China’s Search for Security

Throughout the Cold War, there was a robust American threat to China that derived from Washington’s Cold War strategy to weaken the Soviet bloc. The U.S. had decided at the end of the Chinese civil war that it did not care about China for itself; instead, Washington shaped a policy toward Beijing based on its status as an ally of Moscow and strove to split the two apart. Once the split came about, the U.S. moved to capitalize on it, using relations with China to put pressure on the Soviet Union.

For China as well, the U.S. was a secondary threat, in light of the Soviet Union’s geographical proximity and its apparently rising power until near the end of the Cold War. Twisting and turning to find a way to deal with the Soviet Union, as we saw in the last chapter, China shifted from bandwagoning to isolation and dual deterrence, to balancing on the side of the U.S., to equidistance around 1982 as the Soviet threat receded and U.S. assertiveness increased. Then history did China a strategic favor by bringing about the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union. China used the postcollapse phase to institutionalize cooperative relations with Russia and the Central Asian successor states.

These developments left the U.S. for the first time as the principal potential threat to China. From its position of enhanced relative power, the U.S. was now able to set the limits within which China had to operate, placing greater or lesser pressure on Beijing and creating greater or lesser challenges to Chinese security. In this sense, Chinese policy remained—as it was in the Cold War period—chiefly reactive to the terms set by another power and has begun only recently and in limited ways to try proactively to shape the global security environment and international regimes to serve its interests the way the U.S. has long done.

Yet what strikes Chinese policymakers as most significant is the fact that the American military remains deployed all around China’s periphery even though the Soviet threat to the U.S. has disappeared. The U.S. has a wide network of defense alliances and other military relationships with China’s neighbors (chapter 5 and 6). Washington continues to frustrate Beijing’s efforts to gain control over Taiwan (chapter 8). The U.S. pressures China over its economic policies and maintains a host of official and unofficial programs that seek to influence Chinese civil society and politics.

What are Washington’s real intentions? With the U.S. as China’s primary security threat, the understanding of American motives is the primary determinant of Chinese decisions about how to evaluate the threat posed by domestic dissent; how to make foreign economic policy; how to deal with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, and other states; how to arm and train the Chinese military; what strategy to take on energy security; and many other issues. The question is not as simple to answer as it was during the Cold War because, we suggest, Washington’s intentions are ambivalent—wishing Beijing both well and ill.

The Chinese effort to understand America’s China strategy in some ways mirrors the U.S. effort to understand China’s America strategy. Just as Americans wonder whether China’s rise is good for U.S. interests or represents a looming threat, so Chinese policymakers puzzle over whether the U.S. intends to use its power to help or hurt China.¹ But there are some important differences in the two situations. The American debate is public, whereas the Chinese debate is largely held behind closed doors, so it is easier to know what the Americans are saying and doing. But in another sense the American debate is the more inscrutable of the two. Although the Chinese elite’s long-term strategic intentions are secret, they probably do exist. In the pluralist American system, long-term strategic intentions may not actually exist in a stable sense because power is so divided, and the top leadership changes at least every eight years. Even so, a long-term U.S. strategy seems to have emerged out of a series of American actions toward China. So it is not a hopeless exercise—indeed, it is necessary—for the Chinese to try to analyze American capabilities and intentions.

Three reinforcing perspectives shape Beijing’s understanding of U.S. policy. First, Chinese analysts draw on a set of ideas that are part of Chinese strategic culture, which include “preconceived stereotypes of the strategic disposition of [China and other countries] derived from a selective interpretation of history, traditions and self-image.”² They see their own country as heir to an “oriental” strategic tradition that dates back thousands of years and that is pacific, defensive minded, and nonexpansionist. They consider China’s approach to interstate relations ethically fair and reasonable, and they attribute the existence of this unusual approach to the fact that China is a continental power that was historically agrarian and sedentary. In contrast, they see Western strategic culture as militaristic, offensive minded, and expansionist, growing out of the experience of maritime powers that are mobile and mercantilist. The two images define each other by contrast.³

In light of these ideas, Chinese analysts are prone to interpret American actions almost anywhere in the world as secretly directed against China. For example, few Chinese have ever accepted the American claim that the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 was the accidental result of faulty CIA maps. They respect the CIA too much to accept such claims and believe that by giving such an obviously weak excuse, the Americans seek to reinforce the message of the bombing itself, which was that the U.S. will punish any challenger with brutal force. Likewise, Chinese analysts interpret American protestations about human rights and democracy as a screen for cynical power plays.⁴

These preconceptions are reinforced by a second, more recent Chinese tradition, Marxism. It posits that the relations of imperialist powers with the rest of the world are economically exploitative. An imperialist power extends its military force around the world and politically manipulates foreign governments to perpetuate its economic advantage. Even though China runs trade surpluses with the U.S. and accumulates foreign exchange, its analysts believe the U.S. is getting the better of the relationship by using cheap Chinese labor and credit to live beyond its real means. As China increasingly moves out into the world to protect its economic security by competing with the U.S. for resources and markets (chapter 10), it sees signs of American resistance.⁵

Third, American theories of international relations have become popular among younger Chinese policy analysts, many of whom took advanced degrees in the U.S. The most influential body of international relations theory in China is an approach called offensive realism. It reinforces the two older views by arguing that a country will try to control its security environment to the full extent that its capabilities permit.⁶ According to this theory, the U.S. cannot be satisfied with the existence of an independent China. It naturally tries to promote a “color revolution” (the popular overthrow of an authoritarian system) that will replace the CCP with a regime that is weaker and more pro-American. Many in Beijing see evidence of this intent in the long American record of anticommunism, in Washington’s regular calls for greater democracy and more respect for human rights, and in its stubborn support for what China sees as separatist movements in Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang.

