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How American Foreign Policy Got China Wrong | Foreign Affairs
Far Eastern Promises: why U.S should focus on Asia | Foreign Affairs
China's Foreign Policy in Historical Perspective | Foreign Affairs
How China and America See Each Other | Foreign Affairs
美国高估了自己 对中国如意算盘落空
来源：加国无忧 2018年2月19日 美国之音
http://info.51.ca/news/world/2018-02/624410.html
奥巴马政府时期两名主管亚太事务的高级官员在美国最新一期的《外交事务》杂志上撰文感慨，自二战结束以来，美国历届政府的对华政策都失败了。美国一直以为可以凭借自己的努力（接触和威慑）来影响中国的进程，但是，无论美国是抡起“大棒”，还是拿出“胡萝卜”， 美国都无法影响中国的发展轨迹。
美国过高估计了自己改变中国进程的能力
奥巴马政府时期负责东亚和太平洋事务的前助理国务卿科特·坎贝尔（Kurt Campbell）和曾经担任美国前副总统拜登副国家安全顾问的厄利·拉特纳（Ely Ratner）在今年3/4月出版的外交事务杂志上说，美国一直期望能够决定中国的进程，但是总是过高估计了自己的能力。
两人写道，二战后，美国派特使乔治·马歇尔（George Marshall）前往中国斡旋，期望共产党和国民党达成和平协议；韩战期间，杜鲁门政府期待阻止毛泽东的军队跨过鸭绿江；越南战争期间，约翰逊政府相信中国会限制在越南的参与，但是，上述种种期待都落空了。
两位作者又说，尼克松政府对中国下注了最大的和最乐观的赌注。尼克松和他的国家安全顾问基辛格认为，与中国友好，可以在中国和前苏联之间插入楔子，同时让中国更亲近美国。总之，美国人认为，凭借美国的实力和霸权，美国可以把中国塑造成为一个让美国喜欢的国家。但是，他们指出，自尼克松迈出与中国建立友好关系的第一步后，越来越多的记录清楚地显示，华盛顿再次对自己可以影响中国进程的能力太自信了。
坎贝尔和拉特纳说，无论美国祭出“大棒”还是“胡萝卜”，都没有像预期地那样改变中国。外交和经济接触并没有带来中国政治和经济上的开放；美国的军事力量和区域制衡也没有能够阻止中国试图改变美国领导的体系的核心努力；自由的国际体系并没有像预期的那样可以诱惑或是制约中国。中国在追求自己的发展道路，而这个进程中，美国的一系列期待落空。
两位作者警告说，这样的现实应该足以让美国擦亮眼睛，重新审视美国的对华政策。虽然做出这样的改变可能会给现在的双边关系带来风险，但是，要想建立一个更强大的，更持续的对华措施，美国必须要诚实地审视美国曾经的预想为什么会出错。
市场力量并未能让中国经济进一步开放
坎贝尔和拉特纳说，美国以为与中国进行更多的商业互动将会缓慢而且稳固地促进中国经济自由化。他们说，自老布什政府时期之后的几十年，正是这个理念，不但让美国在1990年代给予中国最惠国待遇，在2001年支持中国加入世界贸易组织，在2006年与中国举行高级别的经济会谈，在奥巴马政府时期，还与中国商讨双边投资协定。
但是，两位作者指出，事与愿违的是，21世纪初以来，中国经济自由化发展似乎停滞，取而代之的是富裕后的中国进一步走向国家资本主义。持续的经济发展非但没有带来经济的开放，相反帮助中国共产党进一步合法化他们的国家主导的经济模式。
美国人相信债务、低效和经济发展的进一步需求会促使中国做出进一步的经济改革，但是，中国共产党却对经济进一步控制。他们不仅巩固了国有企业，而且还推出2025 中国制造的行业政策，在每个领域，包括太空、生物制药和机器人方面推出全国技术龙头老大，而同时却不让在华的外国企业获得公平的竞争平台。
