CHAPTER 6
THE MOST COMMON FEATURE of Asian states is their sense of representing “emerging” or “postcolonial” countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial rule by asserting a strong national identity. They share a conviction that world order is now rebalancing after an unnatural Western irruption over the past several centuries, but they have drawn vastly different lessons from their historical journeys. When top officials seek to evoke core interests, many of them look to a different cultural tradition and idealize a different golden age.
In Europe’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century systems, the preservation of the equilibrium—and by implication the status quo—was seen as a positive virtue. In Asia, almost every state is impelled by its own dynamism. Convinced that it is “rising,” it operates with the conviction that the world has yet to affirm its full deserved role. Even while no state questions the others’ sovereignty and dignity and all affirm a dedication to “non-zero-sum” diplomacy, the simultaneous pursuit of so many programs of national prestige building introduces a measure of volatility to the regional order. With the evolution of modern technology, the major powers of Asia have armed themselves with far more destructive military arsenals than even the strongest nineteenth-century European state possessed, compounding the risks of miscalculation.
The organization of Asia is thus an inherent challenge for world order. Major countries’ perception and pursuit of their national interests, rather than the balance of power as a system, have shaped the mechanisms of order that have developed. Their test will be whether a transpacific partnership, providing a peaceful framework for the interplay of many established interests, will be possible.
ASIA’S INTERNATIONAL ORDER AND CHINA
Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also taken the most complex journey, from ancient civilization through classical empire, to Communist revolution, to modern great-power status—a course which will have a profound impact on mankind.
From its unification as a single political entity in 221 B.C. through the early twentieth century, China’s position at the center of world order was so ingrained in its elite thinking that in the Chinese language there was no word for it. Only retrospectively did scholars define the “Sinocentric” tribute system. In this traditional concept, China considered itself, in a sense, the sole sovereign government of the world. Its Emperor was treated as a figure of cosmic dimensions and the linchpin between the human and the divine. His purview was not a sovereign state of “China”—that is, the territories immediately under his rule—but “All Under Heaven,” of which China formed the central, civilized part: “the Middle Kingdom,” inspiring and uplifting the rest of humanity.
In this view, world order reflected a universal hierarchy, not an equilibrium of competing sovereign states. Every known society was conceived of as being in some kind of tributary relationship with China, based in part on its approximation of Chinese culture; none could reach equality with it. Other monarchs were not fellow sovereigns but earnest pupils in the art of governance, striving toward civilization. Diplomacy was not a bargaining process between multiple sovereign interests but a series of carefully contrived ceremonies in which foreign societies were given the opportunity to affirm their assigned place in the global hierarchy. In keeping with this perspective, in classical China what would now be called “foreign policy” was the province of the Ministry of Rituals, which determined the shades of the tributary relationship, and the Office of Border Affairs, charged with managing relations with nomadic tribes. A Chinese foreign ministry was not established until the mid-nineteenth century, and then perforce to deal with intruders from the West. Even then, officials considered their task the traditional practice of barbarian management, not anything that might be regarded as Westphalian diplomacy. The new ministry carried the telling title of the “Office for the Management of the Affairs of All Nations,” implying that China was not engaging in interstate diplomacy at all.
The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily. China’s most imposing architectural achievement, the Great Wall eventually extending over roughly five thousand miles, was begun by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who had just defeated all rivals militarily, ending the period of Warring States and unifying China. It was a grandiose testimony to military victory but also to its inherent limits, denoting vast power coupled with a consciousness of vulnerability. For millennia, China sought to beguile and entice its adversaries more often than it attempted to defeat them by force of arms. Thus a minister in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) described the “five baits” with which he proposed to manage the mounted Xiongnu tribes to China’s northwestern frontier, though by conventional analysis China was the superior military power:
To give them … elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouth; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomach … and, as for those who come to surrender, the emperor [should] show them favor by honoring them with an imperial reception party in which the emperor should personally serve them wine and food so as to corrupt their mind. These are what may be called the five baits.
The hallmark of China’s diplomatic rituals, the kowtow—kneeling and touching one’s head to the ground to acknowledge the Emperor’s superior authority—was an abasement, to be sure, and proved a stumbling block to relations with modern Western states. But the kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor’s return gifts.