China’s U.S. specialists understand that the American system is politically and ideologically pluralistic, but all three Chinese analytic traditions converge on the view that a great power such as the U.S. must ultimately have a strategy toward China. When confusing and contradictory signals emanate from the American political system, as they often do, Chinese analysts deploy an idea that is similar to one that Americans often use about China: the idea of deviousness. The U.S. may be hiding its strategic intentions behind soothing words; it may be justifying its actions as a search for peace, human rights, and a level playing field; it may be putting forward apparently pro-China persons to manage its dealings with China; it may even be giving China some real help if only out of a search for short-term gain. But its words and actions are “two-faced.”⁷ Washington’s ruses reveal rather than hide its true intention to remain the unchallenged global hegemon and its determination not to allow China to grow strong enough to challenge American power.

A small group of analysts argues that Chinese and American interests are not totally at odds. The two countries are sufficiently remote from one another that their core security interests do not inevitably clash. They can gain mutual benefit from trade and from policies that pursue such common interests as keeping Japan from embarking on an autonomous security policy. Therefore, Beijing can usefully engage Washington even though it has to keep struggling to free itself from the constraints imposed by the U.S. There is a larger body of dissenters on the other side of the spectrum who hold harsher rather than softer views of American policy and have more confrontational ideas about how China should respond. They believe that China must stand up to the U.S. militarily and that it can win a conflict, should one occur, by leapfrogging U.S. military technology and mobilizing its own superior morale. These views are widespread in the Chinese military and security agencies, but they are usually kept out of sight to avoid frightening both China’s rivals and its friends.⁸

First, American military forces are globally deployed and technologically advanced, with massive concentrations of firepower all around the Chinese rim. The U.S. military is divided into six regional “combatant commands,” of which the largest in geographic scope and manpower ⁹ is the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), whose area of responsibility includes China. (There are also four functional commands.) PACOM has its headquarters in Honolulu and has forces stationed throughout Asia and the Pacific. More than 230 of the 800 U.S. overseas military installations are located in Japan and South Korea, and there are major air and naval bases on the island of Guam, 2,000 miles from China.¹⁰ Besides China, PACOM’s area of responsibility includes Taiwan, the South China Sea, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the Pacific and Indian oceans. As of 2010, PACOM’s assets included about 325,000 military personnel from the army, navy, air force, and Marine Corps; some 180 ships, 1,500 navy and marine aircraft, and 400 air force aircraft.¹¹ Among PACOM’s components are the Third Fleet and Seventh Fleet and, most of the time, five of the eleven U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups. At the western borders of China and India, PACOM gives way to the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). CENTCOM is responsible for the area from Pakistan and Central Asia west to Egypt. Before September 11, 2001, CENTCOM had no forces stationed directly on China’s borders except for its training and supply missions in Pakistan, but after that date CENTCOM placed tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan and gained access to an air base in Kyrgyzstan. As one Chinese analyst put it, “The United States has taken … steps to build … [a] strategic ring of encirclement in China’s neighboring regions; … significantly strengthened its network of military bases in the Asia-Pacific region and its alliance relationship[s] with China’s neighboring countries; further strengthened the U.S. Pacific Fleet and established forward military bases in Central Asia which is contiguous to China’s Western region, in the name of counterterrorism.”¹²

The operational capabilities of American forces in the Asia-Pacific are magnified by five bilateral defense treaties (with Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines); a close defense cooperation with Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore; and a host of cooperative arrangements with other countries in the region. U.S. forces have access to port facilities and airfields throughout the region for refueling, resupply, and repair. Australian, Japanese, and South Korean forces are trained to operate in conjunction with U.S. forces. Despite assurances that Washington will wind down weapons sales to Taiwan, the U.S. continues to equip and train the Taiwan armed forces. To backstop its capabilities in the region, the U.S. possesses some 5,200 strategic nuclear warheads deployed in an invulnerable “triad” of land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles, and aircraft-borne bombs.¹³

Chinese analysts became fully aware of the technological level of U.S. military capabilities only when the U.S. put them on global display during the televised Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991. In the two decades preceding that war, the American military had quietly carried out a program of modernization, the Revolution in Military Affairs. By the early 1990s, the U.S. possessed a global network of space satellites that provided real-time intelligence on the state of any battlefield in the world. The operations of all U.S. service arms were integrated through computer-networked communications that allowed so-called joint operations of air, naval, and land forces. Smart bombs and drone aircraft provided accurate targeting with low risk of injury to American troops. Advanced “logistic lift” allowed the transport of the required quantities of troops, weapons, and supplies to distant battlefields in short time frames.

