In any case, whatever its political prospects, China will not be
emerging as a global power in the foreseeable future. If that term is
to have any real meaning, it must imply cutting-edge superiority of a
truly global military capability, significant international financial
and economic influence, a clear-cut technological lead, and an
appealing social lifestyle--all of which must combine to create
worldwide political clout. Even in the most unlikely circumstance of
continued rapid economic growth, China will not be top-ranked in any
of these domains for many decades to come. What is more, its backward
and debilitated social infrastructure, combined with the per capita
poverty of its enormous population, represents a staggering liability.

One should note here that some of the current scare-mongering
regarding the alleged inevitability of China's emergence as a
dominant world power is reminiscent of earlier hysteria regarding
Japan's supposedly predestined ascendancy to superpower status. That
hysteria was similarly driven by mechanical projections of economic
growth rates, without taking into account other complex
considerations or unexpected contingencies. The Japanese purchase of
Rockefeller Plaza became at one point the symbol of the paranoiac,
one-dimensional glimpse into Japan's future.

Be that as it may, China's unsettled domestic scene is likely to
reinforce an inherently ambivalent and occasionally antagonistic
attitude toward the United States. Though Chinese leaders recognize
that they need a stable and even cooperative relationship with the
United States if their country isto continue developing, China is no
longer America's strategic partner against a threatening Soviet
Union. It became so after the Shanghai breakthrough of 1972 and, even
more so, after the normalization of relations in 1980, which
dramatically transformed a three decade-long adversarial relationship
into a decade of strategic cooperation. Today, with the Soviet Union
gone, China is neither America's adversary nor its strategic partner.
It could become an antagonist, however, if either China so chooses or
America so prompts.

Accentuating the Negative

Currently, Chinese policy toward the United States is a combination
of functional cooperation in areas of specific interest and of a
generally adverse definition of America's world role. The latter has
prompted Chinese diplomatic initiatives designed to undercut U.S.
global leadership. Chinese policy toward Russia is ostentatiously
friendly on the rhetorical level, with frequent references to "a
strategic partnership." Such is also the case (perhaps not
surprisingly) with Sino-French relations, with both sides proclaiming
(as, for example, during the October 1999 Paris summit between
Presidents Chirac and Jiang) their passionate fidelity to the concept
of global "multipolarity"--not a very subtle slam at the disliked
American "hegemony."

Indeed, the word "hegemony" has become the favorite Chinese term for
defining America's current world role. Chinese public pronouncements
and professional journals that deal with international affairs
regularly denounce the United States as an overreaching, dominant,
arrogant and interventionist power, increasingly reliant on the use
of force, and potentially tempted to intervene even in China's
internal affairs.

The NATO action in Kosovo precipitated especially a massive
outpouring of Chinese allegations that America has embraced the
concept of interventionism at the expense of respect for traditional
national sovereignty, with dire implications for China. As one
alarmed Chinese expert put it:

Suppose serious anti-Communist Party or anti-government domestic
turbulence erupts in China which cannot be quickly brought under
control, and, at the same time, the international community commonly
joins the anti-China stream. In this case, the hegemonists (perhaps
jointly with their allied nations) could launch a military invasion
of China.

The above was neither an extreme nor an isolated assertion. Such
charges have been accompanied by growing concern that the United
States is accelerating and intensifying its efforts to construct an
anti-Chinese coalition in the Far East, embracing what is represented
as a dangerously rearming Japan, South Korea and also Taiwan, a
coalition "that resembles a small NATO of East Asia." American,
Japanese and South Korean discussions of possible collaboration
against theater missile attacks have intensified these Chinese
suspicions. Occasional American and Taiwanese press speculation that
Taiwan might be included in such a collective effort has also further
aggravated the Chinese, who see it as additional evidence that the
United States is increasingly inclined to make permanent the current
separation of Taiwan from China.

Perhaps the most striking example of the current Chinese inclination
to stress the negative dimensions of the U.S.-China relationship is
the attempt to provide a deeper intellectual or cultural
rationalization for the seemingly intensifying antagonism. The
Chinese-owned Hong Kong daily, Ta Kung Pao, published a major
editorial entitled "On the Cultural Roots of Sino-U.S. Conflict" in
September 1999, advancing the thesis that "the conflict between
Chinese and American civilizations is at a deeper level one between
sacred and secular lifestyles." Amazingly for a nominally communist
regime, it is China that is said to represent the former: "Chinese
civilization has always stressed an integration of heaven with man."
This identity is said to contrast sharply with "the consumerist and
hedonist mode of behavior that grew out of American Civilization",
making Americans "look down on Oriental Civilization, holding that it
is backward and ignorant." The policy inference that was drawn from
the foregoing was stark: "in China-U.S. relations, it will be
absolutely impossible to permanently resolve conflicts of political
views in areas such as human rights, democracy, and freedom."

