Abstract
Fifty years ago October 1, after driving Nationalist forces from the mainland to Taiwan, Mao Zedong stood atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) and proclaimed the People's Republic of China (prc). A few weeks earlier, on August 29, the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb. As Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang put it nearly four decades later, the founding of the prc “shook the world.” He could just as well have been speaking of both events.
The Soviet bomb and the Chinese revolution detonated fundamental policy changes in Washington over the next several months resulting in National Security Council (nsc) document 48, bringing containment to Asia and military aid to the French in Indochina, and nsc 68, the essential American blueprint for fighting the Cold War. To help build the American global position against communist expansion, it called for a trebling of defense expenditures.
In June 1950, the Korean War broke out, leading first to a war for containment in South Korea and then to a war for “a rollback” (in the language of nsc 81) in North Korea, followed by a bloody, disastrous Sino-American collision.
In the meantime, U.S. defense spending had quadrupled from $13.5 billion in June 1950 to $54 billion in December, and the United States had made commitments at home and abroad without historical precedent. It would eventually build a huge peacetime army and develop a national security state that quickly came to influence nearly all walks of American life.
Tiananmen Square, October 1, 1949: Mao Zedong proclaims the People's Republic of China.
Rather quickly, 1.5 million American troops were stationed in hundreds of bases in 35 countries and the United States had formal security arrangements with 43 nations. (A staggering statistic: by then, the United States was training and equipping military forces in 70 countries.)
Second-tier power
In 1949, the United States accounted for 50 percent of world industrial production and it had an unrivaled lead in every advanced technology. Soon it would spend more on defense than all of its potential rivals put together.
Today the U.S. share of world industrial production has declined–it accounts for 25 percent–but the United States retains a lead in just about every advanced technology. And it still spends more on defense than all of its conceivable enemies put together.
In 1949, China was among the poorest countries in the world, with minuscule force-projection capacity. Today it is growing rapidly, but it remains a poor country with two-thirds of its huge population still engaged in agriculture, much of it subsistence. Its per capita income after decades of development is less than 10 percent of Western levels and its living standards are lower than those in Iran or Iraq and Kosovo, before their recent wars.
A construction worker at Shanghai's new Pudong International Airport, due to open this month.
China ranks fortieth in the world in total spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (behind Brazil) and it spends only a little more on defense than Taiwan and South Korea put together. (They spend about $30 billion with China estimated at $25 to $40 billion.)
With Taiwan spending well over $20 billion in the 1990s to obtain the latest fighter jets and other means of air cover (including Patriot missiles and sophisticated early warning radar systems), China lacks the amphibious and air cover capability to successfully invade the island, although many U.S. right-wingers seem to expect such an invasion tomorrow, or perhaps the day after.
Fifty years after Mao's triumph, China still lacks anything resembling a global force-projection capacity. It has no blue-ocean navy and its antiquated air force has no air-refueling capability. Its 20 or so ICBMs capable of reaching America's west coast sit in silos without warheads or fuel. (In a crisis, the United States would be able to monitor the arming and fueling of each.)
Meanwhile, Japan spends $50 billion on defense and boasts high-tech fighter aircraft, missiles, and satellites that would require decades of expenditure for China to match. In short, China is still a modest military power, far more like its neighbors than like the United States or the former Soviet Union.
Containment or “enmeshment”
Fifty years ago, Dean Acheson's policy toward China was to recognize it as a means of bringing it into the world economy and making it dependent on the West. Acheson and his key aide, George Kennan, thought that Moscow could not really do much to rehabilitate and industrialize China. Sooner or later, China would have to turn to the West for help.
An Anglophile and an internationalist, Acheson wanted to work with Britain to keep China open, with the hope that this would split Beijing and Moscow and ultimately dissolve China's insurgent impulses in the solvent of free trade. The way to do that was to try to stay on the good side of Chinese anti-imperial nationalism and enmesh the country in the world economy.
The Korean War put this possibility off long enough that it was left to Richard Nixon, Acheson's Red-baiting antagonist in the 1950s, to fulfill it in the 1970s. But Nixon and subsequent presidents have only deepened the enmeshment strategy, abjuring the Realpolitik argument that a strong China threatened American interests.
