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美國高估了自己 對中國如意算盤落空
來源：加國無憂 2018年2月19日 美國之音
http://info.51.ca/news/world/2018-02/624410.html
奧巴馬政府時期兩名主管亞太事務的高級官員在美國最新一期的《外交事務》雜誌上撰文感慨，自二戰結束以來，美國曆屆政府的對華政策都失敗了。美國一直以為可以憑借自己的努力（接觸和威懾）來影響中國的進程，但是，無論美國是掄起“大棒”，還是拿出“胡蘿卜”， 美國都無法影響中國的發展軌跡。
美國過高估計了自己改變中國進程的能力
奧巴馬政府時期負責東亞和太平洋事務的前助理國務卿科特·坎貝爾（Kurt Campbell）和曾經擔任美國前副總統拜登副國家安全顧問的厄利·拉特納（Ely Ratner）在今年3/4月出版的外交事務雜誌上說，美國一直期望能夠決定中國的進程，但是總是過高估計了自己的能力。
兩人寫道，二戰後，美國派特使喬治·馬歇爾（George Marshall）前往中國斡旋，期望共產黨和國民黨達成和平協議；韓戰期間，杜魯門政府期待阻止毛澤東的軍隊跨過鴨綠江；越南戰爭期間，約翰遜政府相信中國會限製在越南的參與，但是，上述種種期待都落空了。
兩位作者又說，尼克鬆政府對中國下注了最大的和最樂觀的賭注。尼克鬆和他的國家安全顧問基辛格認為，與中國友好，可以在中國和前蘇聯之間插入楔子，同時讓中國更親近美國。總之，美國人認為，憑借美國的實力和霸權，美國可以把中國塑造成為一個讓美國喜歡的國家。但是，他們指出，自尼克鬆邁出與中國建立友好關係的第一步後，越來越多的記錄清楚地顯示，華盛頓再次對自己可以影響中國進程的能力太自信了。
坎貝爾和拉特納說，無論美國祭出“大棒”還是“胡蘿卜”，都沒有像預期地那樣改變中國。外交和經濟接觸並沒有帶來中國政治和經濟上的開放；美國的軍事力量和區域製衡也沒有能夠阻止中國試圖改變美國領導的體係的核心努力；自由的國際體係並沒有像預期的那樣可以誘惑或是製約中國。中國在追求自己的發展道路，而這個進程中，美國的一係列期待落空。
兩位作者警告說，這樣的現實應該足以讓美國擦亮眼睛，重新審視美國的對華政策。雖然做出這樣的改變可能會給現在的雙邊關係帶來風險，但是，要想建立一個更強大的，更持續的對華措施，美國必須要誠實地審視美國曾經的預想為什麽會出錯。
市場力量並未能讓中國經濟進一步開放
坎貝爾和拉特納說，美國以為與中國進行更多的商業互動將會緩慢而且穩固地促進中國經濟自由化。他們說，自老布什政府時期之後的幾十年，正是這個理念，不但讓美國在1990年代給予中國最惠國待遇，在2001年支持中國加入世界貿易組織，在2006年與中國舉行高級別的經濟會談，在奧巴馬政府時期，還與中國商討雙邊投資協定。
但是，兩位作者指出，事與願違的是，21世紀初以來，中國經濟自由化發展似乎停滯，取而代之的是富裕後的中國進一步走向國家資本主義。持續的經濟發展非但沒有帶來經濟的開放，相反幫助中國共產黨進一步合法化他們的國家主導的經濟模式。
美國人相信債務、低效和經濟發展的進一步需求會促使中國做出進一步的經濟改革，但是，中國共產黨卻對經濟進一步控製。他們不僅鞏固了國有企業，而且還推出2025 中國製造的行業政策，在每個領域，包括太空、生物製藥和機器人方麵推出全國技術龍頭老大，而同時卻不讓在華的外國企業獲得公平的競爭平台。
