How Chilly Will We Get With China?

It must be frustrating these days for a raring-to-go hawk on whatever side of the Sino-American divide. The latest dust-up between the United States and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein shoves to the back burner, for the time being, China’s prospects for becoming U.S. foreign policy’s No. 1 tangible villain. How sad. But be patient, ye hawks of Sino or American feather, the odds are improving that before long you’ll get to flock to a new Cold (or at least Chilly) War.

For those of us who prefer a different outcome in our evolving relationship with the new China, though, the Iraqi dictator’s latest eruption was paradoxically welcome. It focused America’s attention on a true bad guy and put the big, far more ambiguous problem in Asia on hold. After all, the most recent tea leaves had not been promising.

Last month, the People’s Republic of China topped Japan, heretofore the most favored nation for U.S. politicians to bash, in the trade-deficit department. Not good for bilateral brotherhood. Then there are those persistent rumors that Beijing is providing missile technology materials to Pakistan. No help in the Washington-Beijing mutual trust department. Most ominously, perhaps, China is now engaged in a campaign to whip up nascent nationalism, leading to chilling man-in-the-street anti-Americanism. UCLA’s Richard Baum, one of America’s foremost China experts, visited Beijing this summer and reports “more hostility [to Westerners] than on previous occasions.” And now Beijing is walling off public access to various Internet sites to protect its subjects from outside contamination.

Clearly, the People’s Republic is in a new phase of its historical consciousness: Proud of its growing economic might, enamored of its military forces, focused on its internal succession struggle; dead-set against any declaration of independence from Taiwan; and, above all, determined to forestall the United States, not to mention Japan, from overshadowing it in the region. Washington, Beijing is all but convinced, is out to trim China’s sails, in part by enlarging Tokyo’s and raising Taipei’s.

Alas, Beijing, in so many ways still so isolated, misunderstands U.S. intentions. By maintaining significant military forces in Asia and nurturing a ties-that-bind relationship with Tokyo, Washington is acting in a way that complements China’s own vital security interests. The effect is to keep Japan from feeling insecure, especially about China, and thus from rearming, which would make Beijing feel really insecure about Japan.

“Anything that suggests . . . fragility . . . in the U.S.-Japan security relationship helps conservative, hard-line [Chinese] analysts sell their portrayal of a threat from Japan and sell their prescriptions for a tougher Chinese security posture,” says Cornell University assistant professor Thomas J. Christensen, in the current Foreign Affairs journal. “The ever-present hawks could more easily foment militarization.”

China will never be entirely thrilled with U.S. policy, especially over Taiwan. Our interests sometimes conflict, sometimes overlap. Do we prefer a showdown with China, then? I think not. Then wimp out, cower and duck? Bad idea, too.

We won’t get anywhere without a mature relationship that avoids scapegoating China for our problems, especially our economic ones (which we have sometimes done with the Japanese). A patient and careful policy out of Washington would continue to underpin regional peace and economic resurgence. It would also provide economic dividends for America. Richard Alter, whose Los Angeles-based Financial Capital Investment Co. does business with Chinese investors from all over, brings the issue home: “The economic future of the United States is in Asia.” In the last two years, though Japanese investment in the U.S. real estate industry has declined, investment from other Asian countries has increased by 42%--much of it from Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. Adds Alter: “The Chinese who invest here are here for the long haul. Asia is the world’s superb growth area, and the Chinese are the most global. They are taking their money out of Asia and they invest it everywhere.” Today no fewer than 19 state-chartered banks here, with affiliations in Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, service this growing business. And it goes both ways: California is now planning to sock state employee pension fund money into venture capital projects in mainland China.

In California alone between 1990 and 1994, the ethnic Chinese population grew by 20%. Now, at 900,000, the Chinese have one of the highest growth rates of any ethnic group in America’s most populous state. “And can you believe?” Alter laughs, “A helluva lot of Chinese in Asia want nothing more than a simple tract house in West Covina! That’s what makes them happy.”

And that’s fine by me. Who wants a new Big Chill with China? Sure, we shouldn’t weaken our relationship with Tokyo or our human rights position just for a few cash sales in West Covina. But who wants to go back to the future?

Times columnist Tom Plate also teaches in the UCLA communication studies program. E-mail: tplate@ucla.edu