THE RISING SUPERPOWER AND THE DECLINING SUPERPOWER
While the domestic debate in the United States might often suggest the contrary, ever since the Mao-Nixon rapprochement of 1972 and the subsequent establishment of full diplomatic relations in 1979, the relationship between China and US has been characterized for almost four decades by stability and continuity. [1146] Although it has been through many phases — the axis against the Soviet Union, the reform period and modernization, Tiananmen Square and its aftermath, China’s rapid growth and its turn outwards in the late 1990s, the rise of Chinese nationalism, and of course a succession of US presidents from Nixon and Reagan to Carter and Clinton — the relationship has remained on an even keel, with the United States gradually granting China access both to its domestic market and the institutions of the international system, and China in return tempering and dovetailing its actions and behaviour in deference to American attitudes. The rationale that has been used to justify the US position has been through various iterations during the course of these different phases, but there has been no shrinking from the underlying approach. It may not be immediately obvious why the US ruling elite has been so consistently supportive of this position, but the key reason surely lies in its origins. The Mao-Nixon rapprochement was reached in the dark days of the Cold War and represented a huge geopolitical coup for the United States in its contest with the Soviet Union. That created a sense of ongoing loyalty and commitment to the relationship with China that helped to ensure its endurance.
China ’s relationship with the United States has remained the fundamental tenet of its foreign policy for some thirty years, being from the outset at the heart of Deng Xiaoping’s strategy for ensuring that China would have a peaceful and relatively trouble-free external environment that would allow it to concentrate its efforts and resources on its economic development. [1147] After Tiananmen Square, Deng spoke of the need to ‘adhere to the basic line for one hundred years, with no vacillation’, [1148] testimony to the overriding importance he attached to economic development and, in that context, also to the relationship with the United States. [1149] It was, furthermore, a demonstration of the extraordinarily long-term perspective which, though alien to other cultures, is strongly characteristic of Chinese strategic thinking. The relationship with the United States has continued to be an article of faith for the Chinese leadership throughout the reform period, largely unanimous and uncontested, engendering over time a highly informed and intimate knowledge of America. [1150]
The contrast between China ’s approach towards the United States and that of the Soviet Union ’s prior to 1989 could hardly be greater. The USSR saw the West as the enemy; China chose, after 1972, to befriend it. The Soviet Union opted for autarchy and isolation; China, after 1978, sought integration and interdependence. The USSR shunned, and was excluded from, membership of such post-war Western institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and GATT; in contrast, China waited patiently for fifteen years until it was finally admitted as a member of the WTO in 2001. The Soviet Union embarked on military confrontation and a zero-sum relationship with the United States; China pursued rapprochement and cooperation in an effort to create the most favourable conditions for its economic growth. The Soviet Union was obliged to engage in prohibitive levels of military expenditure; China steadily reduced the proportion of GDP spent on its military during the 1980s and 1990s, falling from an average of 6.35 per cent between 1950 and 1980 to 2.3 per cent in the 1980s and 1.4 per cent in the 1990s. [1151] The strategies of the two countries were, in short, based on diametrically opposed logics. [1152] The Chinese approach is well illustrated by Deng’s comment: ‘Observe developments soberly, maintain our position, meet challenges calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, remain free of ambition, never claim leadership.’ [1153] It goes without saying that the relationship between China and the United States during the reform period has been profoundly unequal. [1154] China needed the US to a far greater extent than the US needed China. The United States possessed the world’s largest market and was the gatekeeper to an international system the design and operation of which it was overwhelmingly responsible for. China was cast in the role of supplicant, or, as China expert Steven I. Levine puts it, the United States acted towards China ‘like a self-appointed Credentials Committee that had the power to accept, reject, or grant probationary membership in the international club to an applicant of uncertain respectability’. [1155] In the longer term, when China is far stronger, this rather demeaning experience might find expression — and payback — in the Chinese attitude towards the United States; it might be seen by them to have been another, albeit milder, expression of their long-running humiliation.
