Conclusion

Driving beyond the Headlights

The process of revolution in China and the Soviet Union was not the same. In 1917 Lenin mobilized workers to seize power. But we encircled urban areas by the rural [areas]—it took us twenty-eight years to achieve power. We couldn’t have driven Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan if we had listened to Stalin, who was in favor of armed struggle, and if we had listened to him we’d still have American concessions [in the treaty port cities] in China. Lenin never talked about a mixed economy.

—Premier Li Peng, February 1990, Beijing

We have become more diversified but less coordinated. . . . “It has taken us twenty years to recognize, to know that Congress and the executive [in the United States] sometimes are together and sometimes apart. It is time for you to see differences [in China]—so many departments, interest groups, voices. Harder to follow than in the past. You need to work harder.”

—Chinese intelligence analyst, September 2011

“A Chinese pop song goes like this: ‘May I ask where the path is? It is where you take your first step.’”

—Vice President Xi Jinping, U.S. Department of State, luncheon remarks, February 14, 2012

THE ROAD TRAVELED AND THE WAY FORWARD

Careers, revolutions, and research are similar in a few respects—each begins with the first step, their development follows logic not fully apparent at the outset, and the final destination is often unanticipated. I started this journey to better understand China, expecting a career in which I would never go to the PRC, much less meet citizens or leaders there. Instead, I supposed I would have a professional lifetime such as that I experienced in Hong Kong in the early 1970s, interviewing refugees and culling information from local mainland newspapers (difang baozhi) not intended for foreign eyes (neibu faxing) that had been used to wrap the produce imported from the mainland. These papers had been rescued from the municipal garbage by enterprising intelligence operatives and research organizations—some pages had tomato stains. The China I first encountered through the optics of this British crown colony clinging to the mainland’s coast gave virtually no hint of what rapidly would emerge across the colony’s border in Shenzhen and beyond.

From the vantage point of the second decade of the new millennium, China’s second revolution of the communist era has reached a point that Deng and his compatriots could never have fully anticipated when they initiated it in the late 1970s. General Secretary Xi Jinping and his cohort of so-called fifth-generation leaders must now take further steps forward, without seeing the path ahead clearly or knowing the precise destination. The dangers of standing still outweigh those of forging ahead. If PRC leaders and the Chinese people do not continue to adapt creatively to the implications of preceding reform steps, things will go terribly wrong. Conversely, if they find a path to more humane, participatory, rules-based governance with a minimum of human anguish along the way, while simultaneously maintaining vigorous economic growth and becoming progressively more involved in providing global public goods, this Chinese revolution will have made enormous strides beyond those already achieved. China is at an inflection point, with the gains thus far achieved either providing the basis for a more stable and responsive future or signaling the appearance of a more pluralized, unmanageable polity and society.

As to research, the path taken by this work has led me to a greater, and to some degree unanticipated, appreciation of the fragility of the successes thus far achieved as well as the enormous challenges lying ahead. Among the challenges confronting China is the problem Plato addressed in The Republic—from where does the visionary, public-spirited leader arise in a society that tends to replicate what has preceded it? One could have asked this question at the time of Mao’s death, yet Deng Xiaoping was the improbable answer—improbable because in many respects he was an almost indispensable instrument of Mao’s flawed rule, yet after assuming power he became a leader who overturned much of the Chairman’s handiwork. For that matter, Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, was an unlikely and unanticipated vehicle by which Taiwan would move toward a more democratic future in the 1980s—he came of age having been trained in the Soviet Union and having been a central player in the coercive apparatus. How does leadership that produces transformational results arise from a transactional system?

Whatever one thinks of the means Deng Xiaoping used to claw his way to power—his personal responsibility in the antirightist campaign and the Great Leap Forward that precipitated mass starvation of the late 1950s and early 1960s, or his responsibilities with respect to the June 1989 tragedy and its aftermath—the strategic decisions he made following his mid-1977 final return to power set China on a more productive course internally and externally than it had been on in more than 150 years. Whereas Mao became more erratic as he grew older, Deng made his greatest contributions in the last twenty years of his life.

Deng’s revolution has produced a very different society and polity from the one in which he rose. The winners in the economic reform era have gained strength, yet many now resist the further changes necessary to bring the social structure and the governing system into greater harmony. Yesterday’s successes have created today’s intractable problems and resistance. This is normal—the robber barons and entrepreneurs of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America resisted the progressives, trustbusters, and regulators of their era.

