Walking almost arm in arm like best buddies, Xi Jinping and President Obama spent over nine hours in conversation at the June 2013 summit at Sunnylands, on the US West Coast. That the new leader of China should, against protocol, have given up time to go across the Pacific in order to build a relationship with the leader of the United States was only one of many clear pieces of evidence that if there truly was a ‘special relationship’ in the twenty-first century, it was not between the United Kingdom and United States (a coupling that has borne this description for decades, despite no one in London or Washington knowing precisely what it means), but between the United States and China. Talked of as a G2 in the previous decade, they are the essential partners in future global prosperity and security. Various issues – from climate change to reforming international finance governances to sorting out developing world debt and poverty, even doing a ‘nuclear freeze’ deal with Iran – had to involve them both in order to succeed. The absence of one or the other (and sometimes both) almost immediately reduces the relevance of any international agreement.
Yet, as many point out, the United States–China relationship is one contaminated by distrust, fractiousness and tension. Only a year after the cordial meeting between Xi and Obama, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) issued an unprecedented formal accusation against five officials in the Chinese PLA, accusing them of cyberespionage crimes. The language used in the official press release announcing the accusations came from another planet than the warm words which had characterized the two presidents’ relationship as they walked together over golf courses in California, as this quote from the former FBI director James B. Comey illustrates:
For too long, the Chinese government has blatantly sought to use cyber espionage to obtain economic advantage for its state-owned industries […] The indictment announced today is an important step. But there are many more victims, and there is much more to be done. With our unique criminal and national security authorities, we will continue to use all legal tools at our disposal to counter cyber espionage from all sources.1
These two events, which took place in the space of just 12 months, illustrate the spectrum of United States–China relations and its complexity. The roots of that complexity arise partly from clear political and cultural differences between the two countries, but also from their often torturous and difficult history. Even before Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, that complexity resurfaced with his taking of a phone call from Tsai Ing-wen, the president of the Republic of China on Taiwan – a place the United States has not even recognized since 1979. This caused shock waves in China and across the world, illustrating, almost half a century after the Nixon rapprochement, how much potential there still is in the relationship for tension and clashes.
Sometime in 1969, just as the most violent phase of the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end, a group of PLA leaders who had been victims of the movement and ended up in prison in the north-east of China were summoned to a meeting where they were tasked with thinking through something which, had it been spoken aloud at the time, would have risked a death sentence – how China could forge closer relations with the United States. In the topsy-turvy world of the late Mao era, people could think – and even say – the unthinkable. Whether they survived was dependent on where the order had come from (if Mao mandated it, they were safe. If not, then they were often exposed and could find themselves in deep trouble). In this case, the command for their ruminations had come from the very top. Mao Zedong himself wanted to know how to give his country (and at that time, it literally was his country) security and space from the USSR. A closer relationship with the United States was the most logical choice, despite all the barriers.
The USA and the PRC’s relationship had been extremely frosty since 1949. In the 1950s, they had as good as been at war with each other due to the Korean confrontation, even though this was mainly driven by the UN. Right to the bitter end of the civil war that had begun in 1946, the United States had provided Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces with equipment and funding in their struggle with the Communists. With the Nationalists’ flight to Taiwan, the United States became the island’s chief patron – a situation that prevails to this day. Red China, as Washington labelled it then, was part of the Soviet-dominated world, politically alien and in effect an enemy on the wrong side of the Cold War.
Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the United States figured in Chinese propaganda as the great imperialist, the new colonizer, its war in Vietnam evidence of its desire to set up client states throughout the Asia region. The United States had troops in South Korea, the Philippines and Japan, and alliances (after the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco) that reached down to Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand. Very few US citizens ever visited China, apart from a few who were politically favoured. Access was restricted on both sides; through China’s internal Reference News, a digest of translated material from Western newspapers and journals circulated to the Party elite leaders, those in the upper echelons got some idea of what was being reported in US papers, but most Chinese people were not allowed access to this material. For Americans, their main conduit of information was via Hong Kong. The nadir of the relationship was the highly charged moment when Premier Zhou Enlai was attending an international peace conference in Geneva in 1954, and came into contact with the US Secretary of State John Forster Dulles. There is no clear account of their encounter, but the reported refusal of Dulles to shake Zhou’s hand has entered international political mythology.2 It has come to typify the way in which the United States was regarded as ‘losing’ China in this era.
The disagreement between China and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s started to change the dynamics of geopolitics. China did not fit easily into the Cold War bloc of countries. For example, it was the only country in the Communist world to maintain friendly relations with Albania, despite the fact that Moscow had labelled the tiny European country a maverick, and a socialist traitor. Under Mao, the PRC became an increasingly idiosyncratic actor, but it was regarded as being predominantly introspective, never attempting to export its political values beyond its borders. There was a brief phase at the high point of Maoism when voices abroad calling for more support for the Maoist revolutionary struggle became more strident, irritating the United States and Europe. But this proved short-lived, and its impact negligible. The simple fact was that Maoism, beyond being an exotic marginal force, never had much impact on even the radical fringes of cultures in democracies, and had limited traction even in developing countries.3 Chinese Marxism was far too esoteric.
Mao’s anxiety about the Soviet Union and its intentions was long-standing. But in 1969 this was exacerbated by the clashes with the Red Army that the PRC had suffered on its vast shared north-eastern border with the USSR (known as the Sino-Soviet border conflict). Concentrated on Zhenbao Island on the Ussuri River, it involved skirmishes throughout March of that year, resulting in up to 1,000 casualties on both sides. Chinese media at the time portrayed the event exhaustively as an indication of the USSR’s ill intentions and aggression towards its neighbour. Battles continued throughout the rest of the year. For the political leaders of the PRC in Beijing, however, with their memories formed during an era where war and conflict was the norm, they assumed the worst-case scenario about where matters were heading. For them, the USSR was almost certain to use its nuclear weapons against them. From this period, therefore, Russia figured as a far greater and more immediate threat to the PRC than the more remote United States.
Contemplating détente in some form with the United States flowed from the simple logic – as the old Arabic adage states – that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. The three high-level, detained PLA officials mentioned earlier in this chapter had to run through the various options of how an improved relationship with the United States might work. They were operating, in effect, as a deeply secretive, unorthodox think tank – one with a single client: Mao Zedong.4 Their conclusion was that moves towards a rapprochement that triangulated the USSR into a situation where it was on its own against the two other powers, China and the United States, made sense. Their advice appealed to Mao. After all, his paranoia towards the Soviet Union was not new: it had inspired his Third Front policy, relocating much of the country’s heavy industry, including its aerospace engineering and aviation factories, to provincial places like Xi’an, Shenyang, Harbin and Chengdu (where they remain to this day). But the 1969 attacks had added a real element of urgency that something even more dramatic had to be tried in order to preserve the PRC’s security.