Since 1991, the Chinese have tried to keep informed about continuing advances in American military capabilities. This attempt was undoubtedly one reason behind the agreement Beijing made with Washington in 1997 to permit U.S. naval vessels to make regular port visits to Hong Kong after the retrocession of the colony from British to Chinese sovereignty. For their part, American officers are happy to display U.S. capabilities selectively to Chinese officers during military-to-military exchanges in order to impress Chinese officers with the destructive power they would face if a conflict broke out and to send the message that the U.S. constantly adjusts its capabilities in order to keep a step ahead of any rival’s military modernization.

To Chinese analysts, the message is clear. China for now has no forces stationed outside its borders in Asia except for a small antipiracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden and hundreds of personnel in UN peacekeeping operations. It has limited access to port facilities outside its borders for naval and air operations and no military alliances save for the 1961 treaty still technically in effect with North Korea. Its military capabilities, in short, are located within its own borders and around its coasts. As it builds up these capabilities (chapter 11), it sees the U.S. respond by reinforcing its own position around China’s periphery. Any U.S.–China conventional conflict that might occur would have to take place around—and possibly within—China because there are no Chinese forces anywhere else.

Second, Chinese security analysts observe an extensive American capability to damage Chinese economic interests. Even though China has diversified its export markets and sources of investment and technology, the U.S. is still its single most important market (unless one counts the EU as whole) and one of its major sources of foreign direct investment and advanced technology. Since the 1980s, the U.S. has used its economic power more to help than to harm China, contributing in many ways to China’s growth, but it has occasionally sent the signal that it can turn this help into a weapon if it wants to. For example, after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Washington imposed economic (as well as diplomatic) sanctions on China. The sanctions included restrictions on advanced technology transfers, and the U.S. has not only continued to enforce these restrictions but has pressured its European allies to maintain them as well. At that time, Congress also debated whether to punish China by cancelling the low tariff rates enjoyed by Chinese imports—so-called most-favored-nation tariff treatment. Again in the 2000s, American legislators discussed whether to sanction China for what they called currency manipulation—that is, Beijing’s refusal to allow a more rapid increase than it wanted in the exchange rate of the Chinese currency, the renminbi. Even though the post-Tiananmen sanctions were mild and the trade sanctions that Congress discussed were not imposed, to Chinese analysts these political events were reminders of how vulnerable China would be to U.S. actions if Washington decided to punish China economically. In addition, crucial raw materials reach China across sea lanes whose security is controlled by the U.S. Navy (chapter 7). Even though the U.S. has never threatened to do so, Chinese analysts believe that in a crisis the U.S. might cut off China’s supplies.

Even without the intent to punish, the U.S. economy is so huge that it can hurt China by scrambling for its own interests. For example, Chinese strategists do not believe that strategic commodities such as oil and ores are distributed through an open global market to which every country has equal access. Instead, they believe that these commodities are largely controlled by enterprises based in the U.S. and its allied countries through ownership stakes, long-term contracts, and political influence and that price relationships and shortages are often solved in ways that help the West and hurt others. To deal with this unfavorable situation, China has been purchasing part ownership of oil fields as well as iron, copper, and other mines wherever it can around the world. In response, Western media and politicians have expressed anxiety about these moves, revealing Americans’ reluctance, in Beijing’s view, to allow others to play the game the same way that they have played it. In 2005, U.S. politicians halted the acquisition of the Unocal energy company by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, and in 2009 political resistance in Australia blocked a Chinese state-owned corporation’s acquisition of a stake in mining giant Rio Tinto. To Chinese analysts, these acts confirmed that their suspicions are correct: If the market were truly open, why would Chinese ownership be an issue?

Finally, the U.S. economy is so big that it can hurt China simply by mismanaging itself. For example, the U.S. dollar has become the main currency that countries use to trade with one another and the main currency that most countries use to accumulate foreign exchange. The makeup of China’s foreign exchange reserves is not publicly known, but they probably include about 70 percent of dollar-denominated assets. Even if China would like to hold fewer dollar assets, it is hard to do so when the dollar accounts for nearly half of international bank deposits and debt securities, 60 percent of global foreign exchange reserves, and 80 percent of all foreign exchange transactions.¹⁴ The dollar’s ubiquity gives the U.S. the ability to damage Chinese interests simply by trying to solve its own economic problems by printing dollars and borrowing. When the U.S. does these things, it drives down the value of both China’s exports and its foreign exchange reserves.