The era of reform has brought China to a place with respect to governance it never has been before, as explained in chapter 2. Its leaders must govern collectively while the system grows increasingly complex, as power is diffusing, and as the bureaucracy and society continue to pluralize. Today, less dominant leaders seek to collectively govern an increasingly complex and empowered society with inadequate institutions to articulate interests, adjudicate conflicts, regulate and supervise political and societal actors, or ensure just and responsible policy implementation—all in the absence of robust legal or constitutional mechanisms of succession. Imagine, for instance, that Xi Jinping had become incapacitated in the period leading up to his ascension to power in 2012–13: What was “Plan B”? There was none, and one is sobered by the possibilities.

China is becoming vigorous in terms of economic and military power but brittle in terms of governance. Economic and social change have played midwife to a middle class that increasingly wants justice, respect, more voice—in a word, dignity. There is also a large urban underclass that has fueled relentless and fast-paced urbanization, and sooner or later China’s leaders must address its demands for security and justice. Moreover, there are issues above either class or justice—as I write this sentence in February 2013 the China air quality monitoring website reports that Shijiazhuang is “severely polluted” at a reading of 401, with “protection recommended,” and Xian, at a considerable distance from Shijiazhuang, is at 322, also “severely polluted” with “protection recommended.”1 Numbers higher than 50 carry health warnings. A government unable to protect its people from such conditions will soon need protection itself. Not to be overlooked, rural inhabitants are becoming more vocal, knowledgeable, and unwilling to passively accept what elite urbanites determine to be their lot in life.

Like an automobile driving at high speed on a moonless night in the desert, China is undergoing a rate of domestic change so rapid that the country’s forward momentum cannot be stopped or the direction adequately adjusted in the existing zone of illumination—the PRC is driving too fast for the headlights to reveal what dangers lurk ahead. The rate of economic and social change is an indication of immense progress, but its pace has created perils, not least environmental, and at any moment China might hit a stationary object that was diffuse and unrecognized in the obscurity of the night.

If it is to be successful, China’s strategy going forward must involve political changes different and greater than those to date. There must be movement away from almost single-minded economic performance-based legitimacy to reform-based legitimacy. Reform-based legitimacy is premised on bringing China’s social, economic, and governing systems into greater harmony with one another in the very different PRC that has evolved since mid-1977. It is legitimacy anchored in procedural justice and participation, as well as continued economic and quality-of-life improvements. This means that China must find ways to manage pluralization constructively. This will prove to be Xi Jinping’s greatest hurdle.

This political change needs to increase system responsiveness, even though compared to the ossified system of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union the CCP has demonstrated considerable capacities in this regard. A principal legacy of the Soviet model in China was that it was a “supply system.” In other words, the political center determined what the state, society, and individuals needed and undertook to supply them with it or to ignore those needs entirely. Civic society, to the degree it existed, was not an actor but rather acted upon. The initiative was top down. Deng’s reform was about moving toward a “demand-driven system” in the economic sphere, but he left the political system in the top-down, supply-system mode.

Over the years of reform, a “responsive authoritarian” capacity has evolved piecemeal, enabling PRC leaders to hold things together, thus far. However, in the twenty-first century, the broadly encompassing change Deng unleashed in the economic realm must be matched to a far greater extent in the political domain—building institutions of interest articulation, adjudication, and implementation that are the political equivalents to the economic marketplace. The government must move from the role of participant to that of referee. It would be best if this political reform happened in a gradual, controlled manner, but it needs to happen, and the course needs to be set by leaders who bring the vision to this era that Deng brought to his.

As this book goes to press, Xi Jinping’s era is just beginning, and it is too early to say whether his experience stewarding China’s most modernized, cosmopolitan, and globally interdependent areas (Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai), and his limited but important experience in the military, have endowed him with the necessary authority and vision. Surrounding Xi in 2013 are six individuals on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, a group that is far more educationally diverse than its predecessors. This diversity could presage a period of creativity and experimentalism, or the diversity of the group itself could signal immobilization in the face of crushing problems.