The first attempt to reach out to the United States fell on deaf ears, though more by mistake than through deliberate intent. US journalist Edgar Snow, who back in the 1930s had been one of the first foreigners ever to interview Mao, and whose book Red Star Over China had introduced the Chinese Communist movement to the outside world, was invited to participate in the National Day celebrations and stand beside the Chairman himself in 1970. There were two audiences this was intended to reach. One was Washington, which Mao hoped would heed his friendly gesture and start responding; the other was domestic, the hardliners around Lin Biao, his heir apparent at the time, and his wife Jiang Qing, who were resolutely set against seeing the United States as anything but a wholesale enemy. Both audiences failed to understand what this gesture was trying to tell them. For the United States, Snow was regarded as a long-standing left-wing sympathizer, now resident in Switzerland and almost persona non grata. There were no surprises to them in seeing him cosy up to left-wing leaders. For the Chinese radicals, rapprochement with the United States was simply unthinkable – another scheme to weaken the country cooked up by enemies within, and one that they needed to destroy by lobbying the Chairman. Snow was simply there as an old friend of Mao. They thought nothing more of it.
Mao proved resolute, however, his fear of the USSR trumping all other considerations. In 1970–1, first via Chinese representatives in Poland and then through their own diplomats in New York once the People’s Republic had been readmitted to the UN in 1971, China began direct talks with US officials. The presiding genius behind these was President Nixon’s Machiavellian national security advisor Henry Kissinger. It was Kissinger’s secret mission to Beijing from Pakistan in 1971, during which he met both Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong himself, which paved the way for the ensuing presidential visit and the start of normalization of ties in the September of the following year. When Nixon landed on the tarmac on a cold day in Beijing to be met by Zhou Enlai, something which would have been hard to imagine even a few months before was seen playing across TV stations around the United States.5
The 1972 visit still casts a resplendent shadow across US–Chinese relations to this day. Its anniversaries, particularly significant ones like the 30th and 40th, figure large in diplomatic calendars between the two countries. This is probably because it showed a confluence of two highly unorthodox political imaginations – those of Mao and of Nixon. It is unlikely that other more sanguine, risk-averse leaders would have taken the plunge in the way these two did. For Nixon, too, his credibility in the United States as a fierce critic of the left wing and of Communism meant that he was trusted to do deals with China which were seen to be in the United States’ interests in a way a Democrat might have found hard. Nixon’s fate, being to all intents and purposes removed from power during the Watergate scandal, also provided some education to Chinese leaders about the vagaries of democratic multiparty systems. Mao was simply bewildered by how the main leader of a country could be summarily thrown out of office in this way. And for Nixon, he was famously deeply impressed by the ways in which Zhou, in front of his eyes, was able to decide the front-page layout of the People’s Daily, the party-controlled national newspaper.
Under President Carter at the end of the decade relations were normalized completely, with diplomatic recognition shifting from Taipei to Beijing. This was in line with comments Nixon himself had made a decade earlier in the journal Foreign Affairs just before becoming president, when he had asked rhetorically how it was possible for a country of almost 800 million people (as the population stood back then) to simply have no recognition on the United Nations, disenfranchising a fifth of humanity. Once full diplomatic links existed between the two countries, a new era of engagement started.
For all the bright words at the start, this was never going to be a straightforward relationship. The 1980s typified the good years, an era characterized by US journalist Jim Mann in Beijing Jeep: A Case Study of Western Business in China as economically wild and freewheeling, one in which Deng Xiaoping appeared for the second time on Time magazine’s cover as Man of the Year. The countries almost enjoyed a love affair, with US brands like Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken finding a vast new market hungry for its products, and figures like the legendary comedian Bob Hope doing shows from the capital, Beijing, telling the ‘folks’ back home about how wonderful China was.
With the economic reforms promoted by the Deng leadership, China did need US markets, capital and, in particular, its technology. For them, at least, it was a relationship built on clear strategic need. For the United States, however, there was always, even in this period, a slight asymmetry. China was strategically important in the Cold War, as a means of needling the Russians. But under reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, the man that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said the West ‘could do business with’, the USSR became less problematic. Questions about what the strategic attitude towards relations with Communist China should be revolved largely around the idea that through engagement, China would move towards not just economic liberalization but also political reform. It would, in effect, become just like the USA, and yet another major hurdle would have fallen in the global march towards freedom, democracy and human rights.
The 1989 student uprising, which was brutally put down by the Chinese military, has been exhaustively discussed in other sources. As far as Deng Xiaoping was concerned, it was the end of the United States’ idealism towards him as a man who wanted to transform China into a democracy. On the night of 3 June, he proved where his real loyalty lay; he was to the end a believer in one-party Leninist rule. His own words reported after the event, when speaking to the loyalist military units that had taken the lead in suppressing the rebels, was to blame the ‘complex’ international context. The role of the United States, the suggestion it was lurking in the background, was never explicitly stated, but the ideas the United States represented – zealously promoting different values, the adoption of which at the very least would lead to political competition for the Communist Party – was not hard to divine. The two powers had been, in the words of one famous saying of the time, sleeping in the same bed but having different dreams.
There is a more serious question about the 1989 events and their impact on United States–China relations, and one that is not often asked. According to analysts like US academic Robert S. Ross, the attitude of the George H. W. Bush presidency at the time was that China needed stability.6 The world was entering a period in which not only the USSR but also the Middle East was in turmoil, and the United States did not want to add China to this equation. Bush was to prove in his final response to the war against Iraq a highly cautious figure. He had served in Beijing as head of the Liaison Office there in the mid-1970s. He knew the Chinese leaders well. His view was clearly that there was no value in enforcing change on them. So while there was initial coldness, and the imposition of trade and travel embargoes, the remarkable thing about the US response to 1989 was how quickly United States–China relations were normalized again.
Did the United States have the opportunity to put more pressure on China at this time, when it was clearly weak and divided? Could it have encouraged more radical political change, forced China into making concessions to democratic reform? The United States is often accused of having lost China and forced it into isolation from the early 1950s onwards. There are heated arguments about whose fault this was, with some stating that the United States pushed it into this position because of its campaign of ostracization, and others advocating that the United States had zero influence and that China was always likely to occupy this sort of position. Following the events in 1989, there was the possibility that a US president with more grit might have placed pressure on China and seen change, correcting this prior history of failed attempts to get closer to Beijing.
