The American president says one thing, but the American military presence in East Asia implies another. During the first half of the twentieth century, China often found itself in a similar situation in relation to the Japanese, whose central government expressed a desire for peace while its military simultaneously launched armed attacks on Chinese territory. A distrust of public protestations of peace and the need to draw conclusions from concrete military acts are part of China’s heritage of international relations. They played a role in Chinese thinking during the Korean War, when differences between General MacArthur’s strategic decisions in Tokyo and President Truman’s statements in Washington contributed to China’s decision to intervene. In the same way, the discrepancies between the American military’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, on May 7, 1999, and the White House’s subsequent protestations that the attack by a B-2 bomber using precision- guided munitions was an accident based on an “outdated map” are particularly hard for the Chinese to overlook. Contemporary American actions in East Asia, as distinct from statements by Washington, help trigger these old memories in Beijing.
The Chinese were sufficiently alarmed by our self-appointed post–Cold War mission of maintaining stability wherever we declared it to be threatened that, according to Helmut Sonnenfeldt (an executive of the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., and a close associate of Henry Kissinger’s), they began studying George Kennan’s early reports from the Soviet Union. At the dawn of the Cold War, Kennan was the State Department’s foremost specialist on Russia. In a famous 1947 article in the magazine
U.S. policy toward China, whatever the disagreements about it within the government, is driven by a familiar global agenda aimed at preserving and enhancing a Washington-centered world based on our being the “lone superpower.” Whether it is called “globalization,” the “Washington consensus,” “soft power,” or the “indispensable nation,” it still comes down to an urge to hold on to an American-inspired, -financed, and -led world order. Whereas such hegemonism vis-a-vis Germany, Japan, Latin America, Russia, or the United Nations is only likely to result in imperial overstretch and the probable long-term decline of the United States, attempts to establish American hegemony over China hold out more explosive futures and are in any case doomed to failure.
As the histories of previous empires demonstrate, imperial overstretch can be a long-drawn-out process if all sides are careful to avoid confrontation (the Russian and Ottoman empires come to mind). But such hegemonic policies applied to China are likely to precipitate a crisis. China is the world’s most populous country and has recently achieved an economy that promises to provide it with commensurate wealth and power. It is also an old civilization, whose humbling by foreign imperialists over the past two centuries led to the most sweeping and complex of all the modern revolutions. Its leaders are still working out whether they should seek parity on a global stage as defined by Western conceptions of international relations or try to re-create an older Sinocentric world of tributary states that existed before the arrival of the European imperialists, or perhaps some amalgam of the two.
In any case, China owes no obeisance to the United States. From 1950 to 1953, at great cost to itself, it fought the American military to a stalemate in Korea. A new policy of containment toward China once again implies the possibility of war, just as it did during the Cold War vis-a-vis the former USSR. The balance of nuclear weapons prevented that war, but this may not work in the case of China, where great asymmetries in manpower between China and any single external power or alliance will always exist. China has the capacity to deter an American use of nuclear weapons by threatening retaliation against U.S. cities, and the United States could never mobilize a large enough army to defeat China in a land invasion. There is also a much firmer foundation for a Chinese government’s resistance to external threats in Chinese nationalism than there was at the time of the British, French, Russian, or Japanese depredations over the past 150 years. Many Americans do not evaluate Chinese nationalism correctly, thinking it is whipped up by Communist Party propaganda to suit its purposes. But like American nationalism after Pearl Harbor, it is actually rooted in concrete historical experiences of victimization, including Japan’s attempt to establish a protectorate over China in 1915, its creation of a puppet regime in Manchuria in 1931, and its invasion of the whole country in 1937. The Chinese pose no threat to the territory of the United States, but the Americans (and the Japanese) have done so in the past and conceivably still could directly threaten China. A war with China would almost certainly bankrupt the United States, radicalize China, and tear Japan apart.
Military containment of China is a particularly dangerous policy for Japan (as an American ally) to espouse, since its own emergence onto the world stage began a century ago with its invasion and defeat of China in 1895 and its seizure of the island of Taiwan, which it held as a Japanese colony until 1945. Moreover, because Japan’s devastation of China in the 1930s and 1940s was the crucial factor leading China into the civil war from which the Communist Party emerged victorious, politically aware Chinese remain acutely sensitive to any hint of revived Japanese militarism, just as Russians do to any hint of revived German militarism.
According to a Hong Kong wisecrack, China has just had a couple of bad centuries and is back. The question is whether the United States can adjust to the emergence of a new great power in Asia. Will it deal more effectively and less bloodily with China than, say, the former hegemon Great Britain did in the early twentieth century, when it failed to adjust to the emergence of new centers of power in Germany, Japan, and Russia? The current trend of events is not promising.
In 1949, in proclaiming the birth of the Chinese People’s Republic from atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking the square of the same name, Tiananmen, in Beijing, Mao Zedong announced that finally “China has stood up.” He was wrong. China had only risen to its knees. Of the two great objectives of the Chinese revolution—ending imperialistic interference in China’s domestic affairs and overcoming China’s economic weakness in relation to the developed world—the Chinese Communists proved able to deliver only on the first. The latter had to wait another forty years, until China finally discovered the secret of the enrichment of East Asia—Japanese-style, state-guided capitalism—and began to act on it. Its economy then started to grow at double-digit rates, threatening to alter the global distribution of power. Without question, the most important element in the current phase of Asia’s empowerment has been China’s belated discovery of the market and its consequent candidacy as the second great power in East Asia, perhaps as the superpower of the twenty- first century.
Ever since the industrial revolution, the cardinal source of friction in world politics has been the economic inequality it produced. This inequality allowed the first industrializers to use their new power to colonize or in other ways subjugate and exploit the nonindustrialized areas of the world. Nationalistically awakened elites among these subjugated peoples then sought in various ways to overcome their relative backwardness, to equalize relations with or achieve supremacy over their victimizers.
But how can peripheral societies, even when they achieve national independence, break out of their economic and political dependency? In the view of the prominent political scientist Andrew Janos, history offers examples of two grand strategies for dealing with this issue.3 The first was for dependent or “late-developing” countries to attempt through war and revolution to reconstruct their environments. This strategy required a militarization of society and the use of a mobilized people to attack and transform the environment. The execution of this strategy has taken the forms of aggression and conquest (Nazi Germany, Japan from 1931 to 1945), support for world revolution (Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia), fomenting “people’s wars” (China and Cuba), aggressive neutralism (India), and other projects aimed at altering an environment in which “advanced” countries exploit “developing” ones.
The second strategy has been, in Janos’s words, a “drive to imitate the technological innovations of the advanced countries.” This strategy has generally been internally oriented. It is best illustrated by Japan’s state-