In short, there is a new leadership in China, with somewhat different characteristics from its predecessors, which create the possibility for a next wave of advancing reform. To a considerable extent, the era of Hu Jintao was focused on consolidation, while the preceding era of Jiang Zemin has been insufficiently credited for the dynamism that was its hallmark. Preliminary indications in mid-2013 are that the forces that favor tackling long-deferred economic and political reform bottlenecks have gained strength. The story, indeed the legacy, of the so-called fifth generation will be the degree to which the dynamic impulse in China can prevail over the interests resistant to further change—and whether a proud generation of beneficiaries of Deng’s reforms will be able to resist the siren song of assertive nationalism.

GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES

The Rise of a Middle Class

For Americans, all good things have traditionally been thought to come from having a strong middle class. China is building a huge middle class, already around the magnitude of the entire population of the United States, even though this still leaves around a billion Chinese people who remain in much less secure economic circumstances. In the long run, the middle class may become a force for more responsive, humane, and predictable governance. Much happens before you get to the long run, however. Today’s middle class is still a comparatively small island, floating in a sea of relative poverty, and it may, therefore, continue to ally with the elite in the quest to protect what it has struggled to achieve—the work of Bruce Dickson and Margaret Pearson, among others, suggest this is the current predisposition of many in the middle class, particularly its business components.2 However, when this social stratum constitutes a greater proportion of society, less fearful of the underclass, it may challenge the elite, setting off instability or going in policy directions that could inflict terrible costs on many, both within and outside the PRC. Only when the middle class has become the ascendant political force is there a center of gravity adequate to solidify rule of law and build a society in which one sees a shift from “survival” to “self-expression” values.

Moreover, gains made in modernization can be lost—political development is not a one-way conveyor to an ever more humane and secure future. While having a fully institutionalized, middle-class-centric system can foster stability, the pathway to that place is rocky. The middle class also is a vehicle for the more effective expression of popular passions, and, as America’s Federalist forefathers knew, popular passions are not always enlightened or compassionate. This was driven home to me by the stunning remarks of one senior Chinese academic about what the rise of a PRC middle class would mean for Taiwan:

“The first priority is to put the [Taiwan] issue under control. Put a boundary as no independence. For Beijing, resolution means reunification; only unsure when—twenty years? And the starting point is a middle class that is half the Chinese population. Then China will pay more attention to individual rights. So governance will be changed in China and the nature of the middle class changes. The starting of democratization on the mainland will never allow an independent Taiwan. We will pass a referendum [on the mainland on the Taiwan issue], inform you when [Taiwan] is reunified, and we will take over. Democracy in China is the end of the current situation [with regard to Taiwan].”3

There are other PRC views about Taiwan, to be sure, but what is described above is one possible course of future events. My sense is that most middle-class Chinese would resonate with the above sentiment.

The interviews that form the bedrock of this volume indicate that Chinese citizens and leaders alike believe that their country’s economic power now entitles them to more leverage in negotiations and more favorable outcomes in the world system. The biggest change in this respect can be dated from China’s relatively unscathed emergence from the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 and then accelerated by China’s continued growth in the face of the global economic downturn in 2008 and thereafter. As one senior adviser to China’s top leaders explained in late 2009, in China there is “‘a common understanding that the United States is not in good shape. . . . Power is shifting and [China is] more confident.’”⁴

This premature discounting of the United States will prove mistaken, I believe, but my analysis does not diminish the force of this widely shared Chinese conviction.⁵ This middle-class and hair-trigger nationalist empowerment was on full display in September 2012, when thousands of predominantly middle-class citizens took to the streets in fifty or more cities throughout China, carrying placards, in some cases perpetrating vandalism, and shouting vehement anti-Japanese slogans, calling for retaliation on Japan for infringements on what they saw as Chinese sovereignty over the small outcroppings in the East China Sea called the Diaoyu or Senkaku Islands. At least one placard (printed in China Daily as a cover story) went so far as to display what appeared to be a burning Japan ignited by nuclear weapons.⁶ Moving into early 2013, this conflict was assuming worrying military dimensions, with the intrusion of Chinese military, paramilitary, and civilian aircraft and maritime vessels into Japanese defense zones holding out the possibilities of conscious escalation, miscalculation, or accident.