Today the Soviet Union no longer exists and China has moved farther and faster toward economic integration with the American-shaped world economy than an observer could have imagined 20 years ago, let alone 50. China no longer has an alternative economic model and the Communist Party is fighting a losing battle against creeping freedom and openness.
Half a century ago, when Acheson and Kennan were shaping foreign policy, China was an abstraction to Americans, and it still is. Most Americans had no idea that Mao's revolution ended 150 years of decline, rebellion, and humiliation caused by the impact of Western imperialism, just as they do not know that today in “communist” China young people by the millions are hardwired to the World Wide Web, sport green hair, dance to hard rock, and look forward to the next hot initial public offering of equities on the Hong Kong or Shanghai market.
China is a Rorschach inkblot onto which Americans project their hopes and fears. “China” tells us much more about ourselves than it does about the real country by the same name, something often as true of our China experts as it is of ordinary Americans.
If the experts have been good at pointing out the silliness of Republican claims about the Chinese threat, nearly all of them remain captured by the solipsistic belief that China is somehow terribly important, one-fourth of mankind, shaking the world, we ignore it at our peril, and so on. Two leading specialists, Andrew Nathan and Robert Ross, began their 1997 book, The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, as follows: “China is the largest and economically most dynamic newly emerging power in the history of the world.”
Two others, Orville Schell and David Shambaugh, open The China Reader (1999) with: “No nation in history has undergone as total a transformation as has China during the quarter century from 1972 to 1997.” (Hmmm–more so than Japan from 1960 to 1985? South Korea or Taiwan from 1970 to 1995? Germany from 1860 to 1885? England from 1825 to 1850? America from 1900 to 1925?)
Elsewhere Shambaugh writes that “two continental giants,” China and the United States, “are likely to be the two dominant world powers during the twenty-first century.” But the United States is–and has been for decades–the only continental giant, formidably engaged to its east (Europe), west (Asia), south (Latin America), and north (Canada).
In contrast, China and that other “continental giant,” Russia, have undeveloped frontiers and mere pockets of industrial modernity. (Eighty years after its revolution, Russia's gross national product is smaller than that of South Korea or the Netherlands).
Various “realists” who enjoy parlaying the China threat and chastising China-watchers for their sympathetic myopia, are little better: Richard Betts, for example, wrote some six years ago in International Security that China is “the great power in the [East Asian] region about which U.S. strategists should worry most over the long term.” He somehow forgot that Japan has the second largest economy in the world, competes head-to-head with the United States in high technology, and is the only country in Asia to have achieved a completed modernity commensurable with America and Western Europe.
Realists also seem to forget history. If China is a “rising power” akin to nineteenth-century Germany (a trope found constantly in commentary on China), why should the United States be the one to clash with it, leaving Japan or Germany to pick up the pieces? Wouldn't a shrewd Realpolitik let someone else take up the burden of containing China?
In 1949, another realist, George F. Kennan, after listening patiently to experts declaim about China's overriding significance to the world, said: “China doesn't matter very much. It's not very important. It's never going to be powerful.” China had no integrated industrial base, which Kennan deemed essential to any serious capacity for warfare. It merely had an industrial fringe stitched along its coasts by the imperial powers, and it was unlikely to develop a militarily significant capacity anytime soon. Thus, China should not be included in his containment strategy.
But Japan did have such a base; therefore it was the key to post-war American policy in East Asia. Kennan had a strategy for that, too: provide for Japan's defense and police the flow of resources (especially oil) to its industrial economy, thus enabling the United States to maintain a residual, outer-limits veto on what Japan could do in the future.
Dudes jammin' in Beijing: Millions of young Chinese are wired to the web, listen to punk music, and trade stock on the Hong Kong or Shanghai market.
China, of course, also has realists and enmeshers. Among the latter, the leading light is Zhu Rongji, who is still listed as dean of Tsinghua University's rapidly expanding business school. For years U.S. China-watchers touted him as the most intelligent, forward-looking, and reasonable person in the high leadership. Lo and behold, in 1997 he became prime minister.
