Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

The contrast between China ’s approach towards the United States and that of the Soviet Union ’s prior to 1989 could hardly be greater. The USSR saw the West as the enemy; China chose, after 1972, to befriend it. The Soviet Union opted for autarchy and isolation; China, after 1978, sought integration and interdependence. The USSR shunned, and was excluded from, membership of such post-war Western institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and GATT; in contrast, China waited patiently for fifteen years until it was finally admitted as a member of the WTO in 2001. The Soviet Union embarked on military confrontation and a zero-sum relationship with the United States; China pursued rapprochement and cooperation in an effort to create the most favourable conditions for its economic growth. The Soviet Union was obliged to engage in prohibitive levels of military expenditure; China steadily reduced the proportion of GDP spent on its military during the 1980s and 1990s, falling from an average of 6.35 per cent between 1950 and 1980 to 2.3 per cent in the 1980s and 1.4 per cent in the 1990s. [1151] [1151] David M. Lampton, ‘ China ’s Rise in Asia Need Not Be at America ’s Expense’, in Shambaugh, Power Shift , p. 314. The strategies of the two countries were, in short, based on diametrically opposed logics. [1152] [1152] Zheng Yongnian, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 150. The Chinese approach is well illustrated by Deng’s comment: ‘Observe developments soberly, maintain our position, meet challenges calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, remain free of ambition, never claim leadership.’ [1153] [1153] Quoted by Suisheng Zhao in A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 35-6. It goes without saying that the relationship between China and the United States during the reform period has been profoundly unequal. [1154] [1154] Steven I. Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations: Practicing Damage Control’, in Samuel S. Kim, ed., China and the World: Chinese Foreign Policy Faces the New Millennium , 4th edn (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 94-5. China needed the US to a far greater extent than the US needed China. The United States possessed the world’s largest market and was the gatekeeper to an international system the design and operation of which it was overwhelmingly responsible for. China was cast in the role of supplicant, or, as China expert Steven I. Levine puts it, the United States acted towards China ‘like a self-appointed Credentials Committee that had the power to accept, reject, or grant probationary membership in the international club to an applicant of uncertain respectability’. [1155] [1155] Ibid., p. 98. In the longer term, when China is far stronger, this rather demeaning experience might find expression — and payback — in the Chinese attitude towards the United States; it might be seen by them to have been another, albeit milder, expression of their long-running humiliation.

Compared with China ’s huge investment in its relationship with the United States, the American attitude towards China, so far at least, stands in striking contrast. Its relationship with China has been seen by the US as one of only many international relationships, and usually far from the most important. As a result, American attention towards China has been episodic, occasionally rising to near the top of the agenda, but for the most part confined to the middle tier. [1156] [1156] Ibid., p. 93. During the first Clinton administration, for example, China barely figured. [1157] [1157] Ibid., p. 97. Although George W. Bush made strong noises against China during his first presidential election campaign, describing it as a ‘strategic competitor’, China sank down the Washington pecking order after 9/11 and relations between the two rapidly returned to the status quo ante. [1158] [1158] Cheng and Zhang, ‘Patterns and Dynamics of China’s Strategic Behaviour’, p. 200; Mann, The China Fantasy , pp. 3, 84-8. In line with the differential investment by the two powers in their relationship, China ’s impressive knowledge of the United States is not reciprocated in Washington beyond a relatively small coterie. [1159] [1159] Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams , pp. 372-3. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the passing of the Cold War, the US was obliged to rethink the rationale for its relationship with China. [1160] [1160] Suisheng Zhao, ‘Chinese Foreign Policy’, in Zhao, Chinese Foreign Policy , p. 15. It was not difficult. With its embrace of the market and growing privatization, China was seen, not wrongly, as moving towards capitalism. Furthermore, given China ’s double-digit economic growth and its huge population, it was regarded as offering boundless opportunities for US business. [1161] [1161] Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations’, p. 95; Mann, The China Fantasy , pp. 1–2. China became a key element in the American hubris about globalization in the 1990s, an integral part of what was seen as a process of Westernization which would culminate in the inevitable worldwide victory of Western capitalism, with the rest of the world, including China, increasingly coming to resemble the United States. Many assumptions were wrapped up in this hubris, from the triumph of Western lifestyles and cultural habits to the belief that Western-style democracy was of universal and inevitable applicability. [1162] [1162] Ibid., pp. 11–12. George W. Bush declared in November 1999: ‘Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.’ [1163] [1163] George W. Bush, ‘A Distinctly American Internationalism’, speech at Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California, 19 November 1999. Or as Thomas Friedman wrote: ‘ China ’s going to have a free press. Globalization will drive it.’ [1164] [1164] Thomas I. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), p. 154. It was regarded as axiomatic, American author James Mann suggests, that, ‘the Chinese are inevitably becoming like us’. [1165] [1165] Mann, The China Fantasy , p. 12. This view, which is still widely held, burdens American policy towards China with exaggerated expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled. [1166] [1166] Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations’, p. 96. The idea of globalization which lay at its heart was profoundly flawed.

During the course of the 1990s, US policy towards China was assailed by a growing range of different interest groups, from the labour unions which, concerned about the huge increase in Chinese imports, criticized China ’s trade practices, to human rights groups that protested about the treatment of dissidents and the subjugation of Tibet. [1167] [1167] Ibid., pp. 96-7. While China policy remained a presidential rather than a congressional matter, it was relatively invulnerable to the critics’ complaints. However, it should not be assumed that the present American position towards China will inevitably be maintained into the indefinite future. Until the turn of the century, China impinged little on the conduct of American foreign policy, apart from in East Asia, and that was largely confined to the question of Taiwan. True, China’s exports to the United States — combined with the lack of competitiveness of the US’s own exports — had combined to produce a huge trade deficit between the two countries, but this was mitigated by China’s purchase of US Treasury bonds, which fuelled the American credit boom, and the benefit that American consumers enjoyed from the availability of ultra-cheap manufactured goods from China. But as China began to spread its wings at the beginning of the new century — its economy still growing at undiminished pace, the trade gap between the two countries constantly widening, the amount of Treasury bonds held by China forever on the increase, Chinese companies being urged to invest abroad, the state-sponsored quest for a sufficient and reliable supply of natural commodities drawing the country into Africa, Central Asia and Latin America, and its power and influence in East Asia expanding apace — it became increasingly clear that China no longer occupied the same niche as it had previously: across many continents and in many countries, the United States found itself confronted with a growing range of Chinese interests and, as a result, a steady growth in the sources of potential disagreement and conflict between the two countries. [1168] [1168] Robert Ross, ‘Engagement in US China Policy’, in Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross, eds, Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 179.