China is not as vulnerable to economic pressure as some countries because it is a large continental economy with vast natural resources, diversified overseas markets, and an increasingly robust domestic market. Nevertheless, the U.S. possesses a substantial capability to damage China’s prosperity. So far it has not used this capability with that intention in mind. But if it did, China’s ability to retaliate would be limited. Its supplies to the U.S. consist mostly of consumer products that are not strategically significant, and it cannot dump American dollars without damaging its own ability to conduct foreign trade and the value of its foreign exchange holdings.¹⁵

Third, Chinese analysts see the U.S. as possessing potent ideological weapons and the willingness to use them. “Democracy” and “human rights” are ideas that are accepted everywhere, and the U.S. has gained an outsized ability to define what these ideas mean. This acceptance is not, according to Chinese officials, because American ideas are better. Instead, the U.S. took advantage of its position as the dominant power after World War II to write its ideas into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights instruments and to install what China sees as “Western-style” democracies in Japan and eventually in Korea, Taiwan, and other countries around the world. Chinese officials argue that today the U.S. is only using the ideas of democracy and human rights to cover up class exploitation at home and neocolonialism abroad. Ideological power supports military and economic power. With these ideas, the U.S. delegitimizes and destabilizes regimes that espouse alternative ideas such as socialism and Asian-style developmental authoritarianism.

Finally, Chinese analysts believe that the U.S. uses its dominant diplomatic position in the world to reinforce its other capabilities. The U.S. military presence outside its borders is put into legal form by treaties and agreements that other nations have signed under U.S. pressure as well as by UN Security Council resolutions that the U.S. has extracted by arm twisting. The U.S. uses arms control to prevent other countries from challenging its dominance and manages the arms control regime in such a way that attempts by North Korea, Iran, and other countries to shield themselves from U.S. pressure by acquiring nuclear weapons get classified as violations of international law. The U.S. dominates the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and other rule-making bodies of the international economy in such a way as to benefit itself. It has by and large dominated the international human rights regime, although it refuses to subject itself to some of the key treaties (chapter 12).¹⁶ The U.S. arrogates to itself the right to label some governments “rogue” regimes, such as those in Burma, Sudan, and Iran, and to force other countries to join in imposing sanctions on them. Although its diplomatic power has been weakening, the U.S. can still use the international system to benefit itself and, often enough, to make life more complicated for China.

To all three schools of Chinese analysts that we described earlier—the culturalist, the Marxist, and the realist schools—it is only logical to assume that a country as powerful as the U.S. will use its power resources to preserve its privileges and will treat efforts by other countries to protect their interests as threats to its own security. The implications for all three are pessimistic: as China rises, the U.S. can be expected to resist.

Beyond capabilities, Chinese analysts look at the history of U.S.–China relations to sharpen their understanding of U.S. intentions and practices. The lessons of history reinforce the logic of capabilities: in Beijing’s view, the U.S. has treated China harshly in pursuing its power interests. From 1950 to 1972, the U.S. tried to “contain and isolate” China (chapter 3). Among other actions, it prevailed upon its allies to withhold diplomatic recognition from the PRC, organized a trade embargo against China, built up the Japanese military, intervened in Korea, supported the rival regime in Taiwan, supported Tibetan guerillas fighting PRC control, and threatened to use nuclear weapons. U.S. China policy changed after 1972, but only to serve Washington’s needs—to counter the Soviet Union and to gain the economic advantage of doing business in China after China adopted an open-door policy. Even then, the U.S. continued to hedge against China’s rise by maintaining Taiwan as a strategic distraction, further building up Japanese military strength, continuously modernizing its naval and other forces in Asia, and pressuring China on human rights.

More specifically, the Chinese have taken lessons about American China policy from several sets of negotiations with Washington. These negotiations included intermittent ambassadorial talks during the 1950s and 1960s,¹⁷ negotiations over arms control in the 1980s and 1990s,¹⁸ and negotiations over climate change in the 2000s. Two sets of negotiations made especially strong impressions on the Chinese: those over Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s and those over the WTO in the 1990s. We examine the WTO negotiations more fully in chapter 10, but, in summary, the Chinese believe that the Americans dragged out the negotiations, drove an unduly hard bargain, and ratcheted up their demands in bad faith at the last moment when Premier Zhu Rongji came to Washington in 1999 to offer what China thought would be final concessions. After initially agreeing to Zhu’s offer, President Bill Clinton cited congressional dissatisfaction with the deal as a reason for demanding still more concessions. The lessons of this experience for Beijing were that the U.S. never relents even on minor details, that negotiating with the U.S. is politicized and chaotic because no one is fully in charge, and that the U.S. drives the hardest possible bargain to maximize its own benefits rather than seeking a fair deal that serves both sides.

Even more decisive for Chinese understandings of U.S. policy were the three rounds of negotiations that took place over Taiwan in 1971–1972, 1978–1979, and 1982. These negotiations are worth studying in detail because they created the “communiqué framework” that governs American Taiwan policy to this day.¹⁹ The PRC has always labeled Taiwan as its highest-priority issue in its relations with Washington. The issue has existential importance for China because control of Taiwan is essential to Chinese security (chapter 8). To Chinese policymakers, the crux of the “Taiwan problem” has never been Taiwan’s separation from the mainland as such, but the U.S. role in perpetuating that separation. Had the U.S. not intervened in the Chinese civil war to protect the losing KMT side, Chinese policymakers believe that Taiwan would long since have been taken over by the PRC. Instead, with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, President Harry S. Truman directed the U.S. Navy to interpose itself in the Taiwan Strait; the U.S. maintained diplomatic recognition of the ROC as the government of all China instead of shifting recognition to the PRC; and Washington hedged its bets on the relationship of Taiwan to China by stating that “the determination of the future status of Formosa [i.e., Taiwan] must await the restoration of the security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations,” a legalism that allowed the possibility of Taiwan independence to remain on the table. In 1954, Washington signed a defense treaty with Taipei and started supplying military aid, which further consolidated the island’s independence from the mainland. These events formed the background for U.S.–China negotiations over Washington’s Taiwan policy.

