There is a great deal of concern about China signing natural resource contracts with "rogue" states around the world. I think we need to put this in perspective. I see China less as an evil mastermind signing deals with rogue states to thwart Washington's geopolitical ambitions and more as a scavenger. The United States and Europe have locked up the choicest oil suppliers in the world. China is looking for equity stakes wherever it can find them. If we are concerned about Chinese involvement with less than desirable regimes, then we need to find a way to collaborate with them as consumers. I've always thought that a consumers' cartel of petroleum is a better solution than to have individual countries try to freelance.

In New York, especially in financial and business circles, there is a "thin, wonky consensus" about China reflected in our discussions: promoting engagement with China and facilitating its continued integration, as opposed to a confrontational approach defined in terms of containment and protectionism. This consensus does not necessarily hold when one travels to Washington, particularly when one reaches the Congress. But politicians have to deal with realities. China and India are not going to stop growing, they are not going to "disappear." Our political leaders cannot escape the very clear intersection between domestic and foreign policy in dealing with the China challenge. This includes moving beyond talking about competitiveness to having the political courage to prescribe the remedies (some of which may be unpleasant in the short run) needed to heal an ailing American economy.

China certainly benefits from having low wage workers and Chinese firms can sometimes turn to the state for assistance, but Beijing is not responsible for a low savings rate in the United States, or the costs of our hyper-litigiousness, or our lack of investment in education and research.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

If war is too important to be left to the generals, China policy may be too important to be left to the politicians. It is unrealistic to expect that the solution to the challenges posed by "China going global" is to convince China to "stay at home", or that tightening energy markets can be corrected by beseeching the Chinese (or Indians for that matter) to forego an American-style, middle-class lifestyle. Yet the temptation for both political parties to succumb to demagoguery about a "China threat" to the United States is very real.

It is important not to overestimate China's progress or to elevate them to the position of America's new superpower rival. But we are approaching the point where we can no longer compartmentalize the Sino-American relationship into neat "economic" and "political" boxes, and we cannot expect that as China begins to accumulate leverage (as Beijing acquires more U.S. debt, for example) that it will refrain from seeking to influence U.S. policy. Either we have to accept the political consequences of the growing economic interdependence between the United States and China, or we have to change our domestic patterns of consumption that create our dependency on foreign sources of energy and on inexpensive consumer goods from Chinese sources.

Barry Lynn made a cogent observation about the U.S.-China relationship in the Winter 2005/06 issue of The National Interest: "The two nations share absolutely no political framework in which to manage a deeply interdependent economic relationship." One of the recurring themes of our discussion was that a course of action that makes perfect sense from a macroeconomic standpoint may at the same time be highly undesirable from a foreign policy perspective. Currently we have an unbalanced relationship, which cannot be sustained indefinitely.

We have a mindset that conflates competition with hostility. In "going global", Beijing is signaling that it intends to compete, for markets, for resources, for influence, not simply in East Asia, but around the world, including in our own backyard of Latin America and in the United States itself. Will we be able to duplicate the success of the post-1895, Anglo-American rapprochement with China in this century? Or will China become the equivalent of Wilhelmine Germany, seeking its place in the sun? Much depends on whether America's politicians are prepared to lead, to make the case for a Sino-American modus vivendi.