lead eventually to irresistible pressures for political change. At the same time as they sought to subvert its system from within, American strategists were seen as aiming to contain China, preventing it from regaining its rightful place in Asia by encircling it with allies and forward-based military forces.
Faced with what it regarded as a deadly, double-edged threat, the CCP regime worked diligently to devise and implement a counter-strategy of its own. Highly flexible and adaptive in their choice of means, Chinese strategists have nevertheless been remarkably constant in their objectives. For over thirty years now they have found ways to exploit the opportunities afforded by engagement, expanding their nation’s economy, building up its scientific, technological, and military capabilities, and enhancing its influence in Western countries, while at the same time maintaining and even reinforcing the Party’s grip on Chinese society. As their strength and self-confidence have grown, China’s rulers have begun to move from a largely defensive posture in world affairs to an assertive and even aggressive external stance. Albeit belatedly, in the last several years this shift has sparked concern and the beginnings of a more forceful response from the West.
Judged against their respective aims, Beijing’s strategy has thus far worked better than that of the United States and its democratic allies. But the competition between the two sides is far from over. One reason why China has done as well as it has to date is precisely that its rivals have been so slow to react to its advances. Where Beijing has been fixed in its ends but flexible in its means, the democracies have tended to be rigid with respect to both, clinging to forlorn hopes and failed policies. If the liberal democracies can reset their assumptions and expectations about China, abandon their previous passivity and start to regain the initiative, the quality of Beijing’s strategic reflexes will be put to the test. Confronted with a more alert and dynamic opponent, the CCP regime may be prone to seize up, doubling down on existing approaches in ways that could prove counterproductive and potentially self-defeating. Indeed, there are already some signs that this has started to happen.
Subsequent chapters will examine both sides of the complex, multi-dimensional rivalry between China, on the one hand, and the democracies, led by the United States, on the other.
The book’s opening chapters focus on the United States, the architect and prime mover behind the policy of engagement, starting with an account of the policy’s origins, from the latter stages of the Cold War to the debate over China’s entry into the WTO at the end of the 1990s. Contrary to what some critics have claimed, engagement was not merely a fool’s errand, a careless and self-evident blunder with an obviously unachievable aim; nor was it simply the handiwork of greedy “globalists” in search of profits. Rather it was the product of a unique set of historical circumstances that prevailed at the end of the Cold War. Chapter 1 describes the confluence of deeply rooted ideological beliefs, powerful material trends, and emerging interest group pressures that launched the United States on its quixotic campaign to reshape China’s political system, economy, and grand strategy.
Chapter 2 lays out three sets of rationales for engagement offered by US policy-makers during the crucial decade of the 1990s. An examination of the historical record confirms that, despite some recent revisionism, a broad assortment of experts, officials, and political leaders did, in fact, argue that engagement would likely lead to China’s economic and political liberalization and its willing incorporation into the existing, US-dominated international order.
Three subsequent chapters will address the central question of why these expectations have not been met. Chapter 3 analyzes the Party’s persistent anxieties about penetration and subversion, describes its unwavering determination to maintain its domestic political monopoly, and traces the evolving mix of coercion, cooptation, and ideological indoctrination through which it has been able thus far to do so.
As explained in Chapter 4, the CCP’s preoccupation with power and its obsession with control are also essential to understanding the evolution of its economic policies. From the start of the process of “reform and opening up” under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, CCP strategists have regarded the market as a tool of the party-state or, as one of Deng’s colleagues put it, a “bird in a cage.” While they have been willing at times to afford greater scope to market forces, contrary to the expectations of most Western observers, the Party’s top leaders have never had any intention of proceeding down the path towards full economic liberalization. It should therefore come as no surprise that, in responding to the challenge of markedly slower growth, in recent years the regime has ignored the advice of most Western (and many Chinese) economists that it relax its grip, opting instead for policies that further enhance the role of the state at the expense of the market.
Chapter 5 will make the case that, as is true of its domestic political and economic policies, the outward-directed elements of China’s grand strategy are also strongly shaped by the character of the CCP regime and its distinctive ideological worldview. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Beijing faced an international system that it saw as profoundly threatening, not only to its physical security but also to its very legitimacy. While for a time China lacked the power to challenge the status quo, the notion that it would want nothing more than to be accepted as a member in good standing of the existing regional and global orders was always fanciful. As their capabilities have grown, China’s leaders have gone over to the offensive, pushing back at the meddlesome presence of US and allied military forces in their own backyard, challenging America’s position as the preeminent global power, and seeking to neutralize the threat posed by the pervasiveness and continuing appeal of the liberal democratic ideals it espouses.