To be sure, the foregoing views are in part instrumental, for they
are also meant to serve the current Chinese efforts to put America on
the ideological defensive. They do not define for Beijing the overall
character of the U.S.-China relationship. Since China seeks to reduce
the scope of America's global preponderance (and its resulting
leverage on China), it needs some sort of a doctrinal legitimation
for controlled antagonism; yet China also wants to retain for itself,
for obvious reasons of domestic self-interest, the vital benefits of
collaboration with America. Striking a balance between the two is not
easy, especially given the fact that China's communist leaders have
not found an effective substitute for their previous Marxist
world-view. That central reality imposes a severe restraint on
Chinese anti-American proclivities.

Hence, U.S.-China military links are being preserved, economic ties
enhanced and political relations kept relatively congenial--even
while "multipolarity" is hailed and "hegemony" condemned in joint
declarations with Moscow, Paris and whoever else cares to join. The
result is a confused amalgam, involving communist terminology and
Chinese nationalist sentiments. That mishmash reflects the ambivalent
position in which the Chinese leadership finds itself both at home
and at large, given the unresolved ambiguities of Chinese domestic
and foreign policy.

Doubtless, China's leaders, generally intelligent and hardheaded,
sense that inherent ambiguity. They must realize that Paris, rhetoric
aside, will not join in some fanciful Beijing-Moscow-Paris
anti-American coalition. They have to know that Russia does not have
much to offer to China, except perhaps some technologically not very
advanced military equipment. Ultimately, they have to understand--and
their conduct reflects that they do--that at this historical juncture
the relationship with the United States is central to China's future.
Outright hostility is simply not in China's interest.

The foregoing points toward a further observation. China today, in
relationship to the wider international system, is neither the
militarist Japan of the 1930s nor the ideologically and strategically
threatening Soviet Union of the 1950s-70s. Though all analogies, by
definition, are partially misleading, there are some important
parallels between China's current situation and imperial Germany's
circa 1890. At that time, German policy was in flux, while Germany
itself was a rising power. Like today's China, Germany's ambitions
were driven by a resentment of a perceived lack of recognition and
respect (in the case of Germany, especially on the part of a haughty
British Empire, and in the case of today's China, on the part of an
arrogant America), by fears of encirclement by a confining and
increasingly antagonistic coalition, by rising nationalistic
ambitions on the part of its predominantly young population, and by
the resulting desire to precipitate a significant rearrangement in
the global pecking order.

One will never know with any certainty whether the European war of
1914, a quarter of a century later, could have been avoided by wiser
policy in the 1890s. Similarly, one cannot be certain about which
direction China will head over the next quarter of a century.
However, already at this stage it should be self-evident which
prospect is to be avoided. For America, that requires a strategically
clearheaded management of the sensitive issue of Taiwan and, even
more so, of the longer range task of fitting China into a wider and
more stable Eurasian equilibrium.

The Taiwan Question

For America, Taiwan is a problem; China is the challenge. Taiwan
complicates U.S.-China relations, but it is U.S.-China relations that
will determine in large measure the degree of stability or instability
in the Far East and, more generally, in Eurasia. Admittedly, how the
Taiwan issue is handled will influence--and in some circumstances
could even determine--the evolution of U.S.-China relations. But,
except for its impact on those relations, the status of Taiwan itself
is not a central international concern.

Still, it is important to take both history and strategy into account
when addressing the sensitive and volatile issue of Taiwan's
relationship with the mainland. That issue is a direct legacy of
China's civil war. It is also an unresolved legacy, for Taiwan's
separate existence reminds that neither side involved in the civil
war succeeded in totally eliminating the other. Though one side won
by gaining control over the mainland, and thus over the vast majority
of the Chinese population, the losing side still preserved itself not
only as a political entity but also as a potential political
alternative, even though entrenched on a relatively small island
inhabited by only 2 percent of China's people.

Essay Types: Essay