The pages of The National Interest have abounded in recent months
with analyses, prognostications, predictions, and arguments over what
to do with and about China. Robert Zoellick argued persuasively for
the need to rebuild a bipartisan consensus on U.S. policy toward
China, and both he and Paul Wolfowitz have urged that such a
consensus take as its touchstone the recognition that the problem is
one of accommodating the rise of a new power (the Wilhelmine Germany
analogy), and not that of containing an implacably hostile
imperialism (the Stalinist postwar Soviet Union analogy). It is hard
to deny, too, the good sense of recognizing the essential tension
between China's rush toward economic development and its ossified
political system, a tension that Henry S. Rowen and others maintain
will be resolved in the end in a relatively benign way, in favor of
democracy. And it also makes sense, as Bruce Cumings has suggested,
for Americans to understand the historical--and, in some cases, the
very subjective--origins of their own images of China before setting
off to propound U.S. interests in Beijing.
Less persuasive, however, are some of the means advanced to achieve
these goals. Zoellick's argument, for example, that the ASEAN
Regional Forum (ARF) could effectively engage China on regional
security issues takes insufficient account of China's zero-sum view
of international relations--a view generic to East Asia. It also
underestimates the damaging collateral effects that might attend such
an "engagement" policy line, especially on the U.S.-Japanese
alliance, and especially bearing in mind the skill that China has
demonstrated in manipulating multilateral security diplomacy to its
strategic advantage.