坎贝尔和拉特纳说，虽然美国现在意识到了这种歧视的存在，一些人仍然担心如果采取保护和制裁措施会影响两国关系，并影响可能的商业利益。 两位作者认为，美国川普政府所做的只是在蝇头小利上锱铢必较。美国现在应该意识到与中国做生意经历的不是短期的沮丧，现在看起来应该是越来越持久的伤害。
新技术的发展让中国政府的控制之手得到加强
坎贝尔和拉特纳在文章中写道， 美国人相信经济增长不仅会带来经济的进一步开放，也会促进政治的进一步自由化。 美国因此希望通过分享技术，加强投资和贸易、增加民间交流，并接纳更多的中国留学生来完成这个进程。但是，他们指出，在中国，交流技术的发展只是加强了政府的控制之手。
两位作者写道，虽然1989年的六四天安门事件让世界对中国采纳选举民主的希望一点点黯淡，但是，仍然有人相信中国政府会允许一个更强的公民社会，允许更大的媒体自由的存在，但是，由于担心更大的开放会威胁国内稳定以及中国共产党政权的存亡，中国共产党采取了不同的措施。
为了抵制全球化的影响，政府加强了对民众的控制和限制。信息科技的发展没有让民众更加有力量，反而沦为政府对民众的监控工具，使得政府更有能力控制信息和监控民众的行为。
中国不仅在抵制西方的价值观，中国还逮捕宗教领导人、学术领导人、社会活动分子以及人权律师。
中国设立网络“防火墙”阻止政治活动，建立“社会信用体系”，根据民众的社会、商业、社会以及网络活动，利用大数据和人工智能技术来惩罚公民，中国的人脸识别软件以及无处不在的监控让公民几乎无处躲藏。
美国亚太的军事威慑力促使中国加快军事改革
坎贝尔和拉特纳说，美国人认为，美国在亚太的外交和军事力量足以让北京认识到北京既没有可能也没有必须挑战美国在亚洲领导的安全体系。除此之外，美国也一直很小心，不与中国陷入对抗，但是两位作者说，对北京来说，美国在亚洲的盟友和军事存在对中国的利益构成他们不能接受的威胁。
北京认为，美国在亚洲的盟友和军事存在对中国在台湾、朝鲜半岛、东中国海和南中国海的利益都不利。两人援引中国学者王辑思的话说，中国人强烈的相信，华盛顿试图阻止崛起的国家，特别是中国，完成自己的目标并提高自己的地位。
两位作者指出，中国开始在一点一点地削弱美国在亚洲领导的安全体系。中国不仅发展出可以拒阻美国军队进入该地区的能力，并企图分裂美国及其盟友的关系。
坎贝尔和拉特纳说，美国的力量以及外交接触没有能够说服中国放弃打造自己的世界级军队。美国在伊拉克和其他地方展示力量只能促使中国加快军事现代化的进程。中国国家主席习近平已经在着手进行军事改革，而这项改革将让中国军队更有打击力，也能在中国国土之外的地方投射力量。
他们说，中国正在建造的第三艘航空母舰、中国在南中国海的军事部署以及中国在吉布提的军事基地，无不显示中国越来越成为与美国一样强大的军事力量，而这是前苏联垮台以来没有看到的。
他们还说，中国领导人不再坚守中国前领导人邓小平的教诲“韬光养晦”，而是强调中国站起来、富起来和强起来了。
北京试图建立自己的区域和国际秩序
坎贝尔和拉特纳说，中国是美国建立的二战后的秩序的主要获益者之一，因此，美国人相信，中国应该觉得维护现有秩序，使其继续发展与中国自己的进步休戚相关。
坎贝尔和拉特纳说，在一定领域，中国也确实努力在维护这个秩序。比如，中国加入亚太经合组织，中国签署核不扩散条约，并在2001年加入世界贸易组织，也并参与伊朗和朝鲜核项目的斡旋，而且中国也成为联合国反海盗和维和行动的主要贡献国。
但是，两人指出，中国还是感觉到了美国领导的体系的威胁，中国在一步步建立自己的体系来取代它。中国建立了亚洲基础设施银行、新发展银行并提出了“一带一路”的发展计划。这些机构和项目让中国可以设定自己的议程，并汲取自己的力量。中国的这些机构和项目与现行体系的标准和价值不同，比如，中国明确表示，不像美国和欧洲，中国不要求受援国必须进行管理改革等。
他们还说，中国在一步一步改变亚洲的安全平衡。中国采取很小的措施，不至于引发美国做出军事回应。 中国公然拒绝接受联合国仲裁法庭对有关南中国海案的裁决，亚洲国家因为对中国经济的依赖，再加上对美国能否致力于亚洲心存疑问，对中国在南中国海的问题上没有做出有力的回应。
中国谋求取代美国的地位
坎贝尔和拉特纳说，在中国谋求上述种种的同时，美国却被反恐活动以及中东的其他问题所牵制。
