China: what engagement should mean.

• Author: Zoellick, Robert B.

The United States enjoyed a united policy toward China for two decades. That unity ended with Tiananmen Square. But the challenge of an ascendant China now requires a consistent, steady, long-term view. The United States must rebuild a bipartisan policy toward China based on a strategy that can be supported by successive presidents and Congresses, Republicans and Democrats.

Past U.S. policies toward China have reflected two very different national traditions. One has drawn images of China, its people, and its future salvation from America's missionary experience. The other approach has viewed China in light of the realist's concepts of power, national interest, and balancing relationships among great states. At times, the United States has managed to fuse these two traditions in an unlikely amalgam, although the compound has usually displayed cracks created by countervailing forces.

Missionaries, Heretics, and Romantics

America has had a special relationship with China. We have romanticized, and then demonized, China and its people, time and again, in a pendulum of alternating attitudes, which led in turn to swings in policy. America's missionary experience with China helped shape these views. Our first widespread public contact with China came from efforts in the nineteenth century to convert the Chinese to Christianity, to rescue them from their condition, to educate them, to make them like us.

It was an effort that tapped some of the best American impulses. The missionary movement reached deep into Christian churches across the United States, certainly far beyond the elite seaboard groups that considered themselves the guardians of U.S. foreign policy. Millions of children learned about China at Sunday school, or from evening programs with returning missionaries who brought home pictures and stories, and then asked for nickels and dimes to help the Chinese.

The missionaries' influence also extended to more select company. After all, many missionaries to China were trained at Yale, Princeton, Oberlin, and other leading schools, and their children returned to become political leaders, scholars, and foreign service officers. They became the American interpreters of China.

The children of missionaries also wrote books that influenced America's attitude toward China. The most famous and influential of these writers was Pearl Buck, whose book The Good Earth received the Pulitzer Prize, sold 1.5 million copies, became a Broadway play, and was transformed into a movie seen in the United States by an estimated 23 million people. Nor was this a singular example of the infatuation with China in America's popular culture. For later generations, the popular film The Sand Pebbles portrayed the confusing experience of the U.S. Navy and missionaries in a bewildering China caught between the old ways and the new, while The Last Emperor pictured Pu Yi's and China's twentieth-century journeys.

The images of China created by the missionaries were reinforced by America's trading ties. The romantic stories of China clippers, exotic lands, and vast fortunes to be made - or lost - captured America's imagination. Unlike Europeans, Russians, and Japanese who grasped territories from disintegrating Qing China, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay stood for an "Open Door" that would allow all to prosper from the "great China trade."

The romantic, missionary view of China has had important implications for U.S. policies. When the Chinese have embraced the United States and its ways, Americans have been smitten. So Americans admired and committed themselves to Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong family, the Flying Tigers, the YMCA and YWCA in China, Christian schools, the stoic dignity of enduring peasants, and, in a later era, ping-pong diplomacy and the modernizer Deng Xiaoping.

But when China refused to be as Americans imagined it, or worse, rejected America, the United States responded with the combination of fury and hurt reserved for heretics. Whether Taiping rebels, Boxers, "Red" Chinese, "human wave" assaults in Korea, or the gray old men who crushed the young demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, America could not understand why these Chinese would not be like the United States or would even attack it. So the pendulum of attitudes would swing, from embrace to rejection and back again. Meanwhile, the Chinese, who for centuries viewed themselves as living in the "Middle Kingdom", a place above the rest of the earth if still short of heaven, must have had a terrible time figuring out the all-too-earthy Americans.

Thucydides, Napoleon, and the Realists

There is another view of China - that of the realist. Realists have been concerned with China's power, not: its soul. They trace their perspective to Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides wrote that the war among the great city-states of his day was the inevitable result of the growth of Athens' power, and of the fear it inspired in Sparta. Centuries later, another student and practitioner of power, Napoleon, noted that China was a sleeping giant, and that the world would quake when it awoke.

During the Second World War, the United States hoped to arm and train huge Chinese armies to help fight the japanese invaders; regardless of the ideologies of Chinese Nationalists or Communists, these realists concluded that America's interest would be served by a unified Chinese effort against imperial Japan.

After 1949, when the Communists established control over mainland China, some American realists recognized that China posed a new force with which the United States must reckon. This power appeared allied with the Soviet Union by reason of a shared ideology, and the Korean War then led to a bloody encounter with this Chinese enemy. But President Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley sought to avoid an expanded ground war with China because of the priority they placed on defending Europe from the Soviet Union. According to General Bradley, a military contest on the Asian mainland would be "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."(1) This assessment of ends and means prevailed.

It took President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger, however, to recognize that China's power might be balanced against that of the Soviet Union. Ignoring America's fundamental differences with China's political system, Nixon and Kissinger applied the realist's dictum: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The strategic rapprochement between the United States and China that began in 1971 was based on a common interest in countering the power of the Soviet Union.

Over the past ten years, however, the Soviet Union's collapse and China's amazing economic development have presented a new challenge for realists. China is no longer a "card" to be played in a global game against the Soviets. In a sense, the "card" has become the new game. Napoleon's prophecy is coming true: China is now stirring, shaking established foundations for policies in Asia and the world.

In some respects, China today is analogous to Germany at the end of the last century. As rising regional powers with potentially global influence, Germany then and China now are characterized by a mixture of arrogance and insecurity. Germany expected, and China expects, to be taken seriously. The challenge, now as then, is to demonstrate to the rising power that it will benefit from integration within regional and global systems, but also that it must accept the rules of those systems...