What comes through plainly in each of these three domains – political, economic, and strategic – is the consistency of the CCP’s goals and the relentless determination with which they have been sought by successive generations of leaders. Since taking power in late 2012, Xi Jinping has felt emboldened to express those ends more openly and to pursue them more forcefully than his predecessors. Contrary to the way in which he is sometimes portrayed in the West, however, Xi does not represent a break from the past. To the contrary, he is following in the footsteps of his forebears and attempting to attain the same objectives.
For their part, the United States and its allies are presently suspended between a set of old policies that have not achieved the aims set for them and a new, not yet fully defined alternative strategy to guide their future actions. Before looking forward, Chapter 6 will look back one last time, examining the question of whether engagement’s failure was inevitable and explaining why it has taken so long for Western policy-makers to acknowledge that it has, in fact, failed.
The democracies now find themselves confronted, not by a cooperative partner, but by a powerful and hostile state, deeply enmeshed in their societies and economies, and ruled by a technologically sophisticated, dictatorial regime that seeks to reshape the world in ways that are threatening to their interests and inimical to their values. This reality is unpleasant but it is also undeniable and must be faced. Continuing to engage with China on the same terms as in the past will help it grow even stronger and, instead of inducing positive change, such an approach will only strengthen the hand and encourage the ambitions of the CCP regime.
The book will close by laying out the main elements of a new strategy for meeting the challenge that Beijing now poses. Although there will be costs, the United States and its allies need to constrict engagement with China and invest more in the capabilities necessary to balance against its growing power. Abandoning the illusory post-Cold War goal of transforming the country by incorporating it into an all-inclusive international order operating on liberal principles, the democracies must focus instead on strengthening the sinews of a partial liberal system: an assembly of states that, whatever their differences, share a commitment to upholding and defending the rights and freedoms on which their societies are based.
Notes
1.
I will use the terms “West” and “liberal democracies” interchangeably. Once confined to the trans-Atlantic zone, liberal democracies can now be found in every region of the world. These are countries with popularly elected governments whose powers are restrained by the rule of law and which are committed to protecting the civil rights of all their citizens.
2.
Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the European Council, and the Council, “EU–China – A Strategic Outlook,” March 12, 2019, p. 1.
1The Origins of Engagement
During the climactic closing decades of the Cold War, US policy-makers viewed engagement with Beijing primarily through the lens of their ongoing competition against the Soviet Union. As the United States pulled back from its bruising defeat in Vietnam, the Soviets appeared to be moving boldly in the opposite direction. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, Moscow continued an ambitious, broad-based military buildup and launched a series of interventionist adventures of its own in Afghanistan, southern Africa, and Central America. Faced with these troubling trends, American strategists began to look for ways to enhance China’s military, economic, and technological capabilities in order to build it into a more effective counterweight to Soviet power.
Working with Beijing required a revolution in American diplomacy. For two decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Washington had refused even to recognize its existence, clinging instead to the fiction that the Nationalist regime that fled to Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists in 1949 was the legitimate government of all of China. Following the first tentative, secret contacts in 1969, successive American administrations took a series of steps that moved Washington and Beijing away from intense mutual animosity and towards a close, albeit wary, strategic alignment against a common foe.