由于2008年的金融危机、伊拉克和阿富汗战事以及华盛顿政局的混乱，中国认为美国的衰落势在必行，中国领导人习近平呼吁中国在2050年时在综合国力和国际影响力方面成为世界领导国，他还表示，中国的发展模式为其他国家提供了新的选择。
两位作者因此得出结论，华盛顿现在面临着现代史上最有力和最可怕的竞争者。要接受这样的挑战，华盛顿首先要放弃对中国一厢情愿的期待，接受以前对华战略失败的事实。第二，美国需要专注自己以及亚太盟友的发展。
他们说，川普政府新的国家安全战略对美国以往的战略进行了拷问，把中国定义为“战略竞争者”，是朝正确方向迈出的一步，但是川普的政策--聚焦双边狭隘的贸易问题，放弃多边贸易协定，质疑盟友体系的价值，并将人权和外交放在第二位，这样的做法只能是走向对抗而不是竞争，而相反，中国的做法是竞争而不是对抗。
美国仍然有力量制衡中国
美国重要智库--外交关系协会的亚洲研究主任易明随后撰文说，坎贝尔和拉特纳这样评价美国以往的对华政策，有失公允，这相当于把洗澡水和孩子甚至澡盆一起倒掉。
她认为，美国没有能力控制中国的政治和经济发展结果，就像美国没有能力控制任何一个主权国家的政治结果。她举例说，美国甚至无法影响自己的盟友菲律宾和泰国的发展，也无法影响小国古巴的政治进程。她说，美国能做的只是创造机遇并适当控制一下，最终，一个主权国家决策者才能决定这个国家未来的走向。
她还说，中国也不是一直表现不佳。她说，美国可以继续对中国产生积极影响。她指出，由于美国的压力，中国在气候变化、抗击埃博拉病毒以及制裁朝鲜方面做出了更多。1990年代中期以来，美国和中国非政府组织，政府之间的互动，中国在环境法、经济法以及更大的社会政策方面都做出了重要的改变。
她还指出，政治进程是一个长期的计划，现在这个计划还没有结束。她说，中国的许多人：包括高级官员、亿万富翁、文化名人以及公民社会的积极分子在内，他们并没有接受习近平的专制做法。而且，她说，随着时间的推移，中国也会出现不同的领导人，而且这些人会有自己的政治意愿。 她说，中国曾经出现过赵紫阳和胡耀邦，也许五年后有不同的领导人出现掌舵，这个人可能是李克强，也可能是汪洋。她说，美国不该忽略这样的看法，不同的领导人会对内政和外交政策产生不同的影响。
她说，除了放弃对中国不切实际的想法以及加强美国自己的根本外，美国其实还可以制衡中国，比如向习近平施压，让他采取更多措施来应对全球的挑战，或是让他做出更多来维护他所说的他尊崇的全球化。另外，易明说，美国也可以通过自己的保护措施来抵御中国的保护措施。更重要的时，美国需要进一步加强与盟友和伙伴的关系。
How American Foreign Policy Got China Wrong
The China Reckoning
How Beijing Defied American Expectations
By Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2018-02-13/china-reckoning
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.
[Boom town: Shanghai's financial district, November 2013.]
CARLOS BARRIA / REUTERS
Boom town: Shanghai's financial district, November 2013.
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.
[Security cameras in front of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, November 2013.]
KIM KYUNG HOON / REUTERS
Security cameras in front of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, November 2013.
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.