Compared with China ’s huge investment in its relationship with the United States, the American attitude towards China, so far at least, stands in striking contrast. Its relationship with China has been seen by the US as one of only many international relationships, and usually far from the most important. As a result, American attention towards China has been episodic, occasionally rising to near the top of the agenda, but for the most part confined to the middle tier. [1156] During the first Clinton administration, for example, China barely figured. [1157] Although George W. Bush made strong noises against China during his first presidential election campaign, describing it as a ‘strategic competitor’, China sank down the Washington pecking order after 9/11 and relations between the two rapidly returned to the status quo ante. [1158] In line with the differential investment by the two powers in their relationship, China ’s impressive knowledge of the United States is not reciprocated in Washington beyond a relatively small coterie. [1159] Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the passing of the Cold War, the US was obliged to rethink the rationale for its relationship with China. [1160] It was not difficult. With its embrace of the market and growing privatization, China was seen, not wrongly, as moving towards capitalism. Furthermore, given China ’s double-digit economic growth and its huge population, it was regarded as offering boundless opportunities for US business. [1161] China became a key element in the American hubris about globalization in the 1990s, an integral part of what was seen as a process of Westernization which would culminate in the inevitable worldwide victory of Western capitalism, with the rest of the world, including China, increasingly coming to resemble the United States. Many assumptions were wrapped up in this hubris, from the triumph of Western lifestyles and cultural habits to the belief that Western-style democracy was of universal and inevitable applicability. [1162] George W. Bush declared in November 1999: ‘Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.’ [1163] Or as Thomas Friedman wrote: ‘ China ’s going to have a free press. Globalization will drive it.’ [1164] It was regarded as axiomatic, American author James Mann suggests, that, ‘the Chinese are inevitably becoming like us’. [1165] This view, which is still widely held, burdens American policy towards China with exaggerated expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled. [1166] The idea of globalization which lay at its heart was profoundly flawed.
вернуться[1146] James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (New York: Viking, 2007), p. 40.
вернуться[1147] Shambaugh, ‘Return to the Middle Kingdom?’, in Shambaugh, Power Shift, p. 28; Bates Gill, ‘China’s Evolving Regional Security Strategy’, in Shambaugh, Power Shift, p. 248.
вернуться[1148] Quoted by Joseph Y. S. Cheng and Zhang Wankun, ‘Patterns and Dynamics of China’s Strategic Behaviour’, in Zhao, Chinese Foreign Policy, p. 196.
вернуться[1149] For example, Liu Ji, ‘Making the Right Choices in Twenty-first Century Sino-American Relations’, in ibid., p. 248.
вернуться[1150] For example, David M. Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing US-China Relations, 1989-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 372-3.
вернуться[1151] David M. Lampton, ‘ China ’s Rise in Asia Need Not Be at America ’s Expense’, in Shambaugh, Power Shift, p. 314.
вернуться[1152] Zheng Yongnian, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 150.
вернуться[1153] Quoted by Suisheng Zhao in A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 35-6.
вернуться[1154] Steven I. Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations: Practicing Damage Control’, in Samuel S. Kim, ed., China and the World: Chinese Foreign Policy Faces the New Millennium, 4th edn (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 94-5.
вернуться[1155] Ibid., p. 98.
вернуться[1156] Ibid., p. 93.
вернуться[1157] Ibid., p. 97.
вернуться[1158] Cheng and Zhang, ‘Patterns and Dynamics of China’s Strategic Behaviour’, p. 200; Mann, The China Fantasy, pp. 3, 84-8.
вернуться[1159] Lampton, Same Bed, Different Dreams, pp. 372-3.
вернуться[1160] Suisheng Zhao, ‘Chinese Foreign Policy’, in Zhao, Chinese Foreign Policy, p. 15.
вернуться[1161] Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations’, p. 95; Mann, The China Fantasy, pp. 1–2.
вернуться[1162] Ibid., pp. 11–12.
вернуться[1163] George W. Bush, ‘A Distinctly American Internationalism’, speech at Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California, 19 November 1999.
вернуться[1164] Thomas I. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), p. 154.
вернуться[1165] Mann, The China Fantasy, p. 12.
вернуться[1166] Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations’, p. 96.