Chinese nationalism and its discontents.

• Author: Ross, Robert S.

At no time since the end of the Cold War have U.S.-China relations been worse. Yes, in the past there have been periodic confrontations over Taiwan, and tensions over the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese fighter-jet collision with an American reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea. But the current downturn reflects a potential long-term trend with the likelihood of protracted strategic conflict. Equally troubling, this raising of tensions is not only unnecessary but also potentially costly to the United States.

Beginning in early 2009, China committed a series of diplomatic blunders that ultimately elicited a near-universal condemnation of Chinese diplomacy. The list is long:

The March 2009 Chinese naval harassment of the U.S. Navy reconnaissance ship Impeccable operating in Chinas exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea; Beijing's heavy-handed resistance to negotiation at the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, causing diplomatic friction between China and Europe and between China and the United States; Its hard-line response to the January 2010 U.S. decision to sell arms to Taiwan, which included a threat to impose sanctions on U.S. companies that have defense cooperation with Taipei; Mismanagement of North Korea's sinking of the South Korean naval ship Cheonan in March 2010, followed by widespread South Korean anger toward China; Strident Chinese diplomatic protests against U.S.-South Korean naval exercises in international waters in the Yellow Sea; Excessive hostility to the Japanese detention, in September 2010, of the captain of a Chinese fishing boat for operating in Japanese-claimed waters and for steering his ship into a Japanese coast-guard vessel; The Chinese government's clumsy campaign to compel Google to cease service of its search engine on the mainland; Its December 2010 harsh and persistent opposition to Liu Xiaobo's selection as the Nobel Peace Prize recipient; Increasingly forceful assertion of its disputed economic and territorial claims in the South China Sea, eliciting apprehension throughout Southeast Asia. In contrast to three decades of a successful peaceful-rise strategy that enabled Beijing to develop cooperative interactions with nearly every country in the world, within two years China had managed to sour relations with virtually every Asian country and every advanced industrial nation.

The source of all this strident Chinese diplomacy is not its emergence as a regional great power with corresponding confidence in its new capabilities. Rather, China's new diplomacy reflects the regime's spiraling domestic confidence and its increasing dependence on nationalism for domestic stability. Washington has misread the state of affairs, exaggerating Chinese capabilities and fundamentally misinterpreting the source of all the aggressive Chinese diplomacy.

The truth is China is neither particularly militarily strong nor particularly domestically stable. Beijing's combative diplomacy was not spurred by American economic weakness in the wake of the recession, and it was far from an indicator of growing Chinese confidence. On the contrary, in recent years Beijing has not deployed and operationalized significant new advanced naval capabilities, and its domestic economic environment is worse today than at any time since the onset of the post-Mao economic reforms in 1978.

Beyond its coastal waters, China's naval capability remains dependent on its advanced diesel submarines, which were first deployed in the mid-1990s. By 2000, China's submarine force had already begun to pose a formidable challenge to U.S. naval operations in the western Pacific Ocean. But since then it has not deployed any additional naval capabilities that pose consequential new challenges to the U.S. Navy or to America's defense of its security partners. China still cannot independently manufacture advanced military aircraft, and it has yet to deploy a single Chinese-designed advanced aircraft. The J-15 and J-20 fighter planes are still in development. It has finally launched its first aircraft carrier, but it does not have aircraft for the carrier. Its antipiracy...