When U.S.–China rapprochement began, PRC policymakers assumed that Washington would give up its support for Taipei in exchange for the benefits of normal state-to-state relations with Beijing. Indeed, at each stage of the negotiations the Americans seemed willing to disengage. Yet decades later the U.S. remains involved in Taiwan and is, in Beijing’s view, still the chief obstacle to the realization of the PRC’s reunification policy. How did this happen?

When Richard Nixon went to China in 1972, he told the Chinese that he was willing to sacrifice Taiwan because it would no longer be strategically important to the U.S. once the U.S. and China started cooperating. But he told Mao and Zhou that it was politically impossible to sever ties with Taipei at the same time that he opened ties with Beijing. He promised to break diplomatic and military relations with the ROC in his second term. After hard bargaining, the Chinese side accepted this two-step solution. In the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, they restated their absolutist position—“[T]he liberation of Taiwan is China’s internal affair in which no other country has the right to interfere; and all U.S. forces and military installations must be withdrawn from Taiwan”—but they also allowed the U.S. to make a parallel declaration within the same document. The crucial language in the communiqué reads as follows.

When the next president, Jimmy Carter, wanted to normalize relations with China in order to increase pressure on the Soviet Union, the Chinese insisted that the flaws in the 1972 arrangement be repaired. After tense negotiations, as part of the deal to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing on January 1, 1979, Washington agreed to break diplomatic relations with Taipei, give the legally required one-year notice of termination of the Mutual Defense Treaty, “recognize” the PRC government as “the sole legal government of China,” and say again that it “acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.”²⁰ The U.S. insisted, however, on including a sentence in the joint normalization communiqué that said, “Within this context, the people of the United States will maintain cultural, commercial, and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan.” Moreover, despite Chinese objections, the U.S. issued a unilateral statement that said that “the United States continues to have an interest in the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue and expects that the Taiwan issue will be settled peacefully by the Chinese themselves.” The Chinese responded with their own unilateral statement saying, “[A]s for the way of bringing Taiwan back to the embrace of the motherland, it is entirely China’s internal affair.” But this could only contradict, not undo, Carter’s reaffirmation of the American interest in a peaceful resolution first asserted by Nixon. As to U.S. military assistance to Taiwan, China demanded that Washington give an exact date for its termination, but the American negotiators refused. The normalization deal thus brought the Chinese some steps forward but reinforced the lesson that Washington would not let go of any advantage unless the other side had an absolute upper hand in the negotiations.

What happened next was a yet another painful lesson for the Chinese side. On April 15, 1979, the U.S. Congress carried out a partial rebellion against the deal Carter had struck—careful though it was—by adopting the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). The TRA restated the U.S. “interest” in peaceful methods of “determining the future of Taiwan” (as if, Chinese commentators protested, there was something about the future of Taiwan that still needed to be determined). The act expressed Congress’s intent to “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security … of the people on Taiwan.” It committed the U.S. to provide defense “articles and services” sufficient to enable Taiwan to defend itself, “based solely [on] … the needs of Taiwan”—meaning that future administrations were forbidden to bargain with Beijing over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. It established a quasi-governmental framework that enabled Washington to maintain what were in effect state-to-state relations with Taipei ²¹ and said that the U.S. would continue to treat Taiwan in every way except in protocol terms as if Taiwan were a state under international and domestic law.

In short, from Beijing’s perspective, the TRA took back much of what Nixon and Carter had yielded. In place of the old U.S. policy that recognized the ROC as the government of all China—and hence at least acknowledged the unity of China—the TRA now recognized an entity called Taiwan that the U.S. would treat as if it were separate from China and that enjoyed all the substantive attributes of statehood in its dealings with the U.S. except for formal diplomatic recognition. In place of progressive abandonment of the American military commitment to Taiwan, the TRA entrenched the U.S. in the position of guaranteeing protection as long as Taiwan needed it. Indeed, American officials have used the TRA over the years since its enactment to justify a range of public and private diplomatic interventions, arms sales, military contingency planning, and even shows of force to defend Taiwan from PRC threats. When Chinese diplomats complained about the TRA’s inconsistency with Nixon’s and Carter’s promises, they were told that in the American constitutional system the Congress could do what it wanted. Beijing had already learned that the power of the presidency was unstable. Now it discovered that the U.S. could use the principle of separation of powers to claim the right in effect to renege on its agreements.