坎貝爾和拉特納說，雖然美國現在意識到了這種歧視的存在，一些人仍然擔心如果采取保護和製裁措施會影響兩國關係，並影響可能的商業利益。 兩位作者認為，美國川普政府所做的隻是在蠅頭小利上錙銖必較。美國現在應該意識到與中國做生意經曆的不是短期的沮喪，現在看起來應該是越來越持久的傷害。
新技術的發展讓中國政府的控製之手得到加強
坎貝爾和拉特納在文章中寫道， 美國人相信經濟增長不僅會帶來經濟的進一步開放，也會促進政治的進一步自由化。 美國因此希望通過分享技術，加強投資和貿易、增加民間交流，並接納更多的中國留學生來完成這個進程。但是，他們指出，在中國，交流技術的發展隻是加強了政府的控製之手。
兩位作者寫道，雖然1989年的六四天安門事件讓世界對中國采納選舉民主的希望一點點黯淡，但是，仍然有人相信中國政府會允許一個更強的公民社會，允許更大的媒體自由的存在，但是，由於擔心更大的開放會威脅國內穩定以及中國共產黨政權的存亡，中國共產黨采取了不同的措施。
為了抵製全球化的影響，政府加強了對民眾的控製和限製。信息科技的發展沒有讓民眾更加有力量，反而淪為政府對民眾的監控工具，使得政府更有能力控製信息和監控民眾的行為。
中國不僅在抵製西方的價值觀，中國還逮捕宗教領導人、學術領導人、社會活動分子以及人權律師。
中國設立網絡“防火牆”阻止政治活動，建立“社會信用體係”，根據民眾的社會、商業、社會以及網絡活動，利用大數據和人工智能技術來懲罰公民，中國的人臉識別軟件以及無處不在的監控讓公民幾乎無處躲藏。
美國亞太的軍事威懾力促使中國加快軍事改革
坎貝爾和拉特納說，美國人認為，美國在亞太的外交和軍事力量足以讓北京認識到北京既沒有可能也沒有必須挑戰美國在亞洲領導的安全體係。除此之外，美國也一直很小心，不與中國陷入對抗，但是兩位作者說，對北京來說，美國在亞洲的盟友和軍事存在對中國的利益構成他們不能接受的威脅。
北京認為，美國在亞洲的盟友和軍事存在對中國在台灣、朝鮮半島、東中國海和南中國海的利益都不利。兩人援引中國學者王輯思的話說，中國人強烈的相信，華盛頓試圖阻止崛起的國家，特別是中國，完成自己的目標並提高自己的地位。
兩位作者指出，中國開始在一點一點地削弱美國在亞洲領導的安全體係。中國不僅發展出可以拒阻美國軍隊進入該地區的能力，並企圖分裂美國及其盟友的關係。
坎貝爾和拉特納說，美國的力量以及外交接觸沒有能夠說服中國放棄打造自己的世界級軍隊。美國在伊拉克和其他地方展示力量隻能促使中國加快軍事現代化的進程。中國國家主席習近平已經在著手進行軍事改革，而這項改革將讓中國軍隊更有打擊力，也能在中國國土之外的地方投射力量。
他們說，中國正在建造的第三艘航空母艦、中國在南中國海的軍事部署以及中國在吉布提的軍事基地，無不顯示中國越來越成為與美國一樣強大的軍事力量，而這是前蘇聯垮台以來沒有看到的。
他們還說，中國領導人不再堅守中國前領導人鄧小平的教誨“韜光養晦”，而是強調中國站起來、富起來和強起來了。
北京試圖建立自己的區域和國際秩序
坎貝爾和拉特納說，中國是美國建立的二戰後的秩序的主要獲益者之一，因此，美國人相信，中國應該覺得維護現有秩序，使其繼續發展與中國自己的進步休戚相關。
坎貝爾和拉特納說，在一定領域，中國也確實努力在維護這個秩序。比如，中國加入亞太經合組織，中國簽署核不擴散條約，並在2001年加入世界貿易組織，也並參與伊朗和朝鮮核項目的斡旋，而且中國也成為聯合國反海盜和維和行動的主要貢獻國。