Traditionally, China sought to dominate psychologically by its achievements and its conduct—interspersed with occasional military excursions to teach recalcitrant barbarians a “lesson” and to induce respect. Both these strategic goals and this fundamentally psychological approach to armed conflict were in evidence as recently as China’s wars with India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, as well as in the manner in which core interests vis-à-vis other neighbors are affirmed.
Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer. Ironically, the only foreigners who achieved something akin to this status were conquerors. In one of history’s most amazing feats of cultural imperialism, two peoples that conquered China—the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchus in the seventeenth—were induced to adopt core elements of Chinese culture to facilitate the administration of a people so numerous and so obdurate in its assumption of cultural superiority. The conquerors were significantly assimilated by the defeated Chinese society, to a point where substantial parts of their home territory came to be treated as traditionally Chinese. China had not sought to export its political system; rather, it had seen others come to it. In that sense, it has expanded not by conquest but by osmosis.
In the modern era, Western representatives with their own sense of cultural superiority set out to enroll China in the European world system, which was becoming the basic structure of international order. They pressured China to cultivate ties with the rest of the world through exchanges of ambassadors and free trade and to uplift its people through a modernizing economy and a society open to Christian proselytizing.
What the West conceived of as a process of enlightenment and engagement was treated in China as an assault. China tried at first to parry it and then to resist outright. When the first British envoy, George Macartney, arrived in the late eighteenth century, bringing with him some early products of the Industrial Revolution and a letter from King George III proposing free trade and the establishment of reciprocal resident embassies in Beijing and London, the Chinese boat that carried him from Guangzhou to Beijing was festooned with a banner that identified him as “The English ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China.” He was dismissed with a letter to the King of England explaining that no ambassador could be permitted to reside in Beijing because “Europe consists of many other nations besides your own: if each and all demanded to be represented at our Court, how could we possibly consent? The thing is utterly impracticable.” The Emperor saw no need for trade beyond what was already occurring in limited, tightly regulated amounts, because Britain had no goods China desired:
Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfil the duties of the State; strange and costly objects do not interest me. If I have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit which prompted you to dispatch them from afar … As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things.
After the defeat of Napoleon, as its mercantile expansion gathered pace, Britain attempted another overture, dispatching a second envoy with a similar proposal. Britain’s display of naval power during the Napoleonic Wars had done little to change China’s estimate of the desirability of diplomatic relations. When William Amherst, the envoy, declined to attend the kowtow ceremony, offering the excuse that his dress uniform had been delayed, his mission was dismissed, and any further attempt at diplomacy was explicitly discouraged. The Emperor dispatched a message to England’s Prince Regent, explaining that as “overlord of all under Heaven,” China could not be troubled to walk each barbarian envoy through the correct protocol. The imperial records would duly acknowledge that “thy kingdom far away across the oceans proffers its loyalty and yearns for civilization,” but (as a nineteenth-century Western missionary publication translated the edict):
henceforward no more envoys need be sent over this distant route, as the result is but a vain waste of travelling energy. If thou canst but incline thine heart to submissive service, thou mayest dispense with sending missions to court at certain periods; that is the true way to turn toward civilization. That thou mayest for ever obey We now issue this mandate.
Though such admonitions seem presumptuous by today’s standards—and were deeply offensive to the country that had just maintained the European equilibrium and could count itself Europe’s most advanced naval, economic, and industrial power—the Emperor was expressing himself in a manner consistent with the ideas about his place in the world that had prevailed for millennia, and that many neighboring peoples had been induced to at least indulge.
The Western powers, to their shame, eventually brought matters to a head over the issue of free trade in the most self-evidently harmful product they sold, insisting on the right to the unrestricted importation of—from all the fruits of Western progress—opium. China in the late Qing Dynasty had neglected its military technology partly because it had been unchallenged for so long but largely because of the low status of the military in China’s Confucian social hierarchy, expressed in the saying “Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers.” Even when under assault by Western forces, the Qing Dynasty diverted military funds in 1893 to restore a resplendent marble boat in the imperial Summer Palace.
