understanding that America’s Pacific Ocean strategy is not meant to contain China but rather to engage it in a larger web of cooperative relationships that indirectly will also help to shape the bilateral US-Chinese global partnership.
In that larger context of economic and political cooperation, three sensitive US-Chinese issues will have to be peacefully resolved, the first of them probably in the near future, the second in the course of the next several years, and the third within a decade or so, assuming continued constructive development of the bilateral American-Chinese relationship within wider Asian regional cooperation.
The first of these sensitive issues pertains to the American reconnaissance operations on the edges of Chinese territorial waters (six miles from shore) as well as periodic American naval patrols within international waters that also happen to be part of the Chinese economic zone. These activities understandably are provocative to the Chinese, and there is little doubt that the American public would be aroused if China was to reciprocate in kind. Moreover, the air reconnaissance poses serious risks of unintentional collisions, since the Chinese usually respond to such US air reconnaissance by sending up their fighter planes for up-close inspection and perhaps even harassment.
Some accommodation regarding the foregoing could be furthered by addressing on a more systematic basis the second increasingly contentious issue, namely the relationship between the military buildups undertaken by both states. The American defense budget and the scale of the American arms program are infinitely larger, in part because America is engaged currently in warfare and in part because of its global commitments. At this stage, China’s response is primarily regional, but it does directly affect American security concerns as well as America’s commitments to its Asian allies. A systematic effort by the two states, therefore, to reach some sort of agreement regarding longer-range military plans and measures of reciprocal reassurance is certainly a necessary component of any longer-term US-Chinese partnership as well as a source of reassurance to Japan and South Korea. The absence of any such accommodation will almost inevitably become an insurmountable obstacle, gradually not only undermining the existing cooperation but also potentially creating a serious arms race.
The third long-term geopolitical problem is ultimately the most difficult, but its resolution could be facilitated by progress in regard to the aforementioned first two. It pertains to the future status of Taiwan. The United States no longer recognizes Taiwan as a sovereign state and acknowledges the Chinese view that China and Taiwan are part of a single nation. A long-term US-Chinese accommodation at some point will have to address the fact that a separate Taiwan cannot be protected by American arms sales without provoking Chinese enmity, and that a Chinese-type resolution along the lines of Deng Xiaoping’s longstanding formula of “one China, two systems,” provides an elastic formula for both unification and yet distinct political, social, and even separate military arrangements. (Hence it should be redefined as “one China, several systems.”)
The “one China, two systems” formula, in its narrower form, has been tested in Hong Kong since the extension of Chinese sovereignty to that former British colony. Its internal autonomy, including democracy, has proven viable even though the PLA (the Chinese army) has been deployed there. And given China’s growing status, it is doubtful that Taiwan can reject indefinitely its inclusion in China on the basis of a more flexible interpretation of the “one China, several systems” formula, therefore not including a PLA presence on the island. Obviously, the willingness of China and America to reach an accommodation on this politically and morally sensitive issue will depend on the nature of the overall relationship between the two countries. The resolution of the first two issues would eliminate the most likely sources of geopolitical hostility in the near term. In the longer run, failure to address the third one could produce a truly serious rupture in the relationship, especially since the United States conceded already under President Nixon its acceptance of the principle shared by both China and Taiwan that there is only one China.
Ultimately, as noted earlier, a great deal will depend also on the internal condition of both countries. An America that renews its infrastructure, that reenergizes its technological innovation, that regains its sense of historical optimism, and that overcomes its paralyzing political gridlock will be an America that can more confidently adjust to, and cope with, a rising China. Such an America will be likely to have a clearer, less Manichean view of the world, and thus would be better able to face a world in which its political preeminence has to be in some degree shared.