Starting with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s first visit to China in 1971, American officials provided their counterparts in Beijing with satellite photographs and other intelligence information about the capabilities and disposition of Soviet forces, and began to discuss possible contingencies involving a military confrontation with the USSR.1 Together with these sensitive exchanges, Presidents Nixon and Ford also authorized the sale or transfer of limited numbers of so-called “dual-use” systems with both commercial and potential military applications, including satellite ground stations, civilian jet aircraft, and high-speed computers. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Jimmy Carter added “non-lethal” military equipment such as transport aircraft, helicopters, communications hardware, and over-the-horizon radar systems to the list of items for sale. Seeking to strike a balance between countering Soviet power and upholding the continuing US commitment to Taiwan’s security, four years later Ronald Reagan took a significant further step, approving the sale of weapons deemed “defensive” in nature, including torpedoes and both anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.2
Chinese planners ultimately proved less interested in buying military hardware than in gaining access to Western technology of all kinds. Within certain limits, the Americans were happy to oblige. Soon after Reagan’s election in 1980, US officials indicated their willingness to relax controls on high-tech exports to China and to start treating it, as one put it, “as a friendly less-developed country and no longer as a member of the international Communist conspiracy.”3 In 1983, the Reagan administration announced that, for purposes of granting export licenses, the US government would henceforth treat China as “a friendly, non-aligned country.” Among the commodities now deemed suitable for export were computers, integrated circuits, precision measuring devices, and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.4 At the same time as it relaxed its own controls, Washington worked with its allies to synchronize national policies and ease collective export restrictions.5
According to one former State Department official, the “driving force” behind this loosening of controls was “overwhelmingly strategic, it had nothing to do with commercial factors.”6 As far as the US government was concerned, the object of the exercise was to strengthen China rather than to promote the fortunes of American companies. Still, the shift in policy was undeniably good for business. By the end of the 1980s, US high-tech exports to China (including both dual-use and purely commercial items) had increased in value by a factor of thirty.7
Technology transfer took other forms as well. Even before the resumption of formal diplomatic relations in 1979, the Carter administration agreed to permit several hundred Chinese students and scholars to attend universities and participate in research in the United States. These opportunities proved even more attractive than had been anticipated, and the number of visas granted for educational purposes more than tripled over the course of the 1980s.8 During this period, a total of around 80,000 Chinese citizens came to study in the United States, the vast majority of them in science and engineering fields. In 1989, roughly 43,000 were still enrolled and another 11,000 had become permanent residents. The rest had returned to China to teach others, conduct their own research, and help rebuild a scientific establishment ravaged by years of political turmoil.9
American policy-makers took other steps to assist China in strengthening its economy and thus the foundations of its long-term national power. In 1972, the Nixon administration lifted a twenty-three-year embargo on all commerce with the PRC, clearing the way for an increase in bilateral trade from close to zero to over a billion dollars by the end of the decade.10 In 1979, the Carter administration announced its intention to grant China most favored-nation (MFN) status, lowering tariffs on its exports to the same level as those imposed on any other trading partner.11 Coinciding with the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s program of economic “reform and opening up” in the same year, this enabled a further increase in two-way trade, which grew by an order of magnitude over the course of the 1980s.12
The Carter administration also helped China obtain much-needed capital by supporting its entry into the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In keeping with his preference for private enterprise, Ronald Reagan subsequently expanded the use of domestic institutions like the Export–Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to help finance the export of American products to China and to encourage investment there by US firms. As with its relaxation of restraints on technology transfer, these moves reflected the judgment contained in a 1984 National Security Decision Directive that it was in the nation’s strategic interest to “lend support to China’s ambitious modernization effort.” In the words of a 1981 State Department memorandum: “[O]nly the interests of our adversaries would be served by a weak China that failed to modernize.”13 With significant assistance from the United States, China had begun its transformation from a poor and backward nation into a global manufacturing and export powerhouse.
For as long as the Cold War was underway, American policy-makers generally downplayed or ignored the repressive, illiberal character of the CCP regime. In a widely read 1967 article in which he made the case for easing Maoist China out of its “angry isolation” and coaxing it back inside “the family of nations,” Richard Nixon argued that “the world cannot be safe until China changes.” It followed that, “to the extent that we can influence events,” the aim of US policy “should be to induce change.”14 At least so far as its domestic institutions were concerned, however, once in office, Nixon explicitly rejected the idea of trying to change China. As he told Mao during their first meeting: “[W]hat is important is not a nation’s internal philosophy. What is important is its policy towards the rest of the world and towards us.”15
Despite significant differences in outlook, for all practical purposes, Nixon’s successors followed a similar path. Jimmy Carter wanted to make the defense of universal human rights into the centerpiece of his foreign policy, and Ronald Reagan sought to rally the free world against the evils of Communism, but both ultimately bowed to the necessity of staying close to China in order to offset the greater threat posed by the Soviet Union.