Temporarily overwhelmed by military pressure in 1842, China signed treaties conceding Western demands. But it did not abandon its sense of uniqueness and fought a tenacious rearguard action. After scoring a decisive victory in an 1856–58 war (fought over an alleged improper impoundment of a British-registered ship in Guangzhou), Britain insisted on a treaty enshrining its long-sought right to station a resident minister in Beijing. Arriving the next year to take up his post with a triumphal retinue, the British envoy found the main river route to the capital blocked with chains and spikes. When he ordered a contingent of British marines to clear the obstacles, Chinese forces opened fire; 519 British troops died and another 456 were wounded in the ensuing battle. Britain then dispatched a military force under Lord Elgin that stormed Beijing and burned the Summer Palace as the Qing court fled. This brutal intervention compelled the ruling dynasty’s grudging acceptance of a “legation quarter” to house the diplomatic representatives. China’s acquiescence in the concept of reciprocal diplomacy within a Westphalian system of sovereign states was reluctant and resentful.
At the heart of these disputes was a larger question: Was China a world order entire unto itself or a state like others that was part of a wider international system? China clung to the traditional premise. As late as 1863, after two military defeats by “barbarian” powers and a massive domestic uprising (the Taiping Rebellion) quelled only by calling in foreign troops, the Emperor dispatched a letter to Abraham Lincoln assuring him of China’s benign favor: “Having, with reverence, received the commission from Heaven to rule the universe, we regard both the middle empire [China] and the outside countries as constituting one family, without any distinction.”
In 1872, the eminent Scottish Sinologist James Legge phrased the issue pointedly and with his era’s characteristic confidence in the self-evident superiority of the Western concept of world order:
During the past forty years her [China’s] position with regard to the more advanced nations of the world has been entirely changed. She has entered into treaties with them upon equal terms; but I do not think her ministers and people have yet looked this truth fairly in the face, so as to realize the fact that China is only one of many independent nations in the world, and that the “beneath the sky,” over which her emperor has rule, is not all beneath the sky, but only a certain portion of it which is defined on the earth’s surface and can be pointed out upon the map.
With technology and trade impelling contradictory systems into closer contact, which world order’s norms would prevail?
In Europe, the Westphalian system was an outgrowth of a plethora of de facto independent states at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Asia entered the modern era without such a distinct apparatus of national and international organization. It possessed several civilizational centers surrounded by smaller kingdoms, with a subtle and shifting set of mechanisms for interactions between them.
The rich fertility of China’s plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia period and to exercise considerable political, economic, and cultural influence—even when it was militarily weak by conventional standards. Its comparative advantage resided in the wealth of its economy, which produced goods that all of its neighbors desired. Shaped by these elements, the Chinese idea of world order differed markedly from the European experience based on a multiplicity of co-equal states.
The drama of China’s encounter with the developed West and Japan was the impact of great powers, organized as expansionist states, on a civilization that initially saw the trappings of modern statehood as an abasement. The “rise” of China to eminence in the twenty-first century is not new, but reestablishes historic patterns. What is distinctive is that China has returned as both the inheritor of an ancient civilization and as a contemporary great power on the Westphalian model. It combines the legacies of “All Under Heaven,” technocratic modernization, and an unusually turbulent twentieth-century national quest for a synthesis between the two.
CHINA AND WORLD ORDER
The imperial dynasty collapsed in 1911, and the foundation of a Chinese republic under Sun Yat-sen in 1912 left China with a weak central government and ushered in a decade of warlordism. A stronger central government under Chiang Kai-shek emerged in 1928 and sought to enable China to assume a place in the Westphalian concept of world order and in the global economic system. Seeking to be both modern and traditionally Chinese, it attempted to fit into an international system that was itself in upheaval. Yet at that point, Japan, which had launched its modernization drive half a century earlier, began a bid for Asian hegemony. The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 was followed by Japan’s invasion of large stretches of central and eastern China in 1937. The Nationalist government was prevented from consolidating its position, and the Communist insurgency was given breathing space. Though emerging as one of the victorious Allied powers with the end of World War II in 1945, China was torn apart by civil war and revolutionary turmoil that challenged all relationships and legacies.