Likewise, much depends on how China continues to evolve. Its last two hundred years have been turbulent and disruptive. Its contemporary stability and progress are only thirty years old. Its nineteenth century was one of disruption, decay, and violent foreign military interventions as well as humiliating foreign “concessions.” Its twentieth century was one of almost continuous strife in the context of national awakening. Sun Yat-sen and later Chiang Kai-shek were China’s failed equivalents of Turkey’s successful Ataturk. Mao Zedong was a self-destructive equivalent of Russia’s equally brutal Stalin. Only Deng Xiaoping accomplished what Gorbachev failed to do in the Soviet Union: to set China on a so-far-successful course of domestic transformation by tapping simultaneously the personal aspirations of the Chinese people as well as their aroused national ambitions.
Assuming continued domestic success, it is unlikely that China will experience in the relatively near future— say by 2030—what many in the West hope: the emergence of a middle-class-based constitutional democracy of the American-European variety. (Note that it took Taiwan approximately sixty years to evolve—with sympathetic and influential US encouragement—from authoritarianism to constitutional democracy.) Retaining national unity in the context of modernity—increasing access to the outside world, expanding interactions via the Internet, and rising but unequal standards of living—is thus more likely to involve two basic alternatives, but with neither being an imitation of a multiparty Western-type pluralist democracy. The dangerous one has already been discussed: a modernizing China that is assertive, impatient, triumphalist, and aggressively nationalistic in which the PLA is the source of authority and action. Such a China would endanger not only the outside world, but also itself.
A less internationally troubling alternative to a nationalistic China motivated by twentieth-century European-style chauvinism could be the emergence of what might be called a Confucian China with modern characteristics. China’s political culture has deep roots, and it is suffused with its own distinctive philosophical concepts of life, of hierarchy, and of authority. The notion of domestic “harmony,” in which unity asserted by an authoritarian framework is said to originate from a generalized philosophical consensus, in which leadership emerges through meritocratic selection but not open political contestation, and in which policy is derived from “facts” but is not dogmatized is deeply rooted in China’s long past. It is noteworthy that Deng Xiaoping repeatedly cited the phrase “seek truth from facts,” pointedly echoing Confucius.
China’s leadership is also profoundly conscious of the “fact” that its vast numbers of increasingly elderly citizens will be imposing greater strains on social cohesion—thus threatening the Confucian notion of “harmony.” (President Jiang Zemin was once asked by this author what his main domestic problem was, and he instantly replied with just three words: “Too many Chinese.”) Chinese officials have also publicly acknowledged the growing risks inherent in their country’s increasingly evident social disparities and in the persisting reality of hundreds of millions of Chinese still not benefiting from China’s ongoing transformation. That, too, makes coping with these domestic risks to internal “harmony” more important than projecting a universal doctrine.
In any case, the notion of harmony is the message that China is increasingly and deliberately attempting to convey about itself to the world at large. Ruled by an officialdom that calls itself the Communist Party, China in its global outreach does not identify itself with the class struggle nor with an eventual world revolution (on the Soviet mode) but relates itself more to its Confucian past and its Buddhist roots. Symptomatically, China’s main vehicle for an international dialogue about itself are the several hundred Confucius Institutes actively being established around the world, modeled on the French Alliance Francaise and the UK’s British Councils. In addition to acquainting outsiders with Confucius’ teachings, China’s Buddhist heritage (shared with its neighbors) is now also publicly acknowledged. That message, as a practical matter, does not offer much guidance regarding China’s global intentions and strategy. But its emphasis on “peaceful rising” and global harmony does allow at least for a dialogue and for China’s comprehensive integration into the international system.
In that setting and in the longer run, it is doubtful that China could make itself permanently impermeable to pressures from an increasingly interdependent and interconnected world from which it could perhaps only isolate itself at great cost. The cumulative consequences of the emergence of an internationally aware middle class, the countless Chinese who will have studied abroad, the inevitably growing appeal to millions of university students of democracy as a way of life as well as the expression of their personal dignity, the sheer inability in the age of interactive communications of even a determined political elite to impose on society airtight ideological isolation, all argue for the proposition that an eventually modern and more prosperous China, too, will become more inclined to join the democratic mainstream.