As Deng’s economic reforms began to unfold, it also became easier to believe that political liberalization could not be far behind. Following a 1984 visit during which the authorities censored portions of his speeches in which he discussed the virtues of faith and freedom, Reagan nevertheless concluded that China’s embrace of markets meant that it was already merely “a so-called Communist country.”16 The president’s optimism about China’s direction was mirrored in shifting public attitudes. Even after the initial exchanges of the 1970s, a majority of Americans remained highly skeptical of a country that was just beginning to emerge from the ideological frenzy of the Cultural Revolution. With the normalization of relations, and the launch of market-oriented reforms, perceptions of China changed almost overnight. In 1978, 67% of those questioned in one poll regarded the country unfavorably, with only 21% expressing a favorable view. One year later, the ratio was almost completely reversed. By the spring of 1989, the figures were 72% positive and only 13% negative.17
If China was seen to be evolving in generally favorable directions, it was also still perceived to be poor and weak, and likely to remain so for some time. The prospect that it might someday pose a threat to the United States or its regional allies thus seemed doubly implausible. Nevertheless, from the start, there were occasional expressions of concern about what the future might hold. In a 1975 conversation with President Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger mused of China that “in 20 years, if they keep developing the way they have, they could be a pretty scary outfit.”18 Asked in 1983 to assess the impact of proposed arms sales and technology transfers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded somewhat more precisely that, while the risks were real, they were also still relatively distant. Intelligence experts expected that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would take nearly a decade to fully absorb whatever new technologies it might acquire, meaning that the modernization of its ground forces would not “appreciably affect US and allied security interests through the 1990s,” while improvements in its naval capabilities were “unlikely to have any significant impact on US forces in the region during the remainder of this century.”19
Attempts to take a broader, longer-range view were few and far between, but there were some. In 1987, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment sponsored a study that aimed to project the worldwide distribution of economic capabilities twenty years into the future. The findings were striking: based on the size of its population and plausible improvements in productivity due to technological upgrading and market reforms, by 2010 China might have the world’s second largest economy. If it began to invest even a small fraction of its newfound wealth in its armed forces, in two decades China could also “become a superpower, in military terms.” Whether at that point Beijing’s strategic interests would continue to align with those of the United States was an obvious but unanswerable question. Having highlighted the PRC’s potential to transform the global balance of power, the report concluded prudently that “large uncertainties attach to China’s future.”20
Engagement 2.0
In the span of little more than two and a half years, a series of dramatic developments weakened and then swept away the foundations on which the policy of engagement had come to rest. The killing of over one thousand unarmed students in Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square in June 1989 served as a brutal reminder of the CCP regime’s continued, repressive character and cast doubt on facile assumptions about the inevitability of liberalizing reforms. Five months later, the Berlin Wall was reduced to rubble by another group of peaceful protestors, unleashing a wave of pent-up demand for change that would overturn Communist regimes across Eastern Europe, culminating in December 1991 with the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union. The primary justification for two decades of engagement – the claim that the United States needed China to help it balance Soviet power and win the Cold War – had suddenly been rendered obsolete.
It would not take long for an entirely new set of rationales to take shape, sustaining most, though not all, aspects of previous US policy and eventually gaining widespread, if not universal, acceptance. These rationales and the expectations derived from them will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2. In order to understand the logic that underpinned them, and to appreciate their emotional appeal and enduring persuasive power, it is necessary first to describe the unique set of historical circumstances, the distinctive confluence of events, ideas, and material interests, out of which they emerged.
Ideology: the American vision of a liberal international order
With the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States was suddenly the sole remaining superpower, with economic resources, military capabilities, and political prestige far exceeding those of any potential rival. What this meant to American policy-makers was not only that their own country was more secure, but also that for the third time in a century they had an opportunity and, as they saw it, an obligation to reshape the world in ways that would make it more peaceful and prosperous for generations to come. Their thinking about how to do this, and their vision of the ideal international system that they hoped to build, reflected principles deeply rooted in the nation’s founding.
In 1919, and again in 1945, the United States had taken the lead in trying to construct what would today be described as a “liberal international order”: a system made up of democratic states, bound together by trade, multilateral institutions, agreed norms of behavior, and a shared commitment to the protection of certain universal human rights. This vision was essentially an outward projection of the principles on which the American domestic political regime had been built: a belief in the primacy of individual liberty, and a set of rights and institutions meant to protect it, including representative government, private property, and the rule of law. The American design for an ideal international order also reflected the claims of the eighteenth-century philosophers of liberalism: that self-governing republics were less warlike than monarchies; that nations whose economies were organized around free markets and private property were more inclined to trade freely with one another than those pursuing the mercantilist schemes of powerful princes; and that trade itself was conducive to peace.