Last April, this clever, engaging, and astute politician–in contrast to the late Deng Xiaoping and the wooden Party Chairman Jiang Zemin–made a politically brilliant whirlwind tour through the United States. It was meant to be the triumphal cap to China's entry into the World Trade Organization, after he had persuaded his Politburo colleagues to take a set of unprecedented market-opening measures, all of them in response to American pressure.
At a Chicago lunch in Zhu's honor, 1,500 guests, including the chief executive officers of major multinationals–McDonald's, Ford, Motorola, and the like–fell all over themselves congratulating Zhu (and themselves) on China's integration into the world economy and the wondrous opportunities of its market. All that remained was to dot the i's and cross the t's on the agreement. But at the last minute President Clinton pulled back, fearing congressional opposition. On May 7 came the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and all hope evaporated of China entering the World Trade Organization soon.
The real 16-character policy
The errant American bomb, which somehow unerringly crashed into the most sensitive rooms in the Chinese embassy, provided a case study in Sino-American inanity. Beijing declared the bombing to be intentional, regardless of abundant evidence to the contrary. (What possible benefit could Bill Clinton have found in this act, with his China policy under daily fire and the outcome of the war for Kosovo still very much in doubt?)
In turn, Beijing permitted thousands of hysterical students to parade through Tiananmen with a bestiary of crude anti-American posters and slogans, thus contriving to sink like a stone the immense good will that Zhu Rongji had generated during his visit. (When the bodies of the three embassy employees killed in the bombing were returned to Beijing, Zhu lined up in front of the coffins with tears running down his face–perhaps in mourning for the temporary eclipse of his engagement policy.)
Meanwhile, with Clinton-bashing, China-hating, and secrets-leaking a virtual pastime among national-security professionals, it was hard for close observers to declare with certainty that the bombing might not have been intentional, given the multitude of mid-level miscreants in the intelligence community who might find profit in targeting the embassy safe rooms of their Chinese counterparts.
For several years people in the security bureaucracies have been leaking highly classified information alleging this or that new military threat or anti-U.S. crime emanating from China, followed by polite demurrals by Clinton officials and, apparently, no punishment of the leakers.
Virtually every finding in the Cox report had been leaked to credulous New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and James Risen long before the report itself appeared May 25. Running frequently as the lead article, their reports gave an impression of massive and highly successful Chinese spying.
Around the same time, various leaks to London's Financial Times and other British and U.S. papers depicted a massive Chinese missile buildup opposite Taiwan. China was also said to be helping North Korea with its missile program, in spite of the role of such missiles in promoting theater-missile defense systems in Northeast Asia that China has every reason to oppose. Given that China's press serves the interests of the state, it is not unreasonable to believe that leaks appearing in the U.S.-British press are seen by Chinese officials as evidence of a clever anti-China conspiracy.
But the truth appears more mundane, at least in the United States. Clinton apparently fears taking on the CIA, either because of what he worries it may know about skeletons in his closet, or because as a Democrat he can't afford to appear soft on national security.
Meanwhile, the ominous tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen uprising passed almost unnoticed last June, with students and young people focused instead on stoning and egging the U.S. embassy–the one clear gain Beijing's leaders got from the embassy bombing in Belgrade.
To the extent that the Cox report has any analysis of what Chinese leaders think they are doing, it claims that a “16-character policy” drives Chinese actions, one “formally codified” in 1997. (The characters themselves are deployed in large boldface in the report, perhaps to cow the ignorati.)
Even given the committee's warped translations of these phrases (“Combine the military and the civil”; “Combine peace and war”; “Give priority to military products”; “Let the civil support the military”), the four slogans are nothing more than post-Tiananmen bromides about uniting the people and the army.
Meanwhile Deng Xiaoping's own 16-character policy, enunciated in 1992, remains far more important to Chinese strategy. Deng said that China not only benefited from the best global and regional security environment and the deepest peace since its founding, it needed such an environment for the next 50 years. It should therefore deepen cooperation and mutual trust with Washington and avoid confrontations.
Two years later, during one of his last strolls through one of his coastal “open cities”–in this case, the marvelous Sino-European treaty port of Qingdao–Deng doubled his estimate: “The policy of taking economic construction as the key link must never be changed; the reform and open-door policy must never be altered. The party's basic line must not be shaken for 100 years.”