On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, the victorious Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China with the words “The Chinese people have stood up.” Mao elaborated this slogan as a China purifying and strengthening itself through a doctrine of “continuous revolution” and proceeded to dismantle established concepts of domestic and international order. The entire institutional spectrum came under attack: Western democracy, Soviet leadership of the Communist world, and the legacy of the Chinese past. Art and monuments, holidays and traditions, vocabulary and dress, fell under various forms of interdict—blamed for bringing about the passivity that had rendered China unprepared in the face of foreign intrusions. In Mao’s concept of order—which he called the “great harmony,” echoing classical Chinese philosophy—a new China would emerge out of the destruction of traditional Confucian culture emphasizing harmony. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, would serve as a precursor to the next. The process of revolution must be ever accelerated, Mao held, lest the revolutionaries become complacent and indolent. “Disequilibrium is a general, objective rule,” wrote Mao:
The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative.
In the end, this upheaval was designed to produce a kind of traditional Chinese outcome: a form of Communism intrinsic to China, setting itself apart by a distinctive form of conduct that swayed by its achievements, with China’s unique and now revolutionary moral authority again swaying “All Under Heaven.”
Mao conducted international affairs by the same reliance on the unique nature of China. Though China was objectively weak by the way the rest of the world measured strength, Mao insisted on its central role via psychological and ideological superiority, to be demonstrated by defying rather than conciliating a world emphasizing superior physical power. When speaking in Moscow to an international conference of Communist Party leaders in 1957, Mao shocked fellow delegates by predicting that in the event of nuclear war China’s more numerous population and hardier culture would be the ultimate victor, and that even casualties of hundreds of millions would not deflect China from its revolutionary course. While this might have been partly bluff to discourage countries with vastly superior nuclear arsenals, Mao wanted the world to believe that he contemplated nuclear war with equanimity. In July 1971—during my secret visit to Beijing—Zhou Enlai summed up Mao’s conception of world order by invoking the Chairman’s claimed purview of Chinese emperors with a sardonic twist: “All under heaven is in chaos, the situation is excellent.” From a world of chaos, the People’s Republic, hardened by years of struggle, would ultimately emerge triumphant not just in China but everywhere “under heaven.” The Communist world order would merge with the traditional view of the Imperial Court.
Like the founder of China’s first all-powerful dynasty (221–207 B.C.), the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Mao sought to unify China while also striving to destroy the ancient culture that he blamed for China’s weakness and humiliation. He governed in a style as remote as that of any Emperor (though the emperors would not have convened mass rallies), and he combined it with the practices of Lenin and Stalin. Mao’s rule embodied the revolutionary’s dilemma. The more sweeping the changes the revolutionary seeks to bring about, the more he encounters resistance, not necessarily from ideological and political opponents but from the inertia of the familiar. The revolutionary prophet is ever tempted to defy his mortality by speeding up his timetable and multiplying the means of enforcing his vision. Mao launched his disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 to compel breakneck industrialization and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge the ruling group to prevent its institutionalization in a decade-long ideological campaign that exiled a generation of educated youth to the countryside. Tens of millions died in pursuit of Mao’s goals—most eliminated without love or hatred, mobilized to foreshorten into one lifetime what had heretofore been considered a historical process.
Revolutionaries prevail when their achievements come to be taken for granted and the price paid for them is treated as inevitable. Some of China’s contemporary leaders suffered grievously during the Cultural Revolution, but they now present that suffering as having given them the strength and self-discovery to steel themselves for the daunting tasks of leading another period of vast transformation. And the Chinese public, especially those too young to have experienced the travail directly, seems to accept the depiction of Mao as primarily a unifier on behalf of Chinese dignity. Which aspect of this legacy prevails—the taunting Maoist challenge to the world or the quiet resolve gained through weathering Mao’s upheavals—will do much to determine China’s relationship with twenty-first-century world order.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, China by its own choice had only four ambassadors around the world and was in confrontation with both nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1960s, Mao recognized that the Cultural Revolution had exhausted even the Chinese people’s millennially tested capacity for endurance and that China’s isolation might tempt the foreign interventions he had sought to overcome by ideological rigor and defiance. In 1969, the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of attacking China to a point that caused Mao to disperse all ministries to the provinces, with only Premier Zhou Enlai remaining in Beijing. To this crisis, Mao reacted with a characteristically unexpected reversal of direction. He ended the most anarchical aspects of the Cultural Revolution by using the armed forces to put an end to the Red Guards, who had been his shock troops—sending them to the countryside, where they joined their erstwhile victims at, in effect, forced labor. And he strove to checkmate the Soviet Union by moving toward the heretofore-vilified adversary: the United States.