In the end the Communist Party at the time had the space to make this decision, partly because of the slack it had been cut by the United States. It did understand its primary focus had to be on economic development (something that in many ways the 1989 protests had been about, with rising inflation and Party corruption). It knew that better economic performance would form the core pillar of its legitimacy into the future. Eventually, the main thrust of its response in recovering from the 1989 turbulence was to ensure that economic growth continued and the prosperity of Chinese citizens kept increasing. But this was not accompanied by any political reforms. Within two years, with the 1992 ‘southern tour’ of Deng Xiaoping, this commitment had clearly been made – to continue to change the economy, but never the one-party governance model. Deng had stated that without reform there was only the road to perdition. But reform in this context meant accepting the core role of the Party, and the Party alone, as the best way to achieve this without chaos returning. The irony was that in this way 1989 served in some ways to strengthen one-party rule in China rather than weaken it, something most people in the United States and other democratic countries assumed at the time would not be the case. It made the Party more aware of its mortality, more cautious, and more resolute than ever to hold power by whatever means necessary.
Deng had talked directly in 1990 about the risks, saying:
Last year there was some unrest in China. As was necessary, we brought the situation under control. I asked others to tell President Bush that if the political situation in China became unstable, the trouble would spread to the rest of the world, with consequences that would be hard to imagine. Stability is essential to economic development, and only under the leadership of the Communist Party can there be a stable socialist China.7
Throughout 1990, Deng’s comments focused on the need to oppose foreign interference in internal affairs and to develop the economy. From this point onwards, then, his logic was set in stone: economic improvements would make China strong and powerful again, but that could only happen under the Chinese Communist Party. We can call this the Dengist paradigm, and it continues to be the chief basis of political life in China to this day.
The United States, however, may have missed a strategic opportunity. For all the tough talk from Beijing, the CCP had suffered a moment of existential crisis. 1989 had shaken it profoundly. There was plenty of division within the political elite. And if the United States had really believed in the necessity for democratization and reform, there could never have been a better moment to promote this. For all its calculations of risk and potential instability, the pursuit of a strategy which eventually proved supportive to the regime in Beijing showed that the United States, despite its zealotry about promotion of values, democracy and rule of law, remained a hard-nosed realpolitik player in the Kissinger mould. Its core calculation was based on self-interest, and the potential for the collapse of Communist rule in Beijing created the sort of unpredictability and instability that the United States didn’t want to deal with. The price it paid for its hesitations, however, was to see a China eventually emerge which was economically far stronger but also politically resolute in the conviction that the Communist Party was central to the preservation, and delivery, of great-power status. A quarter of a century later, that prognostication has proved correct. And now some in Washington, faced with a China they see as more assertive and more confident by the day, must have wondered if they missed the Thucydides moment back in 1989, the time when they could have truly thwarted the Communist Party’s grand ambitions before it became too strong.
The United States and China have had more dialogue than any other two nations in modern diplomatic history with such major differences in their political views. A simple look at the statement issued by the United States after the 2015 high-level Strategic and Economic Dialogue (the annual bilateral meeting that for every year since 2008 has managed the relationship on a government-to-government level) is an illustration of this. The dialogue encompasses military matters, disability rights, disaster response capacity, and the larger strategic issues of safeguarding security. But it reaches down to immensely detailed and specialist areas: boiler efficiency and fuel switching; green ports and vessels; management of chemicals; forest health management; fisheries and marine litter; clean cookstoves; satellite collision cooperation and severe weather monitoring. In all, the 2015 statement covered 127 separate areas of dialogue and cooperation. And this was just on the strategic track.8
It was this profusion of interests that made Xi Jinping’s statement during his Sunnylands visit in 2013 seem fitting. Standing beside Obama, Xi stated, somewhat boldly, ‘The vast Pacific Ocean has enough space for two large countries like the United States and China.’9 He went on to respond to a reporter from Chinese Central TV who asked what precisely Xi had been referring to when he had spoken before of building a ‘new model of major power relations’ by stating that it was something largely motivated by consensus between the two countries to
find a new path – one that is different from the inevitable confrontation and conflict between the major countries of the past. And that is to say the two sides must work together to build a new model of major country relationship based on mutual respect and win–win cooperation for the benefit of the Chinese and American peoples, and people elsewhere in the world.10
Obama’s response to this bold vision was an interesting example of what some have described as ‘hedging’:
[I]t is very much in the interest of the United States for China to continue its peaceful rise, because if China is successful, that helps to drive the world economy and it puts China in the position to work with us as equal partners in dealing with many of the global challenges that no single nation can address by itself.
‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ This famous quote from US novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrates the difficulty faced in recent years by US presidents coming to speak about China: they have to demonstrate their ‘first-rate’ intelligence. On the one hand, they have to embrace the idea that a country with a wholly alien political system and values which are so different to its own can, daily, prove that it is no longer necessary to be a democracy in order to practice what (on the surface, at least) looks like vibrant, freewheeling capitalism. On the other, they have to hope, despite this situation having been the status quo for an increasingly long time, that China will ultimately succumb to the practice of multiparty democracy like every other economy of its size. By early 2017, the Party in China was living, gargantuan proof that the congratulatory moment after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when there had been brave talk of the ‘end of history’ and the ultimate victory of liberal democracy over one-party Communist systems, had been overly hasty. Perhaps it had even been wrong. As long as the Chinese Communist Party continues enjoying a monopoly on power, it can be said at least that the ‘end of history’ has been put on hold.
The United States is pragmatic about this paradox. Americans have become better off, able to buy consumer goods by the tonne from Walmart and similar places and seen their living standards rise because of cheap labour costs in China. Apple products, including iPhones, along with toys such as Barbie dolls, are produced for tiny sums of money in Chinese factories and then exported, largely to markets in developed countries. Former Premier Zhu Rongji boasted in the 1990s that China had become the factory of the world. But it has also seen plenty of companies spring up which look remarkably like sweatshops. This is not considered a good thing, and provokes the ire of plenty of people in China.
So Americans do half-want to see the peaceful rise of China and to see Chinese people prosper, to work with them to solve global environmental and resource issues, stand alongside them when they face terrorists in Central Asia, the Middle East or elsewhere, and help them solve global financial crises (including the one in 2008). But signs that China has another agenda, and is promoting another set of values which go against the freedoms of the individual, are at the expense of freedom of speech and belief, and are often targeted at Christian and other religious groups, can trigger difficulties in communication, and often cause it to break down entirely. Americans and their leaders certainly do not want this side of China. But how can they extricate themselves from their involvement in the one side but not the other; how can they invest in and export from a China they detest the political values of and want to see fundamentally change? Surely their economic links are one of the key means by which the single-party system they so dislike remains in power? And yet the United States has become unable to walk away from something it feels it has half created, and yet also half detests.