Today the late Deng's views coincide with those of top Chinese security experts, who argue that the United States will be the dominant global power into the middle of the twenty-first century and that China would be foolish to challenge it militarily or strategically. Besides, China needs the time to develop its economy.
In the 1800s, Western powers, joined by Russia and Japan, used economic and military muscle to force a variety of “concessions” from China. Here, in 1900, an American cavalry unit patrols the Great Wall during the Boxer uprising.
Huang Qifan, director of the powerful Shanghai Economic Commission, recently claimed that “China can grow at five percent or more for the next 50 years” because of its “enormous domestic market.” Indeed, the Chinese are just beginning to develop the foaming-at-the-mouth consumerism that marks more developed countries. Huang already has a car and three big-screen TVs in his own home. In a few years, he said, “Everyone will be buying cars.”
In March 1996 Beijing ignored Deng's advice about not challenging the United States strategically with its missile “tests” near Taiwan–a clumsy effort to affect the outcome of upcoming Taiwanese elections. China got little in return from its muscle flexing other than to provoke the largest U.S. force deployment in the Pacific since the end of the Vietnam War. In succeeding months, moreover, it became clear that the authors of that provocative strategy had gotten egg on their faces.
The Cox report returns frequently to these missile exercises, but it might just as easily have dwelt on a programmatic statement by People's Liberation Army head Liu Huaqui that appeared a year later in the PLA newspaper. Titled “Strive for a Peaceful International Environment,” it touted Deng's policy of peaceful engagement.
Like other critics of American policy toward China, the Cox report also ignores the truly remarkable effort (for a communist country) at international cooperation. China has joined a host of organizations and made important commitments to peace and non-proliferation–among them, signing onto the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the chemical and biological weapons conventions, the Missile Technology Control Regime, and the Asian Regional Federation.
Further, it has played an unexpectedly responsible role on the U.N. Security Council. China has also facilitated American diplomacy with North Korea throughout the 1990s, joined Clinton's Four Power talks to formally end the Korean War, and (along with Washington) provided large amounts of food aid to famine-stricken North Korea.
The world shakes China
In 1949 realists like Kennan and enmeshers like Acheson worked together to place defeated industrial countries like Japan and West Germany in a harness that would contain their military and diplomatic power while opening the path of least resistance: rapid economic development. Containers and engagers worked together in the 1970s and 1980s, too, because realists could justify good relations with China as a counterweight to Soviet power, while enmeshers argued for the solvent effects of world trade on the Chinese revolution.
In 1950 and 1951, China claimed sovereignty over Tibet, launching a brutal invasion. Here, in 1985, a Chinese soldier poses on the stairs of a building at the Potala Palace in Lhasa.
Japan and Germany are still well ensconced in their harness, as Chalmers Johnson [page 44] makes clear. But China is independent and the Soviet Union has disappeared, leaving realists and enmeshers without a common program. But that does not prevent us from saying who has been right for the past 50 years: the enmeshers, hands down.
If it is true that China shook the world in 1949, it is also true the world has shaken China since then–and indeed for the past two centuries, after a British emissary first sought to open trade with the Celestial Empire. Since that fateful encounter, China's central leaders have swayed it this way and that in search of a principle for involvement with the West, a way to grow strong while retaining national dignity, to become modern while remaining distinctively Chinese.
Fifty years after its revolution, China's two major principles for interacting with that world are incompatible with one another. The first: ever-increasing interaction with a world economy shaped by American power, in which China inevitably trades some elements of its sovereignty for national wealth. The second: stubborn nationalism, accompanied by proclamations of absolute sovereignty over patches of geography that elude China's control (particularly Taiwan and the Spratly Islands)–territorial principles that hark back to the nineteenth century on the eve of the twenty-first.
Still, China's military history has never conformed to the expectations of Western Realpolitik. Before and after the revolution, it has had a singular strategy of confining its expansion to its near reaches and constraining its choice of means. When China has used force since 1949, it has done so within its historic region, and more than once it has done so judiciously and effectively.