Thus the rise of a middle class offers the longer-term hope of more humane, participatory, and predictable governance, but it also carries within it the seeds of instability, extremism, and the tyranny of assertive nationalism. Mature middle-class democratic states may possess the attributes democracy promoters attribute to them, but getting to such a state is an altogether more tumultuous process. The PRC now faces dilemmas similar to those that confronted the founders of the United States in developing a constitutional architecture. How does one build a system of governance with sufficient strength to regulate society in essential areas, without citizens losing control over the leviathan that has been created? How does one prevent democracy from becoming a tyranny of the majority? How does a constitutional order constrain popular passion while liberating the citizen to act responsibly? How does one define responsible behavior? Today’s China has no effective constitution—one is needed. However, the question is: “How can a constitution be written and embedded in the hearts of the Chinese people?” And will the beneficiaries of the current order find ways to incorporate, peacefully, the new, more assertive societal groups that the vision and policies of Deng’s generation spawned?

Corruption: A Cancer on the Regime

In his report to the Eighteenth Party Congress, outgoing general secretary Hu Jintao, in speaking of corruption, said: “If we fail to handle this issue well, it could prove fatal to the Party, and even cause the collapse of the Party and the fall of the state.”7 A few days later, in addressing the new Politburo, incoming general secretary Xi Jinping similarly minced no words, saying: “A mass of facts tells us that if corruption becomes increasingly serious, it will inevitably doom the party and the state.”⁸

The regime of Mao Zedong was profoundly corrupt in the sense that one man and a small coterie around him had unspeakable power over China’s people that they exercised with minimal regard to consequences. In relative comfort this privileged clique, whose children grew up in hermetically sealed communities behind high walls, formed networks that gave them and their progeny great advantage when China turned toward the “socialist market economy.” The hypocrisy of a Jiang Qing (Mao’s fourth wife) who harangued on behalf of proletarian equality in public and lived in palatial residences, wearing Western clothing and watching Hollywood films with her cronies in private—all indulgences denied the Chinese people at the time of the Chairman’s demise—is a profound testament to the moral rot of the Mao regime. Nonetheless, at that time, most Chinese were materially and politically equal—equally impoverished and powerless.

Something very profound has happened in China’s reform era. As Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom explained in the 1950s, societies have three basic ways to achieve control beyond spontaneous self-limitation imbued through indoctrination (ethics): hierarchies, bargaining (markets), and preference counting systems (voting).9 The reform era has brought the weakening of hierarchies in the PRC, while voting has remained unacceptable to the party as an alternative way to exercise legitimate control, forcing the system to fall back upon bargaining (and markets) to a considerable extent. Markets have brought enormous material and social liberation benefits to China’s people since the late 1970s, but without the constraints of effective and impartial legal, regulatory, and judicial systems, without shared moral norms, and without accountability through preference counting methods, nothing stands in the way of bargaining activity mutating into an ever widening spiral of corruption.

Whether corruption accounts for about 4 percent of GDP (as Minxin Pei estimated for the late 1990s), 13.3 to 16.9 percent, as Wang Shaoguang, Hu Angang, and Ding Yuanzhu have asserted (also for the late 1990s), or the much higher range of numbers that other scholars have estimated, the magnitude of “take” in the world’s second largest economy is staggering—corroding the elite’s right to rule and greatly reducing domestic and global confidence.¹⁰ The revelations concerning former Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai and others (such as Ao Man Long, the Macau transport secretary taking kickbacks totaling more than a hundred million U.S. dollars) in the spring and summer of 2012 only shone a light on what everyone in China knows: corruption among the elite is rampant.¹¹ In an era of widespread information availability and a rising middle class looking for some measure of justice and respect, corruption is a time bomb ticking at the regime’s clay feet.

The Military-Civilian Balance

The danger of the relationship between the civilian and military leadership is unlikely to be the actual replacement of civilians by uniformed officers in a couplike development. Indeed, under Xi Jinping, the practice of having no uniformed military officer on the Standing Committee of the Politburo has continued, and the norm of having the CMC chaired by the individual simultaneously holding the other paramount civilian positions has also been strengthened. The more profound dangers in the civil-military relationship are fourfold. First, the military-industrial complex is likely to become progressively more central to the Chinese economy, and hence more influential. Second, the military may become an increasingly potent symbol of China’s nationalist aspirations in the minds of the public, and China’s civilian political leaders could become progressively more reluctant to tangle with the military on highly charged nationalistic issues. Third, the military may simply expand its “room to run” in the system, as it has demonstrated the capability to do from time to time, presenting civilians with faits accomplis from which they find it difficult to extract themselves. In the aggregate, these first three dangers could give rise to a fourth, in which the fear should be less a military takeover than a situation in which military-related personalities and interests become so strong that moderating civilian control is inhibited.

