Responding to the China challenge.

AuthorHunt, Michael H.
PositionEssay

Editor's Note: An eminent historian looks at the U.S.-China relationship and sees many possibilities for success and failure for the United States in coming to grips with the rise of China. Indeed, this intensely complex and multifaceted relationship appears to become ever complicated to manage for both parties.--The Editor

The media provides almost daily reminders of how complex and tangled the U.S.-China relationship has become. The range of issues in play is extraordinary, even unprecedented. At the forefront right now are a mix of hardy perennials (such as arms sales to Taiwan, the future of Tibet, and human rights) and newly emergent concerns (such as internet censorship and cyber warfare, sanctions against Iran and North Korea, holdings of U.S. debt, the trade gap, currency devaluation, competition over oil and other natural resources, and the response to climate change). Taken together, these issues generate considerable contention and have the potential over time to spawn a dangerous level of ill will.

Viewed in historical perspective, the U.S.-China relationship may now be at a major inflection point. On the one side, an increasingly strong and self-confident China poses a profound challenge to a U.S.-defined and dominated global regime. On the other side, American elites continue to have a hard time coming to terms with this unfolding challenge. While U.S. presidents have grudgingly accepted China's legitimacy as a major power, rumblings of discontent with China's Communist Party dating back some six decades have echoed powerfully in Washington and the media. The result has been a divided U.S. response to China's rise, part accommodation, part confrontation, and each arising from distinct, even contradictory premises.

Let's start with the nature of the China challenge. Its foundation is, above all else, a half century of successful economic development. What tends to get lost amidst the daily reports of booming output, changing skylines, and mushrooming consumerism is the origins and long-term significance of this success. However painful for Americans to accept, it is the product of a strategy shaped and supported by the Chinese Communist Party.

After a more than a century of economic stagnation in which per capita GDP did not increase, Communist victory in 1949 heralded a distinct upturn in material conditions for ordinary Chinese. Income doubled between 1950 and 1973 thanks to the new and powerful party-state. (1) It promoted industrialization, invested in infrastructure, set limits on urbanization, secured political order, and maintained security along a vast and vulnerable frontier. To be sure, party control led to costly experiments and colossal errors, most notably the twenty million or more lives lost as a result of the Great Leap Forward campaign of the late 1950s. But the economic and political achievements during the Mao Zedong years were considerable and indispensable to the mounting of the China challenge.

Those achievements made it possible for Deng Xiaoping to move quickly on economic reform in the late 1970s and secure remarkably rapid results. While he preferred to describe his program as "socialism with Chinese characteristics," it would be more accurate to call the new course a variant on a proven Asian-style model of economic development. The state-guided capitalism pioneered by Japan and widely adopted in the region assigned a major role to free markets; it gave the state an important part in guiding those markets; and it put a high priority on production of export goods. The results in Deng's China as elsewhere in eastern Asia were stunning. Between 1973 and 2001, the per capita GDP more than quadrupled. The growth has continued at a similarly robust pace over the last decade.

What is seldom noted but should be troubling for American observers is the international significance of this economic success. To begin with, China's record has become the envy of the developing world. There generally post-colonial economies have not performed well, and in some places in recent decades they have virtually flat lined. China's case argues for having the state make the...

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