For this reason, the relationship between China and the United States in the twenty-first century suffers from immense cognitive dissonance. The United States likes China’s ability to support its economy and work with it when it suits it, but deeply dislikes China stretching out to take up more strategic space in the region around it, in the East and South China Sea in particular. As the 2016 Trump campaign rhetoric about China proved too, there is a large market of people in the United States who also believe that trade policy has favoured Beijing and taken jobs and opportunities from blue-collar workers at home. For the Chinese, there is the irrefutable fact that they both admire and also dislike the United States. The United States remains the destination of choice for Chinese students. It is the place where most Chinese manufactured goods end up. Chinese cinemas would be permanently full of US blockbusters was there not a government-imposed annual limit to the number that can be shown domestically. American English rules the world of print and the world of TV in China. In many ways, when Xi Jinping talks of the China Dream, it is the American dream he is emulating.
The Chinese do want to see their culture admired and better known, and they take national pride in their achievements since 1978. But the United States still remains an object of both fascination and resentment, particularly to the elite. Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang sent their daughters to US, not Chinese, universities, raising all sorts of questions about how they had been able to afford this on their modest salaries and why they hadn’t had enough faith in their own system to have their children stay back at home. Chinese officials put immense efforts into understanding the United States, with legions of US study centres across the country and huge amounts of scholarly engagement. Most telling of all, of the core advisors around Xi, his most trusted lieutenants on foreign affairs are most knowledgeable about the United States. Liu He, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, an all-important macroeconomic planning body, had spent a year in the United States, at Seton Hall University and Harvard University. Wang Huning, the Politburo member with the most influence over international affairs and ideology, had been influenced by a visit to the United States in the 1980s. And Xi himself had enjoyed his first visit there as early as 1985, when he had briefly stayed in Iowa. All this proves that if there is a country officials want to know about and spend precious time on, the United States is it. Other places are sideshows.
Such attention might be viewed as profoundly flattering. And were China to have pursued its admiration for the United States even up to the point of adopting its political values, then things would have been straightforward. That was partly behind the engagement strategy pursued from the 1990s onwards, particularly under President Bill Clinton. This culminated in China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, a moment which was meant to see the United States and the rest of the world start to enjoy increasing linkages with and involvement in the Chinese economy. Behind this, however, lurked another agenda: the idea of a ‘peaceful evolution’, something Chinese strategic thinkers were aware of from early on – the belief that as with most gifts, the United States’ largesse and generosity in terms of openness to China carried a price tag, the attempt to subtly change and influence it. To make it, in the end, more like the United States, in effect to see the Communist Party either accept political competition or fall from power and be replaced by a democratic system. In their hearts, this was the attitude of the US political elite in their engagement with Beijing.
When it became clear that China’s implementation of WTO standards had not led to the sort of political changes expected, some constituencies in the United States were inevitably disappointed. This perhaps came to the fore most sharply during the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics, at which the country was due to open its internet as never before, allow unfettered access to journalists and create a space for peaceful protestors in the capital. Never before had the Chinese government allowed this sort of liberality within its own country. But the results were initially underwhelming, and soon proved to have been short-lived in terms of positive impact. No sooner had it been opened up than the internet was rapidly closed down again, with Facebook and other social media platforms blocked again by 2010.
More worrying than this was an incremental attack on civil society and other actors, especially those linked to international groups. Legal scholar and academic Xu Zhiyong of the Open Constitution Initiative was detained in 2009 (and subsequently given a suspended jail sentence in 2015), largely due to his links with the Paul Tsai China Center, the home for activities related to China at Yale Law School. The National Endowment for Democracy and other US-supported groups became anathema in Beijing, blamed for their funding to Uighur and Tibetan groups, areas which had become very restive in 2008. China’s brief dalliance with liberalism had not ended well; instability seemed to have risen. The world outside, with the 2010 Jasmine Resolution in the Middle East and other uprisings, had become more precarious and turbulent. From 2009, a clampdown on rights activists and others grew, with figures like intellectual and writer Liu Xiaobo, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, sent to jail for 11 years.
For US ambassador Jon Huntsman, serving in China from 2009 to 2011 under Barack Obama, things became more complicated. Obama’s own experiences during his visit in late 2009 seemed to typify this. His visits to Beijing and Shanghai were carefully controlled by his hosts: he was allowed almost no access to Chinese people directly, except one meeting with students during which he held a question-and-answer session in a remote suburb of Shanghai, and the city was in virtual lockdown during his time there. There were no press conferences, and it seemed at the time like a deliberate attempt to belittle the newly elected US leader by limiting his access to Chinese people and seeking to control almost every aspect of his visit so that it looked like he was from a weaker country visiting a stronger one. Despite this, the two sides managed to issue a long, comprehensive joint statement. But the sense of a relationship that was becoming increasingly complicated and unmanageable for both sides intensified, as did the idea that the United States was hedging, still hoping that through engagement China would change. This notion was put most forcefully by Aaron Friedberg, who argued in a 2010 book that the United States and China were almost fated to some kind of battle in the Asian region as they tried to assert hegemony.11 This harked back to the earlier work of international relations specialist John Mearsheimer, who described relations between great powers as being ‘tragic’ – doomed despite accommodation to brutal power struggles, leading to war, conflict and the final prevalence of one over the other.12
Hearing Americans talk of China as a potential threat gave rise to a parallel narrative – that of containment. The idea of a United States which was ubiquitous was something that was referred to for instance in the work of Beijing academic Wang Hui, who complained in one essay that the borders of the United States came right up to those of China.13 There was no space left where it could get away from the world’s sole remaining superpower, a superpower that seemed to regard itself as the only essential country on the planet. This was not just about geographical space, but also about cultural, moral and intellectual zones. Referring back to Yan Xuetong’s argument (cited in Chapter 1) about China needing to represent a different kind of power and a different approach to the current world order, for intellectuals like Wang the whole Western discourse – with its tendency to universalize, imposing its own frameworks and Enlightenment values – was an expression of control, an attempt to rob China of its voice and its autonomous culture where things were centred more on the person and on the calibration of social relationships, something that lay at the heart of Confucius’ teachings. At heart, it was a campaign revolving around a form of cultural theft and reduction no less brutal than the colonial humiliations China had suffered in the past. But this time, under the CCP, the country was strong, unified, wealthy and at last in a position to resist.