In 1982, Beijing saw another chance to correct the errors of its previous negotiations with the U.S. As a presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan had signaled his intention to upgrade relations with Taiwan, but when he became president, he found that he needed Chinese cooperation against the Soviet Union. In return for such cooperation Beijing insisted on concessions on the issue of American arms sales to Taiwan. After intense negotiations, the two sides issued a second Shanghai Communiqué on August 17, 1982. The key passage read:

China had now forced the U.S. to make its 1972 commitment to reduce arms sales to Taiwan more specific. But once the agreement was in place, the Americans proceeded to use legalistic reasoning to empty it of all meaning. They set the benchmark year at 1979, when arms sales had been at their highest; calculated annual reductions at a small marginal rate, adjusted for inflation so that they were actually increases; claimed that the more advanced weapons systems that it sold Taiwan were the qualitative equivalents of older systems rather than advances on them; and allowed commercial firms to cooperate with Taipei’s armaments industry under the rubric of technology transfer rather than arms sales. By the time George W. Bush approved a large package of advanced arms to be sold to Taiwan in April 2001, it was clear that the 1982 communiqué was a dead letter. Meanwhile, as America indefinitely prolonged its involvement with Taiwan, changes took place there that put unification farther out of Beijing’s reach (chapter 9).

Reviewing this history, Chinese strategists ask themselves why the Americans are so stubbornly committed to Taiwan. Although Americans often answer this question by citing the imperative to defend a loyal, democratic ally from subjugation by a dictatorship, most Chinese see strategic motives at the root of American behavior. They believe that keeping the Taiwan problem going helps the U.S. tie China down. As one group of mainland military strategists framed it, “[S]ince the end of the Cold War, Taiwan has become an increasingly important chess piece used by the United States to keep China in check.”²² The lessons of this experience thus confirm Chinese expectations from theory. The U.S. will use all its instruments of power to hold back the rise of a rival.

In these circumstances, interest-group politics assumed an increased importance in U.S. China policy, working its effect in part through Congress. China’s political system elicits opposition from human rights organizations (chapter 12); its population control policies anger the right-to-life movement; its repression of unofficial “house churches” is condemned by American religious communities; its inexpensive consumer goods exports trigger demands for protection from organized labor; its reliance on coal and megadams for energy worries environmental groups; its arms and technology exports offend arms control activists; its rule in Tibet arouses protests from Tibetan expatriates and their American supporters; the film, software, and pharmaceutical industries demand protection of their copyrights in the Chinese market. Indeed, starting in the 1980s, China seemed to attract the attention of more American interest groups than any other country. The media and think tanks devoted increasing attention to China, usually following the principle that only bad news is worth reporting. Starting in the late 1990s, public discussion focused on the idea of a “China threat,” an idea that, in Chinese eyes, not only denies the legitimacy of Chinese aspirations but seems to voice a threat itself to Chinese interests.²³

Members of Congress have pressured the White House or voted for legislation to promote policies toward China that meet the demands of vocal constituencies. In recent years, the spectrum of congressional critics of the U.S. China policy has run from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to the Republican Right and has covered the gamut of issues from human rights and Tibet to trade barriers and currency manipulation, from Taiwan to intellectual property rights, from climate change and the environment to the Chinese military threat. The more important China becomes, the more necessary it seems to be for each member of Congress to take a strong position on one or another issue relating to China. Some members specialize in issues they feel strongly about personally—often religious freedom, Tibet, or human rights. Others respond to issues important to their constituents for reasons of economic interest or ethnic identity—currency, trade, Taiwan. And others select issues related to the policy specializations they have carved out in Congress, such as trade or defense. Small groups of citizens encourage attention to the issues they care about by “bundling” campaign contributions, which the campaign finance law otherwise limits to $2,500 per individual donor and $5,000 per group.

Most congressional debate on China is only that—debate—but Congress occasionally takes action, sometimes in unexpected ways that can have a real impact on Chinese interests. Passage of the TRA in 1979 is a prime example. From 1990 to 1994, Congress debated every year whether to cancel China’s most-favored-nation trade status, which would have raised tariffs on Chinese imports into the U.S.²⁴ Although it never did so, the possibility that it might do so caused China to make concessions on human rights issues every year during that period. In 1995, a “sense of Congress” resolution forced the administration to grant a visa to Taiwan president Lee Tenghui in contravention of previous State Department commitments to Beijing, an event that led to the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait crisis (chapter 9). In 1997, Congress forced the State Department to appoint an ambassadorial-level “special coordinator” for Tibetan issues, a step that China protested as infringing on its internal affairs. In 1999, as noted earlier, congressional opposition forced President Bill Clinton to raise the price he demanded for U.S. approval of Chinese admission to the WTO. Congress often only barked, but sometimes it bit.