Of course, Chinese leaders still proclaim the inherent superiority of their nation and their culture, but that heritage also teaches them the ultimate weakness of a power that only expresses itself militarily. Military force cannot solve China's deepest problem, which is the continuing predominance of the West. The answer to that challenge is civilizational, not military.
Sino-American affinities
Long inured to either Atlanticist presumptions about the importance of Europe or alarmist claims about the rise to power in the Pacific of Japan or China, Americans in recent years have lived through the eclipse of any potential rival in Europe or East Asia. What is now clear is the towering global predominance and influence of the United States for the foreseeable future. How can that influence be retained? By thinking through our affinities with other peoples–especially the Chinese.
Over the past two centuries the United States and China essentially developed in isolation from each other. Now, however, economic ties have thrown them together–and it seems safe to say that they must sink or swim together in the next century. What if we asked the question, what makes China and America alike rather than different?
China and the United States are both continental nations of geographically similar size. Both have experienced prolonged periods of uninvolvement with the rest of the world–China through centuries in which the Han majority expanded on the continent, almost by accretion, with only a brief heyday of world trade in the twelfth century; America through nearly two centuries (the 1780s to the 1940s) of relative uninvolvement with the world. Both countries have strong isolationist tendencies, albeit of a different kind.
It is striking that only 10 years ago a greatly popular television documentary series sponsored by the Chinese government, “Elegy for the Yellow River,” castigated China's ingrown, navel-contemplating, sedentary, and land-bound culture and argued that China would have to join with Western civilization or risk disintegration and oblivion.
China's legendary self-absorption and self-sufficiency, compounded by its sense of cultural superiority and civilizational centrality as the Middle Kingdom, nonetheless led it to a kind of benign neglect of its near neighbors. With a couple of exceptions–particularly the brutal occupation of Tibet–most neighbors lived at peace with China. And to varying degrees (Korea and Vietnam a lot; Japan less so), China's neighbors emulated Chinese arts and letters, philosophy, statecraft, and social institutions.
In the United States, the end of the Cold War appears to have spawned the strongest resurgence of indifference toward the rest of the world, if not necessarily isolationism, since 1941. This year, when a major opinion poll asked Americans to name the two or three most important foreign policy issues facing the United States, fully 21 percent couldn't think of even one.
So a curious isolationist affinity may be one of the deepest historical and cultural elements undergirding the chances for Sino-American peace. If so, it is only one of many affinities.
Both China and America have had world-influencing revolutions, and in many ways are–or have been–revolutionary societies. Both have weak military traditions and strong traditions of civil governance and civilian supremacy. Both experience profound tensions between governmental centralization and decentralization.
Both have long histories of prowess in small business and petty capitalism. Both strike foreign observers as highly egalitarian societies, just as both contain heterogeneous ethnicities, especially when compared to Japan or Germany.
Both produced large diasporas–although the American diaspora is within, through vast migration, and the Chinese diaspora is without, through historic emigration. Both have ideals of the independent, hard-working pioneer: in the Chinese case, the myriad Chinese families living alone for generations in small American towns, running a restaurant or laundry.
The United States and China, so often conceived as diametrically opposite in civilization, customs, values, and practices (especially political), are actually similar in many respects. One day China will finally become fully modern, and it will find its way toward being the proud nation it has wanted to be through two centuries of humiliation.
But that is an agenda for the Chinese people. For Americans, the route to understanding China is through self-knowledge. A wise policy begins with an understanding of China's long-term humiliation at the hands of the West, which should induce some degree of Western humility.
The West has shaken China enough as it is. We in the West can do little more than encourage the evolution of a less dominant central government in China, as well as the rule of law and basic political rights for China's citizens. But we in the West should not harbor illusions that we can make much of a difference.
The main theme in the West's relations should still be enmeshment–a long period of economism that allows both countries to discover a new relationship. Does the United States want a China shooting missiles across Taiwan's bow–or a China that burnishes its application to the World Trade Organization with trade concessions to the United States? The question answers itself.
The alternative is to bring into being the very enemy that some national security professionals appear to want and perhaps need. If that eventuality should come to pass, Americans will eventually have a rendezvous with a formidable adversary.