This fourth danger in part materialized in the 2002–4 period when Jiang Zemin retired from his posts as general secretary and president while retaining the chairmanship of the CMC for two additional years. As explained in chapter 6, this development created the potential dilemma that the head of state and the party general secretary (then Hu Jintao) did not control the military—the “two centers” or “two headquarters” problem. As it so happened, there was no circumstance in which the two centers (Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao) wanted to go in radically different directions in any important situation (so far as we know); hence no crisis ensued. The fact that in the 2012 party transition there again was an argument over whether the predecessor (Hu Jintao) should for a time retain control of the military rather than hand it over to the successor (Xi Jinping) is disquieting, though in the end Xi was appointed. It is not desirable to have ambiguity as to who is in charge in a crisis.

An area of debate (starting in the 1980s) that is likely to assume greater importance in the future is the degree to which the military should remain an instrument of the Communist Party or become an instrument of the state, irrespective of the political coloration of the regime. Any meaningful liberalization and constitutional development will involve a redefinition of the PLA’s relationship to the Communist Party.

CHINA AND THE WORLD

Impulses Shaping Chinese Global Behavior

Beijing now deals with the outside world from a position of greater strength, more interdependence, and more confidence than at any time in the modern era. Accompanying this newfound strength has been and will be a degree of “realism” and “pragmatism” in China’s dealings with the outside world that is disconcerting to many in the West. This will be particularly so to an America seeing itself in search of shared global norms to govern the conduct of international affairs and the internal behavior of individual states—though, it should be noted, Washington often is no more willing to delegate decisions about its vital interests or internal affairs to others than is Beijing. The West starts its thinking about international affairs with the search for norms and formal constraints and then accommodates its principles to the stubborn realities of limited resources and vital interests.

On the other hand, Beijing’s thinking on international affairs does not derive from the vision of universal norms. Rather, the starting point for China is fluid process—the endless accommodation to dynamic reality, the ceaseless endeavor of adjusting relationships, and the quest for an ever shifting pathway that maximizes its interests. This reality notwithstanding, however, in 2013 there are high-ranking people and opinion leaders in and out of government in the PRC who argue that China’s future global status and role rest on aligning the country more closely with global norms and who do not simply dismiss the call for universal values as capitulation to “westernization.”12 China still is debating whether and how to adopt universal values—something America did long ago, asserting that its own values were universal values. As the U.S. Declaration of Independence put it, “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .” China’s different starting point, its very different historical experience and self-conception, its distinctive resource endowments and economic circumstances, and its far different geostrategic setting all result in distinctive Chinese leadership and popular perceptions and behavior. Conflicts of interest, value, and policy will be enduring fixtures of the West’s interaction with China.

PRC political leaders and many of its citizens have concluded that the global balance of power is tilting away from the established post–World War II powers (the United States, the European Union, Japan, and the Soviet Union/Russia), that America has lost the moral legitimacy to be the default global leader, and that China has gained sufficient strength to be less deferential to the preexisting international power hierarchy.¹³ If this assessment means that the United States will be less dominant in the global system in the future than in the past, along important dimensions this is proving true, but I sense a widespread tendency in China to underestimate the resilience of the U.S. cultural, economic, and political system.¹⁴

It is not that Beijing wishes to overturn the international system (particularly the global economic apparatus) from which it has gained so much, but it most assuredly wants more influence in that system and wants to “rectify” some of the perceived injustices of prior arrangements. Among those injustices is the separation of Taiwan and American challenges to Beijing’s desire for a wider security buffer in all security dimensions—land, air, sea, space, and cyber. For two centuries China, believing that power is the principal coin in the realm of international affairs, has been determined to augment its comprehensive national power. As one Chinese foreign policy analyst put it to me: “‘When China has more power, the U.S. will pay more attention.’”15 China is not comfortable with a U.S.-led international security order, one reliant on alliances born of the Cold War, and instead feels more comfortable working within the United Nations system, which requires Beijing’s assent before collective security action can be taken.