Of course, there are also many advocates in Congress, the think tanks, the media, and academia who support positions favorable to China on the basis that cooperation is important for American farmers, exporters, banks, and Wall Street or that strategic cooperation over issues such as Korea or climate change is more important than disputes over rights or religion. Those voices may be more powerful in the long run than the voices critical of China, but they tend to speak more quietly and work more often behind the scenes.²⁵ To Chinese analysts trying to make sense of the cacophony of views expressed in the American policy community, the signals are mixed and often alarming.²⁶

In trying to ascertain American intentions, Chinese analysts also look closely at authoritative policy statements by senior figures from the executive branch. Coming from a political system where the executive dominates, Chinese analysts consider these statements the most reliable guides to American strategy. They find that such statements often combine two themes: seeking to reassure Beijing that Washington’s intentions are benign, but at the same time reassuring the American public that Washington will make sure that China’s rise does not threaten American interests. This combination of themes produces what Chinese analysts perceive as sugar-coated threats.

For example, in 2005 Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick delivered a major China policy statement on behalf of the George W. Bush administration. He told his American audience that China’s rise was not a threat because China “does not seek to spread radical, anti-American ideologies,” “does not see itself in a death struggle with capitalism,” and “does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system.” On that basis, he said, the two sides could have “a cooperative relationship.” But cooperation would depend on certain conditions. “China’s … national interest would be much better served by working with us to shape the future international system”—rather than, implicitly, by working against Washington. China should take measures to calm what he called a “cauldron of anxiety” in the U.S. about its rise. It should “explain its defense spending, intentions, doctrine, and military exercises”; reduce its trade surplus with the U.S.; and cooperate with Washington on North Korea and Iran. Above all, Zoellick advised, China should give up “closed politics.” In the American view, he said, “China needs a peaceful political transition to make its government responsible and accountable to its people.” In conclusion, he said that the U.S. welcomed China in the role of a “responsible stakeholder” in world affairs and that the U.S. and its allies would meanwhile “hedge relations with China” to see how China would act.²⁷

Chinese analysts were fascinated because in China a speech like Zoellick’s would be carefully vetted through an interagency process and reflect the considered opinion of the whole government. They fanned out to ask their U.S. contacts what was meant by the Americanisms stakeholder and hedge. They concluded that Zoellick was telling Beijing that it must cooperate with Washington or else and that in the meanwhile the U.S. would continue to try to change China’s form of government.

Other authoritative statements in the Bush administration sounded similar themes. The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review—a document issued every four years by the U.S. Defense Department—said, “U.S. policy seeks to encourage China to choose a path of peaceful economic growth and political liberalization, rather than military threat and intimidation…. The United States … will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States or other friendly countries, and it will seek to deter aggression or coercion. Should deterrence fail, the United States would deny a hostile power its strategic and operational objectives.”²⁸ The 2006 edition of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America said, “China’s leaders must realize, however, that they cannot stay on [a] peaceful path while holding on to old ways of thinking and acting that exacerbate concerns throughout the region and the world…. Only by allowing the Chinese people to enjoy these basic freedoms and universal rights can China honor its own constitution and international commitments and reach its full potential. Our strategy seeks to encourage China to make the right strategic choices for its people, while we hedge against other possibilities.”²⁹

The same ideas were repeated—albeit in gentler language—by the Barack Obama administration.³⁰ The first major policy speech on China under that administration, given by Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg in September 2009, introduced the idea of “strategic reassurance.” Steinberg defined the principle in the following way: “Just as we and our allies must make clear that we are prepared to welcome China’s ‘arrival’ … as a prosperous and successful power, China must reassure the rest of the world that its development and growing global role will not come at the expense of security and well-being of others.” China would need to “reassure others that this buildup does not present a threat …, [to] increase its military transparency in order to reassure all the countries in the rest of Asia and globally about its intentions, … [and to show that it] respects the rule of law and universal norms.”³¹ The Obama administration’s first National Security Strategy, issued in 2010, said: “We will monitor China’s military modernization program and prepare accordingly to ensure that U.S. interests and allies, regionally and globally, are not negatively affected. More broadly, we will encourage China to make choices that contribute to peace, security, and prosperity as its influence rises.”³² The first Quadrennial Defense Review of the Obama years, issued in 2010, said, “[L]ack of transparency and the nature of China’s military development and decision-making processes raise legitimate questions about its future conduct and intentions within Asia and beyond. Our relationship with China must therefore be multidimensional and undergirded by a process of enhancing confidence and reducing mistrust in a manner that reinforces mutual interests.”³³ To Chinese analysts, these statements were consistent in substance and conveyed the message that Washington wanted cooperation on its own terms and would seek to deter China from developing a military capability adequate to defend its own security interests.

Rendering U.S. policy even more dangerous and inflexible in Chinese eyes is its ideological character. Policymakers in a democracy use ideology—clear, simple themes that make sense out of complex actions—to unify influential political actors, mobilize public support, and coordinate the bureaucracy.³⁴ Chinese leaders do the same but less extensively because the Chinese public pays less attention to foreign policy than Americans do, and there are fewer actors with independent influence. Chinese leaders are usually able to deal with foreign policy issues on a pragmatic basis behind closed doors but feel that American officials often fail to reciprocate: according to one Chinese analyst, “The United States needs ideology to distinguish friend from foe.”³⁵ The public ideology of U.S. diplomacy appears to the Chinese as evangelical—both literally in that the U.S. promotes what it considers Judeo-Christian values and figuratively in that the U.S. promotes its values with a religious-like fervor. Understanding U.S. policy as ideological helps Chinese elites make sense of decisions that otherwise do not seem coherent to Beijing, such as the U.S. interventions in Somalia in 1992–1994 and Serbia in 1999, Washington’s prolonged anti-Castro policy toward Havana, and its frequent criticism of other governments for human rights violations.