At the end of World War I, with Europe in ruins, Woodrow Wilson had tried to use the unmatched material strength and, in his view, the superior moral authority of the United States to reshape the entire international system along liberal lines. Wilson’s plan called for overturning the autocratic regimes that he blamed for starting the war and replacing them with democracies, dividing Europe’s multi-ethnic empires into self-governing nation states, breaking up imperial trading blocs, and instituting a world order based on free trade, freedom of navigation, open diplomacy, and mutual arms reductions. The entire system would be capped by a new kind of international institution, a League of Nations whose members would pledge to defend one another against aggression, regardless of the source.21
This scheme, sweeping in its scope and ambition, was quickly rejected as impractical and even dangerous, both by America’s wartime allies and by Wilson’s domestic political opponents. Nevertheless, as Henry Kissinger has pointed out, with the United States finally coming into its own as a world power, Wilson had managed to define a distinctive, liberal vision for its foreign policy objectives that “grasped the mainsprings of American motivation” and, in particular, the belief that the nation’s “exceptional character resides in the practice and propagation of freedom.”22 Indeed, Kissinger writes: “Wilson’s principles were so pervasive, so deeply related to the American perception of itself, that when two decades later the issue of world order came up again … America turned once more to … Wilsonian principles.”23
At the start of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt self-consciously echoed Wilson’s rhetoric, declaring his intention to build a post-war world on the principles of self-determination, free trade, freedom of the seas, and a commitment to “life, liberty, independence … religious freedom,” and “the preservation of human rights and justice.”24 Like Wilson, Roosevelt also believed that, once the war was over, some kind of multilateral, collective security mechanism would be essential to keeping the peace. Hoping to strengthen the original design of Wilson’s League, the president and his planners proposed that a new United Nations grant special authority to Britain, China, the United States, and the Soviet Union, the “Four Policemen” that had worked together to defeat fascism and which were supposedly united, as FDR said of Stalin at one point, in their desire “for a world of democracy and peace.”25 This claim, however, required an obfuscation of the true character of the Soviet regime that became impossible to sustain as the war drew to a close.
With the breakdown of the wartime alliance and the onset of the Cold War, the United States was forced again to abandon the dream of a truly global liberal order. This time, however, instead of withdrawing in disappointment and disgust, the nation set out to build what a 1950 strategic planning document described as a “successfully functioning political and economic system in the free world.”26 Although it would take some time fully to take shape, what emerged from this effort was a partial rather than an all-encompassing liberal international order; a sub-system of democratic states, organized and operating on liberal principles, that would eventually come to include the advanced democracies of Western Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. These nations were joined together by expanding flows of goods, capital, people, and information, by military alliances and other multilateral mechanisms for consultation and policy coordination, and by shared political values. The resulting loose coalition (often referred to with some lack of geographic precision as “the West”) proved to be enormously successful in generating both wealth and power. Over a forty-year period of intense rivalry, its members were able to out-produce, out-innovate, and ultimately outlast their Communist competitors.
As the Cold War wound down, US officials sought once again to outline their preferred vision for the world. It should come as no surprise that they did so by describing a liberal international order using language and concepts virtually identical to those deployed by their forebears. “What is it we want to see?” asked newly elected President George H.W. Bush in the spring of 1989. “It is a growing community of democracies anchoring international peace and stability, and a dynamic free-market system generating prosperity and progress on a global scale.”27
Despite the president’s well-known aversion to “the vision thing,” as he rallied the nation to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, Bush indulged in flights of Wilsonian rhetoric of a sort that had been largely absent from public discourse for most of the preceding half-century. What was at stake, he told a joint session of Congress in January 1991, was nothing less than “a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind – peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” This supposed convergence of values, signified by the Soviet Union’s willingness to vote in favor of intervention in the UN Security Council, meant that it might finally be possible to implement a working system of collective security: “[F]or the first time since World War II, the international community is united,” Bush declared. “The leadership of the United Nations, once only a hoped-for ideal, is now confirming its founders’ vision.”28 By the spring of 1992, a few months after the final collapse of the Soviet Union, even a hard-nosed pragmatist like Secretary of State James Baker could describe the administration’s goals as being to create “a democratic peace” that would cover “not just ‘half a world’ but ‘the whole world’ instead.”29 A new, globe-spanning system would be built “on the twin pillars of political and economic freedom.”30
Reflecting its deep, ideological roots, this image of a desired future was shared by Republicans and Democrats alike. Having replaced him as president, Bill Clinton essentially picked up where Bush had left off, recasting the same basic principles and assumptions into a new, formal grand strategic doctrine. In a 1993 speech entitled “From Containment to Enlargement,” Clinton’s first National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake, noted that the demise of the Soviet Union provided America with “unparalleled opportunities to lead.” To the greatest extent possible, Lake argued, the United States should use its position of overwhelming strength to “promote democracy and market economics in the world.” Thus, he concluded, “ the successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement – enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.”31