Mao calculated that the opening with the United States would end China’s isolation and provide other countries that were holding back with a justification for recognizing the People’s Republic of China. (Interestingly, a CIA analysis, written as I was preparing for my first trip, held that Sino-Soviet tensions were so great as to make a U.S.-China rapprochement possible but that Mao’s ideological fervor would prevent it in his lifetime.)
Revolutions, no matter how sweeping, need to be consolidated and, in the end, adapted from a moment of exaltation to what is sustainable over a period of time. That was the historic role played by Deng Xiaoping. Although he had been twice purged by Mao, he became the effective ruler two years after Mao’s death in 1976. He quickly undertook to reform the economy and open up the society. Pursuing what he defined as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he liberated the latent energies of the Chinese people. Within less than a generation, China advanced to become the second-largest economy in the world. To speed up this dramatic transformation—if not necessarily by conviction—China entered international institutions and accepted the established rules of world order.
Yet China’s participation in aspects of the Westphalian structure carried with it an ambivalence born of the history that brought it to enter into the international state system. China has not forgotten that it was originally forced to engage with the existing international order in a manner utterly at odds with its historical image of itself or, for that matter, with the avowed principles of the Westphalian system. When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese—including senior leaders—has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system. They are asked—and, as a matter of prudence, have agreed—to adhere to rules they had had no part in making. But they expect—and sooner or later will act on this expectation—the international order to evolve in a way that enables China to become centrally involved in further international rule making, even to the point of revising some of the rules that prevail.
While waiting for this to transpire, Beijing has become much more active on the world scene. With China’s emergence as potentially the world’s largest economy, its views and support are now sought in every international forum. China has participated in many of the prestige aspects of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western orders: hosting the Olympics; addresses by its presidents before the United Nations; reciprocal visits with heads of state and governments from leading countries around the world. By any standard, China has regained the stature by which it was known in the centuries of its most far-reaching influence. The question now is how it will relate to the contemporary search for world order, particularly in its relations with the United States.
THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA are both indispensable pillars of world order. Remarkably, both have historically exhibited an ambivalent attitude toward the international system they now anchor, affirming their commitment to it even as they reserve judgment on aspects of its design. China has no precedent for the role it is asked to play in twenty-first-century order, as one major state among others. Nor does the United States have experience interacting on a sustained basis with a country of comparable size, reach, and economic performance embracing a distinctly different model of domestic order.
The cultural and political backgrounds of the two sides diverge in important aspects. The American approach to policy is pragmatic; China’s is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change. Americans outline an agenda of practical “deliverable” items; Chinese set out general principles and analyze where they will lead. Chinese thinking is shaped in part by Communism but embraces a traditionally Chinese way of thought to an increasing extent; neither is intuitively familiar to Americans.
China and the United States have, in their histories, only recently fully participated in an international system of sovereign states. China has believed that it was unique and largely contained within its own reality. America also considers itself unique—that is, “exceptional”—but with a moral obligation to support its values around the world for reasons beyond raison d’état. Two great societies of different cultures and different premises are both undergoing fundamental domestic adjustments; whether this translates into rivalry or into a new form of partnership will importantly shape prospects for twenty-first-century world order.
China is now governed by the fifth generation of leaders since the revolution. Each previous leader distilled his generation’s particular vision of China’s needs. Mao Zedong was determined to uproot established institutions, even those he had built in the original phase of his victory, lest they stagnate under China’s bureaucratic propensities. Deng Xiaoping understood that China could not maintain its historic role unless it became internationally engaged. Deng’s style was sharply focused: not to boast—lest foreign countries become disquieted—not to claim to lead but to extend China’s influence by modernizing both the society and the economy. On that basis, starting in 1989, Jiang Zemin, appointed during the Tiananmen Square crisis, overcame its aftermath with his personal diplomacy internationally and by broadening the base of the Communist Party domestically. He led the PRC into the international state and trading system as a full member. Hu Jintao, selected by Deng, skillfully assuaged concerns about China’s growing power and laid the basis for the concept of the new type of major-power relationship enunciated by Xi Jinping.