Containment is also a physical reality. Chinese leaders like Xi look out from their government compound in Zhongnanhai, Beijing, and see a world around them infected and interlinked with the United States. The United States has a huge wall of treaty alliances, running from Japan, down to South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, to Indonesia, right down to Australia and New Zealand. It also has, under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, a commitment to security with the island the PRC still regards as nothing more than a renegade province of the mainland. But even more alarming are the ways in which the United States is also involving itself in Mongolia, increasing its activities on the economy and security front in Myanmar, and, even more distressingly, developing closer links with Vietnam, a country it has been at war with within living memory. It seems only North Korea is immune to US influence – but even the leaders in Pyongyang seem to spend their lives plotting how best to capture Washington’s attention and bring the two countries back into direct dialogue.
Containment has weighed on the psychology of Chinese leaders for a generation. The Deng framework supplied a temporary solution to this – working in the economic dimension in ways which clearly benefited the United States and which it chose not to oppose. But in a 2009 book by several writers, including nationalist blogger Wang Xiaodong, the complaint following the 2008 Summer Olympics was bitter and heartfelt. Why had the elites in Beijing simply sold Chinese people out to an economic model where their sweat and hard graft had been responsible for maintaining the comfortable living standards in the United States and other developed countries? Wang and his co-authors made a particularly sharp attack on their government in Unhappy China by asking how it was that Chinese people could not even trust the food they ate, let alone rely on their leaders to start pushing back at the world and not requesting but demanding more status and space.14
Ironically, writers like Wang Xiaodong were far more scathing about the people they labelled as their ‘elites’ than were figures like Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Prize-winning dissident, who never issued anything quite as contemptuous of Chinese leaders as the nationalist bloggers. And yet, at least up to the time of writing, they remained at liberty. In many ways, they were perceived as having a strong influence on government – though a fierce debate has continued to rage over the years of whether ardent Chinese nationalism provokes the Chinese government, or whether nationalism is provoked by the government; in fact, it is probably a combination of both. There is plenty of evidence in blogs and different statements by academics, intellectuals and other figures that the United States is regarded with deep ambivalence – admired for its power, its hard assets, its global reach and wealth, but also loathed for its proselytizing nature, the ways in which it seems to want a world in its own image, one where its engagement and attention are motivated by the desire to see partners change to follow its ways and ultimately become more similar to it. All of this was well illustrated by commentary about the election campaign of Donald Trump where, despite his fierce rhetoric over 2015 and into 2016 of China being an unfair trade partner and thief of US jobs, Chinese newspapers like the nationalistic Global Times expressed some admiration for his aggressive attitude, and begrudging admiration for the fact that a complete outsider could be elected to the supreme position of power in the country.
Underneath Chinese notions of US containment is the reality that, out of all the current nations, the United States is the only one that remains feared. In 1991, Chinese military figures watched as the US army invaded Iraq, obliterating its army in a matter of days with hardly any casualties. The immediate images carried by CNN of this shock and awe campaign brought the immense gap between Chinese and US capacity into the open. As things stand in early 2017, the Chinese military has seen no active combat since 1979, whereas the United States and its allies have been almost continuously engaged with military actions (for example in the Balkans in the 1990s, and later in Afghanistan, Iraq and then, through NATO, in Libya). The deployment of US destroyers in the South and East China Seas – sailing through waters that China lays claim to and declaring that these are international and that it has right of free passage – is a potent sign of how much the United States remains dominant, even in China’s backyard. The United States is able to send spy planes flying close to and even into Chinese territory (one of which collided with a Chinese plane over Hainan in 2001, killing its pilot and bringing the two powers into an ugly confrontation, something only dispelled by the tragedy of 11 September that year), yet China is unable to operate outside its region, and certainly not deep into the Pacific towards the United States. The United States maintains over 600 military installations across more than 120 countries, whereas China has established just one, a naval refitting entity, in Djibouti, east Africa, which was set up in 2016 (and which I referred to in the Introduction). The United States has over a dozen aircraft carriers, effectively policing the world’s waterways; China, a very late arrival to naval power, has only one, bought from Ukraine, with a second planned in 2017. It is questionable whether it will even be able to properly deploy these.
Then there are even larger issues. The United States, which only shares borders with Canada and Mexico, lives in a kind of dream neighbourhood where its greatest problem is illegal migration from the latter. China shares its immediate geography, its border, with 14 countries, four of which (Russia, India, Pakistan, and now North Korea) are nuclear states, one of which (Afghanistan) has been riven by war, and another (Vietnam) with which it enjoys fractious relations and has been at war in living memory. With India, it continues to dispute its land border. Would anyone in the United States want to swap their location with China? The answer will most likely always be no. If the function of strategy in international relations is to create predictability and some sense of stability (Henry Kissinger’s argument in On China), then it is unsurprising that something as important as geographical location and the nature of its neighbours has made China’s strategic thinking highly cautious and circumspect. It lives with too much unpredictability within itself, and with its closest neighbours. It would gladly swap these issues for those faced by the United States inside and outside its borders.
The mystery is not so much that as China has grown in economic power in the period since 2000 it has sounded more confident and assertive, but that a sizeable constituency in the United States has viewed its emergence as a real threat, sign of an inevitable long-term conflict. Christopher Coker, a UK academic, referred to the ‘preponderance of resentment’ in China, some of it derived from the narrative promoted from the ‘century of humiliation’ and World War II.15 This victim mentality grates in the United States when they see a country which seems to excel in concealment, in playing the international system while refusing to step up to its own responsibilities and using covert rather than overt means to subvert and contest the United States’ primacy.
Cyberespionage is a particular area of contention. By nature it is hard to detect, but has a visible effect on people’s perceptions of those involved, and a report issued in 2013 by US-based consultancy Mandiant added fuel to this by giving granular detail on the places where China’s cyberespionage units were, the main actors, and the things they got up to. The core message of this impressively documented report was that the Chinese state was the key actor, and that for all the Chinese leaders’ declarations of ignorance when confronted about this issue, it was clear that at some level they must have sanctioned it, so widespread and well-funded as it was. Chinese actors, it stated, were ‘able to wage such a long-running and extensive cyber espionage campaign in large part because [they receive] direct government support.’16 The PLA are behind this, funding, directing, managing and collating information, particularly about commercial targets. But there are also suspected political targets, with the White House, the office of the German Chancellor and the internet network of London’s government headquarters in Whitehall all attacked by actors, some of whom seem to have originated from China.
