A Year of Debating China.

AuthorHarries, Owen

IT IS NOW widely believed that I the most serious challenge to America's primacy will come from China. If indeed this turns out to be right, there is some cause for concern, for over the years Americans have had great difficulty thinking rationally about China. They have tended to oscillate violently between romanticizing and demonizing that country and its people. Thinking has largely been dominated by stereotypes: China as Treasure, in the form of insatiable market or investment opportunity; China as Paragon, the source of a superior wisdom, either ancient and Confucian or from a little red book; China as Sick Patient, needing Christian or Western democratic understanding, care and cures; China as Ingrate, insufficiently responsive to and grateful for our ministrations; and, of course, China as Threat--at one time Yellow Peril, at another Red Menace, and now, in the eyes of some very vocal and not uninfluential Americans, as rival, malevolent superpower.

Given this background, if indeed China should emerge as America's serious rival, the chances of a cool, sensible American reaction cannot be rated particularly high. Recent evidence of the way the issue is being debated bears this out. That debate has been structured as a sharp and clear choice between two options, usually labeled "engagement" and "containment." While this in itself amounts to a considerable oversimplification, it has been made worse by the fact that each side has tended to distort not only its opponents' position but its own. Thus "engagement" has been caricatured by its opponents as "appeasement", and by many of its advocates, including the Clinton administration itself, whose policy it is, as "strategic partnership." A realistic engagement would need to recognize that differences and friction--sometimes of quite a serious kind--are going to be unavoidable between two such different countries. The realistic objective should not be the creation of anything as ambitious as partnership, but t he more modest one of the avoidance of enmity.

On the other side, many of the advocates of "containment" seem to proceed on the assumption that if China is finally getting its act together and emerging as an authentic major power, there is no option but to treat it as an enemy, starting from now. This kind of anticipatory enmity is evident in much of the strident rhetoric. Thus, the Chinese system is still routinely characterized as "totalitarian" by supposedly responsible commentators, though the regime's writ no longer runs very effectively in many parts of the country--and even in those parts where its will does prevail, the degree of authoritarianism has more in common with the Habsburg or Romanov empires in a bad week than it has with the tight grip and savage repression of Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany.

But there it is: belief in the virtual inevitability of a clash is widespread.

During 1999 the China debate has been particularly animated and bitter. It has been fueled by five issues: first, the continuing repercussions of Chinese interference in the U.S. election process, in the form of illegal contributions during the 1996 campaign; second, the accusations of Chinese spying on U.S. defense secrets, given special prominence by the release of the Cox report in May; third, the troubled negotiation over Chinese membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO); fourth, the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May; and finally, and most serious, the issue of the status of Taiwan, made highly controversial once again by the statement of Taiwan's President Lee in July that in future Taiwan intends to conduct its relations with the mainland on a state-to-state basis. The cumulative effect of these five issues--working on already existing concerns--has been great. What can be said concerning their merits and the way they have been debated?

Interference in the U.S. Election Process

THAT THERE WAS some interference in the U.S. election process, in the form of illegal campaign contributions by a number of sleazy characters, some of whom were connected to the Chinese military, is not in dispute. In considering how much moral outrage, shock and anger is appropriate, however--and how much it should influence policy toward China--we might take three things into consideration:

First, though the Chinese contributions apparently ran into some hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a campaign that was awash in money its overall impact could only have been very modest indeed.

Second, insofar as it took place, this violation of U.S. electoral laws depended much more on the insatiable appetite of American politicians for money--or, to be more pointed, in this instance on the political greed of the President and the Vice President, and the indiscretion resulting from it--than it did on any exceptional villainy or cunning on the part of Beijing.

Third...

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