The Xi Jinping leadership has sought to build on these legacies by undertaking a massive reform program of the Deng scale. It has projected a system that, while eschewing democracy, would be made more transparent and in which outcomes would be determined more by legal procedures than by the established pattern of personal and family relationships. It has announced challenges to many established institutions and practices—state-run enterprises, fiefdoms of regional officials, and large-scale corruption—in a manner that combines vision with courage but is certain to bring in its train a period of flux and some uncertainty.
The composition of the Chinese leadership reflects China’s evolution toward participating in—and even shaping—global affairs. In 1982, not a single member of the Politburo had a college degree. At this writing, almost all of them are college educated, and a significant number have advanced degrees. A college degree in China is based on a Western-style curriculum, not a legacy of the old mandarin system (or the subsequent Communist Party curriculum, which imposed its own form of intellectual inbreeding). This represents a sharp break with China’s past, when the Chinese were intensely and proudly parochial in their perception of the world outside their immediate sphere. Contemporary Chinese leaders are influenced by their knowledge of China’s history but are not captured by it.
A LONGER PERSPECTIVE
Potential tensions between an established and a rising power are not new. Inevitably, the rising power impinges on some spheres heretofore treated as the exclusive preserve of the established power. By the same token, the rising power suspects that its rival may seek to quash its growth before it is too late. A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.
It is therefore not surprising that significant strategic thinkers on both sides invoke patterns of behavior and historical experience to predict the inevitability of conflict between the two societies. On the Chinese side, many American actions are interpreted as a design to thwart China’s rise, and the American promotion of human rights is seen as a project to undermine China’s domestic political structure. Some major figures describe America’s so-called pivot policy as the forerunner of an ultimate showdown designed to keep China permanently in a secondary position—an attitude all the more remarkable because it has not involved any significant military redeployments at this writing.
On the American side, the fear is that a growing China will systematically undermine American preeminence and thus American security. Significant groups view China, by analogy to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, as determined to achieve military as well as economic dominance in all surrounding regions and hence, ultimately, hegemony.
Both sides are reinforced in their suspicions by the military maneuvers and defense programs of the other. Even when they are “normal”—that is, composed of measures a country would reasonably take in defense of national interest as it is generally understood—they are interpreted in terms of worst-case scenarios. Each side has a responsibility for taking care lest its unilateral deployments and conduct escalate into an arms race.
The two sides need to absorb the history of the decade before World War I, when the gradual emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and latent confrontation escalated into catastrophe. The leaders of Europe trapped themselves by their military planning and inability to separate the tactical from the strategic.
Two other issues are contributing to tension in Sino-American relations. China rejects the proposition that international order is fostered by the spread of liberal democracy and that the international community has an obligation to bring this about, and especially to achieve its perception of human rights by international action. The United States may be able to adjust the application of its views on human rights in relation to strategic priorities. But in light of its history and the convictions of its people, America can never abandon these principles altogether. On the Chinese side, the dominant elite view on this subject was expressed by Deng Xiaoping:
Actually, national sovereignty is far more important than human rights, but the Group of Seven (or Eight) often infringe upon the sovereignty of poor, weak countries of the Third World. Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is designed only to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony and practice power politics.
No formal compromise is possible between these views; to keep the disagreement from spiraling into conflict is one of the principal obligations of the leaders of both sides.
A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: “We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.” North Korea is ruled under no accepted principle of legitimacy, not even its claimed Communist one. Its principal achievement has been to build a few nuclear devices. It has no military capability to engage in war with the United States. But the existence of these weapons has a political impact far exceeding their military utility. They provide an incentive for Japan and South Korea to create a nuclear military capability. They embolden Pyongyang into risk-taking disproportionate to its capabilities, raising the danger of another war on the Korean Peninsula.
For China, North Korea embodies complex legacies. In many Chinese eyes, the Korean War is seen as a symbol of China’s determination to end its “century of humiliation” and “stand up” on the world stage, but also as a warning against becoming involved in wars whose origins China does not control and whose repercussions may have serious long-range, unintended consequences. This is why China and the United States have taken parallel positions in the UN Security Council in demanding that North Korea abandon—not curtail—its nuclear program.