Strategically, some Chinese see cyberespionage as fair game because the virtual space puts them on an equal footing with the United States: the dice are not loaded against China, as they clearly are in other areas of contention. Chinese leaders are realistic. Whatever ambitions they might harbour about one day taking their country to be the world’s great and most central power, they also assume that this is decades away. And provoking a direct military clash with the United States when they are doomed to lose is senseless. In cyberspace, there is a golden opportunity to put up a fight in a place where there are no agreed international conventions and where confusion and obfuscation can reign. It is the only true frontier territory left, and one that China feels it has every right to try to colonize.
It is highly fitting, therefore, that when renegade US security operative Edward Snowden fled with huge amounts of data on US surveillance (of its own citizens, among others) through a ‘dark web’ scanning process involving providers like Gmail and Facebook, his initial port of call was Hong Kong before eventually going to Moscow. More interesting, however, was the suggestion that while he was holed up in Hong Kong for a few weeks in 2013 his application to seek refuge in China was not positively received. Beijing simply didn’t want the trouble of accommodating a person who would inevitably prove to be a bugbear in their relationship with their main international partner. The service that Snowden did provide, however, was to knock some of the sheen off the US government’s attitude that it occupies the moral high ground in the realm of electronic surveillance. It is, in fact, up to the same dirty tricks and availing itself of the same wonderful opportunities to get information as everyone else. That at least was the jubilant claim of some of the commentators in China.
Cyberespionage is more symbolic of a sense of amorphous threat. To some Americans who subscribe to the China challenge, it seems to revolve around a feeling reminiscent of that felt by the great English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early nineteenth century, who referred to being afflicted most of his life by a sense of a nameless dread always pursuing him. China encapsulates these fears for the United States – its alien political system in particular, and the fact that for a country where religion, and specifically Christianity, are still such strong forces, China’s official adherence to atheism is clearly distressing, particularly to those who are members of the right wing. A powerful discussion of this ‘threat’ thesis appeared in a special report issued for the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC in 2015, where former diplomats Ashley J. Tellis and Robert D. Blackwill painted China as a place of looming and imminent danger, somewhere driven by values that were not just different to the United States’, but inimical and often downright threatening.
This grew out of the broader ‘pivot to Asia’ moves from 2009, during President Obama’s period in power. This had been heralded in statements made by his first Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while attending the ASEAN Regional Forum in July 2010. She had stated that ‘The United States has a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons and respect for international law in the South China Sea.’17 The phrase ‘national interest’ raised particular concerns in Beijing, implying a heavier US security presence in its own backyard. Such worries were exacerbated by President Obama himself, who used the phrase ‘pivot’ and, more frequently, ‘rebalancing’, with regard to Asia, as a central part of his foreign policy approach. Speaking in the Australian parliament during his visit there in 2011, he stated that the United States was a Pacific nation, and that ‘as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends.’ He developed this theme further when it came to security: ‘As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.’ While seeking a ‘cooperative relationship with China’, the United States, Obama stated, would ‘continue to speak candidly to Beijing about the importance of upholding international norms and respecting the universal human rights of the Chinese people’.18
Just over four years on, Tellis and Blackwill’s argument had a brutal simplicity about it. Things needed to go beyond pivoting and rebalancing. Two decades of ‘engagement’, in which China has been allowed more access to the international community and benefited from deepening links with it, had to be reviewed. Those who did undertake this review could only reach one conclusion: that there had been a failure of reciprocity. Engagement, at least on these terms, had failed.
Because the American effort to ‘integrate’ China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to US primacy in Asia – and could eventually result in a consequential challenge to American power globally – Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy.19
Preserving US centrality has to be the prime objective of Washington in international relations, as the report puts it:
Sustaining this status in the face of rising Chinese power requires, among other things, revitalizing the US economy to nurture those disruptive innovations that bestow on the United States asymmetric economic advantages over others; creating new preferential trading arrangements among US friends and allies to increase their mutual gains through instruments that consciously exclude China; recreating a technology-control regime involving US allies that prevents China from acquiring military and strategic capabilities enabling it to inflict ‘high-leverage strategic harm’ on the United States and its partners; concertedly building up the power-political capacities of US friends and allies on China’s periphery; and improving the capability of US military forces to effectively project power along the Asian rimlands despite any Chinese opposition – all while continuing to work with China in the diverse ways that befit its importance to US national interests.20
There is nothing ambiguous about this red-blooded approach to dealing with China. Indeed, in the closing words of the report, the authors categorically state that ‘there is no real prospect of building fundamental trust, “peaceful coexistence”, “mutual understanding”, a strategic partnership, or a “new type of major country relations” with China.’21 And yet despite this, their policy proposals are remarkably tepid, consisting of expanding US trade relations in the region, increasing measures on cybersecurity, creating deeper links with India and other neighbouring countries (shadows of containment here), and, most specific of all, increasing expenditure on the military.
If China is to be configured as an adversary by some constituencies in the United States, then these people might do well to take heed of the words of Sun Tzu in The Art of War, written two and a half millennia before: ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.’ The quote finishes with the most disastrous of all outcomes: ‘If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.’22 The fear of US containment within China and the language of ‘Chinese threat’ in the United States indicates a conflict involving distortions both in conceptualizations of the self and of others. In conferences throughout the world focusing on the China–United States relationship, there often seems to be a huge act of therapy going on, with supporters of the Chinese threat theory bemoaning the weakness of the world’s sole remaining superpower and its need to remain dominant, and those supporting China’s position stressing its internal challenges, its lack of wealth per capita, its huge environmental and diplomatic issues, and the simple fact that as an international player it is bereft of the rich global network of support and alliances that the United States has. On the one hand, the United States is being belittled by this China fear, and on the other it is flattering a China that is a long way from being powerful enough to challenge it, even in the Pacific region.
At one conference I attended in the city of Changsha, Hunan Province in the early 2010s, I listened to two iterations of this. On the one hand, a US speaker stated that despite all the challenges in recent years, particularly during the George W. Bush presidency and the debacles in the Middle East, the United States would reclaim its moral mantle and continue indefinitely to be the dominant power. But this speaker’s words were followed by a Chinese speaker who protested that China could – and would – never want to be dominant. They gave an impressive list of reasons why: lack of its own resources; the continuation of entrenched poverty, including even a lack of stable water supplies; environmental problems that would take decades, if not longer, to address; and finally the simple fact that, in their words, no one supports China’s rise. When America rose, they continued, its ascendancy was welcomed. But for China, it is isolated and alone. Its political model alienates people outside. And that is not going to change.