Indeed, in the eyes of many in Beijing, since the end of the Cold War the U.S. has revealed itself to be not a conservative power intent on resisting structural change in the international system, but a revisionist power that is taking new initiatives to reshape the global environment in its favor. These initiatives include NATO expansion; interventions in Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo; two Persian Gulf wars; the Afghanistan War; the extension of U.S. military power into Central Asia; and the effort to deny North Korea’s and Iran’s rights (as the Chinese see it) to self-defense. In the economic realm, the U.S. has tried to expand its advantages by pushing for free trade, running down the value of the dollar while other countries are forced to use it as a reserve currency, and trying to make developing countries bear an unfair share of the cost of mitigating global climate change. The U.S. has shown its aggressive designs by pushing its version of human rights and democracy in other countries and by promoting color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. According to one rising star in the CCP, “[The Americans’] real purpose is not to protect so-called human rights but to use this pretext to influence and limit China’s healthy economic growth and to prevent China’s wealth and power from threatening [their] world hegemony.”³⁶ There is, Chinese analysts conclude, a pattern of aggressiveness to the American use of power.³⁷

This Chinese suspicion of the U.S. confronts the huge anomaly that the U.S. has done so much to promote China’s rise. For Chinese analysts, however, history provides an answer to this puzzle. The U.S. contained China for as long as it could. When the Soviet Union’s rising strength made it necessary, the U.S. was forced to engage with China in order to reinforce its hand against Moscow. Once the U.S. started to engage with China, it came to believe that engagement would make China into a democracy and would win back for the U.S. the strategic base on the mainland of Asia that Washington had lost in 1949. Moreover, after China started down the path of reform and opening, the U.S. began to earn huge economic benefits from its investments in China, the supply of cheap Chinese goods, and the Chinese willingness to support the U.S. trade and fiscal deficits by buying U.S. Treasury bonds. In the Chinese view none of this was done out of idealism or generosity. Meanwhile, until the late 1990s, American strategists underestimated China’s potential. Now, Chinese analysts believe, the U.S. perceives China as a threat but no longer has any realistic way to prevent it from continuing to develop. In this sense, the U.S. strategy of engagement failed, whereas Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of “hiding our light and nurturing our strength” worked (chapter 1). Now that it is faced with a China that has risen too far to be stopped, the U.S. can do no more than it is doing: demand cooperation on American terms, threaten China, hedge militarily, and continue to try to change the regime.

These depressing views have not prevented China from cooperating with the U.S. in many areas of common interest. It has had no choice but to do so. According to Hu Jintao, “Neither side gains if relations deteriorate.” Former PRC vice president Zeng Qinghong said, “Avoiding conflict is a long-term task for both sides.” According to Premier Wen Jiabao, “What determines the direction of development of U.S.–China relations is the two countries’ basic interests…. [C]ommon interests are greater than the divisions between the two countries.”³⁸

Such thinking reflects the realistic, instrumental thinking that guides Chinese foreign policy, in which common interests trump ideological differences. Beijing believes that the more the U.S. needs China for its own economic prosperity and to solve issues such as North Korean nuclearization, proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran, and global climate change, the more likely Washington is to choose cooperation over conflict. As Zeng Qinghong put it in the 1990s, “[G. H. W.] Bush and Clinton are both clear—to form bad relations with China is against their long-term basic national interest. Therefore, the United States will not develop bad relations with China in the long term, and U.S.–China relations cannot evolve into [something similar to] the former U.S.–Soviet relations.”

For China, as for the U.S., however, the logic of security has no horizon. The stronger—and in a certain sense the more secure—a country is, the more security it needs. Each major power prefers to dominate the other rather than to compromise. Beijing analysts expect the U.S. to remain the global hegemon for several more decades, despite the best efforts of Russia, China, and others to restrain it and despite what they perceive as the initial signs of U.S. decline. For now, as one leading Americanist put it, “The superpower is more super, and the many great powers less great.”³⁹ Survey research among Chinese elites shows that most do not think the hegemonic power of the U.S. will disappear quickly.⁴⁰

Chinese policymakers thus assume that each power is likely to continue to build up its capability to constrain the other, aiming to be free of dependence on the other for its own security. But that is a distant goal for either side, unless the other side withdraws from the race. Instead, the two are growing increasingly interdependent economically, and as China’s military power grows, the two sides—although not equal—will have the increasing ability to cause each other substantial harm (chapter 11). In this mutual vulnerability lies the best hope for now for cooperation. It is fear of each other that keeps the imperative to cooperate alive in the face of mutual suspicion.