For the Pyongyang regime, abandoning nuclear weapons may well involve political disintegration. But abandonment is precisely what the United States and China have publicly demanded in the UN resolutions that they have fostered. The two countries need to coordinate their policies for the contingency that their stated objectives are realized. Will it be possible to merge the concerns and goals of the two sides over Korea? Are China and the United States able to work out a collaborative strategy for a denuclearized, unified Korea that leaves all parties more secure and more free? It would be a big step toward the “new type of great-power relations” so often invoked and so slow in emerging.
China’s new leaders will recognize that the reaction of the Chinese population to their vast agenda cannot be known; they are sailing into uncharted waters. They cannot want to seek foreign adventures, but they will resist intrusions on what they define as their core interests with perhaps greater insistence than their predecessors, precisely because they feel obliged to explain the adjustments inseparable from reform by a reinforced emphasis on the national interest. Any international order comprising both the United States and China must involve a balance of power, but the traditional management of the balance needs to be mitigated by agreement on norms and reinforced by elements of cooperation.
The leaders of China and the United States have publicly recognized the two countries’ common interest in charting a constructive outcome. Two American presidents (Barack Obama and George W. Bush) have agreed with their Chinese counterparts (Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao) to create a strategic partnership in the Pacific region, which is a way to preserve a balance of power while reducing the military threat inherent in it. So far the proclamations of intent have not been matched by specific steps in the agreed direction.
Partnership cannot be achieved by proclamation. No agreement can guarantee a specific international status for the United States. If the United States comes to be perceived as a declining power—a matter of choice, not destiny—China and other countries will succeed to much of the world leadership that America exercised for most of the period following World War II, after an interlude of turmoil and upheaval.
Many Chinese may see the United States as a superpower past its peak. Yet among China’s leadership, there is also a demonstrated recognition that the United States will sustain a significant leadership capacity for the foreseeable future. The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.
In East Asia, the United States is not so much a balancer as an integral part of the balance. Previous chapters have shown the precariousness of the balance when the number of players is small and a shift of allegiance can become decisive. A purely military approach to the East Asian balance is likely to lead to alignments even more rigid than those that produced World War I.
In East Asia, something approaching a balance of power exists between China, Korea, Japan, and the United States, with Russia and Vietnam peripheral participants. But it differs from the historical balances of power in that one of the key participants, the United States, has its center of gravity located far from the geographic center of East Asia—and, above all, because the leaders of both countries whose military forces conceive themselves as adversaries in their military journals and pronouncements also proclaim partnership as a goal on political and economic issues. So it comes about that the United States is an ally of Japan and a proclaimed partner of China—a situation comparable to Bismarck’s when he made an alliance with Austria balanced by a treaty with Russia. Paradoxically, it was precisely that ambiguity which preserved the flexibility of the European equilibrium. And its abandonment—in the name of transparency—started a sequence of increasing confrontations, culminating in World War I.
For over a century—since the Open Door policy and Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation of the Russo-Japanese War—it has been a fixed American policy to prevent hegemony in Asia. Under contemporary conditions, it is an inevitable policy in China to keep potentially adversarial forces as far from its borders as possible. The two countries navigate in that space. The preservation of peace depends on the restraint with which they pursue their objectives and on their ability to ensure that competition remains political and diplomatic.
In the Cold War, the dividing lines were defined by military forces. In the contemporary period, the lines should not be defined primarily by military deployment. The military component should not be conceived as the only, or even the principal, definition of the equilibrium. Concepts of partnership need to become, paradoxically, elements of the modern balance of power, especially in Asia—an approach that, if implemented as an overarching principle, would be as unprecedented as it is important. The combination of balance-of-power strategy with partnership diplomacy will not be able to remove all adversarial aspects, but it can mitigate their impact. Above all, it can give Chinese and American leaders experiences in constructive cooperation, and convey to their two societies a way of building toward a more peaceful future.
Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. In Asia, it must combine a balance of power with a concept of partnership. A purely military definition of the balance will shade into confrontation. A purely psychological approach to partnership will raise fears of hegemony. Wise statesmanship must try to find that balance. For outside it, disaster beckons.