The clash of these two radically different perceptions was again demonstrated when, in 2014, Chinese premier Li Keqiang started to unpack some of the ideas flowing from the notion that China was now a ‘major power’ by announcing the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). China’s irritation – particularly since 2008 and the Great Financial Crisis – at its lack of voting rights on bodies like the IMF, which had resulted from the post-World War II US-dominated international financial order, are well known. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank were little better, with the latter headed by a Japanese national (Japan and the United States between them control 26 per cent of the voting rights). As China was the world’s second biggest economy, this seemed unfair, but efforts by China to lobby for increased rights have been addressed at a glacial pace.
The AIIB is a response to this, and represents the ambiguity of China’s position perfectly. On the positive side, it does seem to be a response to Robert Zoellick’s 2005 demand when he spoke of wanting to see a ‘stakeholder’ nation, one willing to take some responsibility. Since 1978, China has accrued a huge amount of knowledge about building infrastructure, developing cities and lifting people from poverty. All of this has been recognized by entities like the World Bank and others. It would seem natural therefore that in its own region, where demand for new infrastructure on some estimates ran into the trillions of US dollars, it could play a powerful and positive role. But the United States’ response to the idea was initially tepid, and then hostile. The White House and State Department felt that there were questions about China’s capacity, its ability to observe international norms and rules, and its motives. For some of the critics, there was the clear sense that the AIIB was yet more evidence of China seeking a greater role, attaching clear political conditions to its activity and using the Bank to find ways to influence and, with its new-found collective wealth, ‘buy’ others.
When the United Kingdom, a faithful ally of the United States, applied to become a member of the new proposed bank in 2015, the response in the United States was dismissive, complaining of the British ‘constant accommodation’ of China. The application by Germany, Italy, Australia and others to join by the summer, however, leading to 55 foundation partners when the Bank was formally launched later in the year, showed that many among the United States’ closest allies felt that in the economic realm, at least, China did have space internationally to initiate and develop things. In many ways, the AIIB is likely to prove a litmus test of China’s ability to work in a leadership role with others and show that it can be a more normative actor, rather than one always seeking to demonstrate its exceptionalism. The simple fact is that by the start of 2016, the Bank was in a position to make loans, and it would be on the quality and performance of these that it would be judged. There are huge risks to China in this endeavour, but also clear opportunities and benefits.
The narrative of China constructing a new hegemony away from the United States and its influence does have some evidentiary foundation, however. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which will be discussed later, has never involved the United States since its initial establishment in the late 1990s. With the Association of South East Asian Nations China has developed a separate dialogue, once more without the United States being in the room. In the realm of economics, this ‘parallel’ world of Chinese activity and interest existing away from the United States has proved strong, with bilateral trade deals starting to emerge between China and countries like Switzerland, Iceland and, more significantly because of its size and security importance to the United States, Australia. The US counterproposal to have a Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 countries has been striking because it, too, attempts to create a Pacific zone where economic interests are the commonality, and where the missing partner is China. Was this an attempt to shadow China’s own strenuous efforts to build a non-US-dominated world?
Mutual dependency has always been a theme of China–United States relations. In the early era, the United States’ attitude was often that it was gifting or granting China attention, space and cooperation. US leaders still speak of the ways in which without their collaboration or support China would never have achieved what some call its ‘economic miracle’ since 1979. US capital, technology, export markets and, above all, the security that the United States has provided in the region, have all been beneficial to China in this account. But, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss showed in his classic work about the meaning of gifts, there are some forms of assistance and granting of aid that carry a high price tag.23 The issue of the United States’ concealed expectations, and the likelihood that it has really been driving towards a ‘peaceful evolution’ of China becoming a democracy, lurks near the surface. It is the principal reason, analysts in Beijing and elsewhere argue, why the Chinese need to be clear-headed and circumspect about the ways they listen to and interpret US talk of how much the country has helped and assisted China.
Xi’s rhetoric of a ‘new model of major power relations’, like many of the grand ideas he has articulated, does beg the question of what this sort of conceptualization of the relationship between the world’s largest and second largest economy might practically achieve. Where, as one candidate in an election in the United States’ recent past demanded of an opponent long on talk and short on specific ideas, is the ‘beef’? In what ways can the United States and China buck the trend of the past and the ‘tragedy of great power relations’ outlined by analysts such as Mearsheimer in his influential book?24
The US–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue referred to above was striking because of its stress on process. There were plenty of dialogues and a great deal of talk. But on the core outputs, the solid things both sides were working in concert with each other on, there was less to speak about. The United States and China certainly were loquacious partners. The famous motto of the BBC is that ‘nation shall speak peace unto nation’, but in the case of Beijing and Washington they had taken this outpouring of words towards and with each other, at almost every conceivable rank of government and society, to a new level. Where were they really working for a common cause, however? Military to military cooperation was minimal. China did not (and, indeed, could not easily have) involve its military in any meaningful way in conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere beside US troops. The United States and China did not share a common vision of the global finance system, and they disagreed even about the rate that the Chinese renminbi (RMB) should be set at, with US economists constantly complaining about Chinese manipulation of the figure set in order to favour its exports.
Under Obama, however, a theme emerged where, simply because it clearly suited China, there was the promise of much deeper cooperation. The reality of climate change and the need for environmentalism are things that have been accepted by the Chinese political elite for most of the last two decades. And China’s blighted cities, smothered by terrible smog and polluted air since 2013, are a powerful, and unavoidable, testament to the physical impact of rapid and often unsustainable industrialization on its water, air quality and natural resources. This issue matters profoundly to the all-important emerging middle class in the country – the sort of aspiring, service-sector-orientated, high-consuming, home-owning stakeholders that Xi and his government need to maintain the support of. This group’s anger and a collapse of its faith would deliver a killer blow to the Communist Party in Beijing. Addressing environmental issues, therefore, has become a matter of critical importance over the last decade.
For this reason, under Xi, the discourse of environmentalism has strengthened and the means by which China speaks with the United States has changed. In the past, bickering about how the United States, along with other developed countries, has been polluting more per capita and for a longer period than China, and that they need to do more to address the problem, becomes less important when considering that the environment within China’s most important cities has deteriorated so badly in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Having a stand-off with the West will not solve this problem, however satisfying it might be to eventually win it. This logic was behind the bilateral climate-change deal announced between the United States and China at the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in November 2014. Much to the surprise of many, China committed itself for the first time to capping its emissions by 2030. For the world’s largest and second largest emitters to agree in principle to tacking climate change together showed one way in which, when they do identify an area they can agree on, things can really start to happen. It is unlikely that the Paris meeting a year later, in which more than 180 countries came to an agreement on environmental protection, would have happened without the clear sign that China and the United States were largely speaking from the same page. This proved a more fruitful and happy experience than the Copenhagen summit of 2009 in which Chinese negotiators were accused of wrecking a potential deal.