但是，兩人指出，中國還是感覺到了美國領導的體係的威脅，中國在一步步建立自己的體係來取代它。中國建立了亞洲基礎設施銀行、新發展銀行並提出了“一帶一路”的發展計劃。這些機構和項目讓中國可以設定自己的議程，並汲取自己的力量。中國的這些機構和項目與現行體係的標準和價值不同，比如，中國明確表示，不像美國和歐洲，中國不要求受援國必須進行管理改革等。
他們還說，中國在一步一步改變亞洲的安全平衡。中國采取很小的措施，不至於引發美國做出軍事回應。 中國公然拒絕接受聯合國仲裁法庭對有關南中國海案的裁決，亞洲國家因為對中國經濟的依賴，再加上對美國能否致力於亞洲心存疑問，對中國在南中國海的問題上沒有做出有力的回應。
中國謀求取代美國的地位
坎貝爾和拉特納說，在中國謀求上述種種的同時，美國卻被反恐活動以及中東的其他問題所牽製。
由於2008年的金融危機、伊拉克和阿富汗戰事以及華盛頓政局的混亂，中國認為美國的衰落勢在必行，中國領導人習近平呼籲中國在2050年時在綜合國力和國際影響力方麵成為世界領導國，他還表示，中國的發展模式為其他國家提供了新的選擇。
兩位作者因此得出結論，華盛頓現在麵臨著現代史上最有力和最可怕的競爭者。要接受這樣的挑戰，華盛頓首先要放棄對中國一廂情願的期待，接受以前對華戰略失敗的事實。第二，美國需要專注自己以及亞太盟友的發展。
他們說，川普政府新的國家安全戰略對美國以往的戰略進行了拷問，把中國定義為“戰略競爭者”，是朝正確方向邁出的一步，但是川普的政策--聚焦雙邊狹隘的貿易問題，放棄多邊貿易協定，質疑盟友體係的價值，並將人權和外交放在第二位，這樣的做法隻能是走向對抗而不是競爭，而相反，中國的做法是競爭而不是對抗。
美國仍然有力量製衡中國
美國重要智庫--外交關係協會的亞洲研究主任易明隨後撰文說，坎貝爾和拉特納這樣評價美國以往的對華政策，有失公允，這相當於把洗澡水和孩子甚至澡盆一起倒掉。
她認為，美國沒有能力控製中國的政治和經濟發展結果，就像美國沒有能力控製任何一個主權國家的政治結果。她舉例說，美國甚至無法影響自己的盟友菲律賓和泰國的發展，也無法影響小國古巴的政治進程。她說，美國能做的隻是創造機遇並適當控製一下，最終，一個主權國家決策者才能決定這個國家未來的走向。
她還說，中國也不是一直表現不佳。她說，美國可以繼續對中國產生積極影響。她指出，由於美國的壓力，中國在氣候變化、抗擊埃博拉病毒以及製裁朝鮮方麵做出了更多。1990年代中期以來，美國和中國非政府組織，政府之間的互動，中國在環境法、經濟法以及更大的社會政策方麵都做出了重要的改變。
她還指出，政治進程是一個長期的計劃，現在這個計劃還沒有結束。她說，中國的許多人：包括高級官員、億萬富翁、文化名人以及公民社會的積極分子在內，他們並沒有接受習近平的專製做法。而且，她說，隨著時間的推移，中國也會出現不同的領導人，而且這些人會有自己的政治意願。 她說，中國曾經出現過趙紫陽和胡耀邦，也許五年後有不同的領導人出現掌舵，這個人可能是李克強，也可能是汪洋。她說，美國不該忽略這樣的看法，不同的領導人會對內政和外交政策產生不同的影響。
她說，除了放棄對中國不切實際的想法以及加強美國自己的根本外，美國其實還可以製衡中國，比如向習近平施壓，讓他采取更多措施來應對全球的挑戰，或是讓他做出更多來維護他所說的他尊崇的全球化。另外，易明說，美國也可以通過自己的保護措施來抵禦中國的保護措施。更重要的時，美國需要進一步加強與盟友和夥伴的關係。
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.