Throughout history, China has viewed itself in several different relationships to what we may loosely call the international system. In the dynastic period, the Middle Kingdom thought of itself as the center of a cultural universe in which peripheral states at progressively greater distance from China had less salience and fewer obligations—this was a China that was basically self-reliant, with its borders expanding or contracting as central power waxed and waned. The tone and substance of relations with its regional neighbors were at once variable and reciprocal. Speaking of China’s traditional relations with neighbors, Ren Xiao explains: “The more distant they were from the center, the weaker the political link between them. For those remote areas, what was left often was simply an empty shell that only existed in theory.”¹⁶ Then, in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century, China became a victim of a predatory industrialized West and aggressive Japan. By virtue of internal political disorder and weakness, as well as foreign encroachment, China lost control of both its internal circumstances and its external relations.

Upon the communist victory in 1949, a new page was turned, with China regaining its full sovereignty and, for a time, aligning itself with the Soviet Union in the ideological and armed conflicts of the Cold War. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Sino-Soviet relations dramatically deteriorated, Beijing sensed the danger of having conflicts with two superpowers simultaneously and tilted toward Washington to offset the greater threat from Moscow.

Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, for the first time in its modern history China sees itself as a strong independent actor in a world of nominally equal sovereign states. Accepting the basic structure of international economic and cultural institutions, Beijing wishes to contribute to them but rejects the American dominance that has typically characterized those structures. This is to say, China accepts the economic and social structures of the international system and the universalistic character of the UN-oriented international security system, as well as the regimes in which it has negotiated membership. However, Beijing rejects the U.S.-dominated alliance system (particularly in East Asia), and even more the right of Washington to act unilaterally (or through ad hoc coalitions it creates) on a global basis.

A core question for the future is: “Can the United States work with the PRC and others to develop a shared vision of international security architecture, first in East Asia and then globally?” The West has already gone quite far in accommodating Beijing’s economic and cultural participation on a global basis. But China’s still powerful “victim mentality,” its fear of “bullying,” its aversion to being sucked into international obligations it can ill afford, and its anxiety about the West’s proclivity to involve itself in the PRC’s internal political evolution will make it a prickly partner on the security side. Mounting frictions in East and Southeast Asia do not look promising for a new, shared vision of an inclusive regional security order, but this should be the objective.

There is another powerful impulse at work in China as its leaders and people think about their relationship to the world, particularly America, and Washington’s ceaseless effort to get Beijing to use its growing power for U.S. purposes. As one adviser to China’s senior leaders put it to me amid the anti-Japanese demonstrations sweeping the PRC in September 2012, “‘We think about China, not the U.S. We tell the U.S. to do its thing and China will do its peaceful development. . . . Do your own thing and leave us alone.’”17

The United States and China in the Years Ahead

While there is much that strains the fabric of U.S.-China relations, at least two strands help knit the two countries together. First, a number of critical problems that the planet and individual nations face cannot be adequately addressed without Sino-American collaboration, among them global economic growth, world health, and environmental issues. This does not mean the two countries can resolve global challenges without others, but it does mean that not much will be accomplished if they do not cooperate. Second, both societies face the fundamental and long-term task of rebuilding themselves for a new age—economically, socially, and institutionally. Neither the United States nor China needs the diversion of having to deal with the other as a principal external problem.

A central question therefore is: Will the centripetal forces of interdependence, the gains to be made through cooperation, and the need of each nation to recreate itself for a new age prove stronger than the combined forces of different philosophical starting points, often divergent national interests, distinctive national narratives, and increasingly fragmented societies and polities? Several forces are contending for primacy in China and for that matter in the United States—domestic politics, interdependence, big-power realist thinking, and the technological action-reaction cycle. Given these contending impulses, the way forward is to construct an inclusive balance of forces in Asia that restrains assertive impulses, build inclusive multilateral economic and security institutions, and reinforce interdependence, thereby raising the costs of unrestrained conflict.

Two things seem blindingly obvious to me after more than forty years of interaction with a multitude of leaders in the PRC and those around the world who deal with them. First, crude external pressure applied to accelerate internal change in China and crude external pressure designed to produce a more congenial PRC foreign policy generally backfire. As one of China’s premier analysts of public opinion put it in late 2012 in speaking of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trips to China: “‘She is a guest, but gives the Chinese no face. So I don’t give you face. We don’t have friendship, we have policy.’”18 Second, excessive accommodation to PRC demands feeds an image in Beijing of weakness in the outside world that, itself, invites further attempts to push. The way out of this dilemma is the combined power of example, opportunity, comprehensive national power carefully sheathed, and dialogue—never forgetting that resolving our own problems can be more effective than coercing others to solve theirs.