Outside observers sometimes have to be forgiven for regarding Chinese–US relations as something akin to a clash of vanities. The way in which Chinese leaders seem keen whenever the opportunity arises to boast about their ancient, glorious and rich cultural traditions stands alongside the United States’ self-professed prowess at modernity, it being the most successful template of a wealthy, powerful, rich country. This cocktail of emotions is striking. But, to use the words originally provided to journalists Bernstein and Woodward by ‘Deep Throat’, their source for the Watergate story in the early 1970s, the key means we have of clarifying the relationship is to ‘follow the money’.
Like it or not, for all the complexity of United States–China relations, there is one immense tangible symbol of their deep interrelationship. As China’s economy grew in the 2000s, so did its foreign-currency reserves. By 2007, these reserves already stood as the world’s largest. Coming close to two trillion US dollars, they proceeded to rise to over three and a half trillion by 2014, before stabilizing and then dipping. Never before had so much capital been accrued. China’s foreign exchange reserves fueled the arguments of those who accused it of mercantilism, taking advantage of a favourable and weak currency level to export goods and then sucking in money from across the world through the enormous trade surpluses other countries had with it, exporting far more from China than they ever managed to import.
The composition of Chinese foreign exchange is a secret. However, the estimate is that perhaps half is in US treasuries, with the rest in Eurobonds and a basket of other currencies. This means that China is exposed to the fortunes of the US economy as its largest single stakeholder. It possesses more US debt than any other country or entity. More remarkably still, it means that a US downturn – or worse, a full-blown sustained US recession – would be a disaster for China. China is the greatest stakeholder in US prosperity. It was for this reason that, according to documents leaked from the United States and placed on the WikiLeaks website, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained that for the United States, it was ‘hard to argue with your banker’.25
Due to the colossal amounts involved, it is not easy to see how China would be able to walk away from the United States. There are no other large, reliable investment vehicles to put their money in; it is by far and away the best bet for fiscally cautious Beijing. Using the money to invest in the outside word, or opening the country’s current account overnight and making the RMB fully convertible, would be unconscionable; they would lead to global economic meltdown and immense structural uncertainty.
The United States and China, therefore, are locked in tight mutual dependency for the foreseeable future. Neither seems happy with this, and both are working in the long term towards a world and a time when they will be liberated from each other. For China, that would be a world where they have strategic freedom over their region, the ability to control their own logistic supply routes, and dominance (at least in the economic realm) without needing to be beholden or answerable to the United States. For the United States, their dream would be to see China peacefully evolve, as soon as possible, to a country with a multiparty democratic system, one where Christianity would be more dominant, where values would be shared with the United States, and, most important of all, where there would be an acceptance of future US dominance.
The election of Donald Trump may well shift the emphasis of the relationship in new, unexpected directions. His economic hawkishness towards China and desire to charge China as a currency manipulator, claiming it keeps its own currency weak in order to produce cheaper exports to the detriment of other countries it sends goods to, thereby destroying jobs there, has to be countered by the fact that cheap Chinese imports have maintained at least some of the living standards in the United States over the last decade. A more likely approach under Trump will be to attempt to place fierce pressure on China to open up some of its investment and finance sectors to foreign ownership and cooperation. Market access in China remains a bugbear for many. Far less certain is the nature of the opportunity Trump provides for a retrenchment from the rebalancing to Asia under Obama and the spaces this opens up for Beijing. Despite the surprise there of his success in the 2016 election, the assumption was that as a businessman he would pursue pragmatic, transactional strategies – a style that suits China. This would then raise the possibility of some grand ‘deal’ whereby China might cede ground in economic spaces in order to get what they want in the realms of security or territory – more influence over Taiwan, for instance. The unprecedented phone call between Taiwan’s President Tsai and Trump in early December 2016 figured in some interpretations as the president-elect going for an issue he knew would matter a lot to China, in order to unsettle it. The problem with this approach was that it raised the stakes considerably in an area where China has no real wiggle room. Its commitment to seeing off any moves by Taiwan to creep towards independence are even enshrined in a 2005 law which commits Beijing to taking military action should the island unilaterally declare independence.
Trump’s presidency also potentially pushes China towards a more exposed position. On climate change, as mentioned above, through self-interest as much as anything else, China has become a committed supporter of international action to cut down man-made emissions. But Trump’s scepticism about this issue provoked China to make a very unusual statement about the need for the incoming administration to stand by the convention it had signed and passed into law only a few weeks before. Even more remarkable is the way in which China now has to survey an international terrain where it is regarded as being the more stable, and reliable, partner of the two major economies. Exploiting the United States’ potential retrenchment and isolationism in order to secure concessions and gain advantage in its hunt for dominance in Asia is one thing. But having others expect the country to step in where the United States has said it will no longer provide security or support is quite another. China therefore strongly resists the desire by Trump to unpick the nuclear deal with Iran, and, for that matter, to get more involved in the Middle East generally, despite its resource interests. More quickly than it had ever wanted, it is now looking at a world where its position is becoming increasingly dominant and exposed – a position that it regards as more threatening than welcoming. Like the United States and the rest of the world, too, China has had to factor in the immense unpredictability that Trump has brought with him.
Whether under Trump or any other US president in recent times, when a Chinese leader invites people to dream, as Xi Jinping has since 2013, starkly different visions rise up in the collective imagination of Washington political elites and those in Beijing. This truly is a story of starkly contrasting dreams. The issue at the heart of this is the entity that the United States has to deal with most of the time – the Chinese Communist Party. Its role in China proves a constant sticking point for the United States, and is the subject about which there is most consternation. For the CCP, there would be no united, peacefully rising China were it not in power. In their view a China without the Party would revert to turmoil, unpredictability and anarchy. The US dream for the People’s Republic, on the other hand, is to see the country freed from the shackles of its one-party system. And the CCP’s dream for the United States – for the country to realize it needs to share power with or cede it to China – is also a nightmare, despite Trump’s rise. For both, therefore, the current default is to strive for an uneasy status quo, leading into a future where these profound differences might one day prove resolvable. That day is unlikely to come any time soon. Until then they truly will be sleeping in one bed, but having very different dreams.