The case for enlargement was pragmatic as well as idealistic, but even the pragmatic arguments were based on long-standing liberal beliefs. “The addition of new democracies makes us more secure,” Lake declared, “because democracies tend not to wage war on each other…. They are more trustworthy in diplomacy and do a better job of respecting the human rights of their people.” As a result, “to the extent democracy and market economics hold sway in other nations, our own nation will be more secure, prosperous and influential, while the broader world will be more humane and peaceful.”32
Material trends: democratization, marketization, globalization
Lake’s bumper-sticker summary of America’s new grand strategy never gained the same currency as George Kennan’s notion of “containment,” but it was apt nonetheless. As the post-Cold War era began, the United States set its sights on expanding the scope of what had been a partial, geographically constrained liberal order to include the entire world and, in particular, the swath of Eurasia that extended from Eastern Europe, across the newly independent republics of the former Soviet Union, to China. Here the aim was to “help democracy and market economics take root” where they had not already done so, and to “foster and consolidate” new liberal regimes when they did begin to blossom.33
In dealing with the nations that had arisen out of the wreckage of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the United States and its allies used the promise of incorporation into Western political institutions and the global economy as a tool for encouraging liberal reforms. The states that eventually earned full membership in this way were, at the outset, weak, poor, and, for the most part, eager to change. More challenging and, in the long run, more important were Russia and, above all, China. Lacking sufficient leverage to compel their transformation, the democracies effectively inverted the strategy they had used to such good effect along the periphery of the former Soviet empire. Rather than hold out the possibility of inclusion as an inducement to liberalization, the United States and its allies worked instead to bring Russia and China as fully as possible into the existing order and, in particular, into the open global economy, in the hopes that doing so would help speed their domestic economic, political, and social transformation. Instead of change followed by inclusion, the formula was reversed to inclusion followed by change.
US and other Western policy-makers were highly confident that this approach would succeed. To a certain extent, this attitude reflected an “end of history” triumphalism, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism had finally won a two-hundred-year evolutionary struggle against other forms of political and economic organization and that its superiority over autocracy, fascism, and now Communism had been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.34 It seemed clear that, as George H.W. Bush put it, the movement towards markets and democracy had become “inexorable.”35
This belief was not merely the product of wishful thinking, of course; there was ample evidence that seemed to back it up. The dramatic scenes in Berlin, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the evident desire of people in many parts of its former empire to throw off their shackles and join the West all lent credence to the notion that liberalism had triumphed. Further to the east, China had already begun its march towards market-oriented economics. While Tiananmen represented a terrible setback, Americans, in particular, could take comfort from the fact that student demonstrators had quoted Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, and Woodrow Wilson and rallied around a papier-mâché “Goddess of Democracy” that resembled their own Statue of Liberty. It was easy for Western observers to believe that those reactionaries in the Communist Party leadership who still opposed liberalization were engaged in a futile effort to hold back the tide of history.
Philosophical speculation about world-historical tendencies aside, recent events appeared to be the product of some more concrete and observable long-term trends. By the early 1990s, the world was already almost two decades into what political scientist Samuel Huntington described in a widely read book as a “third wave” of democratization. As had happened between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and again from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, since the mid-1970s the number of democratic states had increased sharply, growing from thirty in 1973 to fifty-nine in 1990.36 Thus, even before the Soviet implosion, 45% of the countries in the world were ruled by democratic governments, the highest proportion since the 1920s. And the trend was clearly global: starting in Western Europe with Portugal and Spain in 1974–5, the democratic wave had traveled west to Central and Latin America, and south to parts of Africa, before propagating east, across Eurasia. Huntington was at pains to point out both that the causes of this phenomenon were varied and complex, and that past waves had been followed by periods of reaction (or “reverse waves”).37 Still, it is not difficult to understand why more casual observers, to say nothing of busy policy-makers, might have been drawn to conclude that the process unfolding before them was linear and irreversible.
Democratization was accompanied by a parallel trend towards what can best be described as “marketization”: an increased emphasis on market mechanisms in national economic policy, as opposed to more statist, interventionist approaches to fostering growth and development. This tendency, too, had become evident well before the end of the Cold War. The so-called “market revolution” or “Reagan–Thatcher revolution” that began in Britain and the United States also reverberated across the global South.38 During the 1980s, often under pressure from international financial institutions to which they owed large sums, many developing countries proceeded to abandon subsidies, state-owned enterprises, and high tariffs in favor of deregulated banks, reduced government spending, privatization of industry, and liberalized trade.
