China and the United States After Deng? : THE COMING CONFLICT WITH CHINA.<i> By Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 232 pp., $23</i>

The U.S.-China relationship has known soaring hope and biting fear; no other major relationship in the world has been so passionate. Yet the prosaic truth is that for a century, Beijing-Washington ties have been smooth only when a common enemy loomed; at other times, they have ranged from argumentative to parlous. Now with the death last week of Deng Xiaoping, the giant of post-Mao China, Beijing and its role in the world is once again in question.

“The Coming Conflict with China” is more redolent of fear than of hope. Its authors, Richard Bernstein, a former correspondent in Beijing for Time magazine and currently a book critic for the New York Times, and Ross Munro, a Canadian who is the head of the Foreign Policy Institute in Philadelphia, give full marks to Deng Xiaoping for creating a China more “new” than was Mao’s New China. Yet they see this post-ideological China as tyrannical, ambitious and duplicitous.

To Bernstein and Munro, the period of the 1970s and ‘80s, when the United States and China were friendly because of the Soviet threat, is a past era; just as the World War II period of warm United States-Soviet Union links became a past era when U.S.-U.S.S.R. hostility arose in the late 1940s. We used to talk--some still do--of the United States and China together preventing the emergence of a hegemon in Asia-Pacific. “The Coming Conflict with China” argues that China is the emerging hegemony.

A Chinese bid to dominate Asia is “virtually inevitable,” say Bernstein and Munro because of Beijing’s sense of historical grievance, the size and centrality of China, and the assertiveness of its position on Taiwan, the South China Sea and other issues. In the end, however, the authors do not flatly predict military conflict with China as the post-Deng era takes shape. They speak rather of managing a many-sided conflict.

Bernstein and Munro are close enough to the tightly-packed trenches of China studies to be well-informed, yet sufficiently outside to see its clay feet--an excellent combination for standing back from the details of the United States-China tie to capture the large picture. Their argument is nuanced and far-seeing. They report much information. They explain it, which is less common in a journalistic book. They relate Beijing-Washington relations to history and to current American domestic politics. The Clinton era (so far) has seen a sad weakening of the United States’ stance toward China. Policy has been uneven and fragmented. There is absolutely nothing wrong with putting commercial interests into our China policy. The trouble is candidate Clinton in 1992 attacked President Bush for doing just that; then, having marched up the mountain of moralism, he marched down again two years later with a sheepish smile and empty hands. Nothing was different except that he had gained a reputation in Asia for unsteadiness.

After 1994, with Ron Brown at the helm, commerce became China policy. Back in the 1970s, Henry Kissinger was indulgent toward Beijing in the interests of maintaining a balance of power. Some of the Clinton people are indulgent toward Beijing to make a buck for the Democratic Party. The Chinese toughening toward the United States from 1994 is based on a sense of opportunity created by Clinton’s weakness. But it is also, like a comparable toughening in the last two years of Mao’s life, part of eve-of-succession tension.

“The Coming Conflict with China” is written in the crisp, graceful prose we have come to expect from Bernstein and bears the marks of Munro’s considerable knowledge of Chinese defense policy. Excellent are the analyses of trade issues and the Taiwan imbroglio. In a brilliant chapter, the authors skewer the manipulative anti-Japan stand of the Chinese Communists. It is conventional wisdom in Washington that the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1996 worked in Beijing’s favor and brought new respect for China in Asia and the West alike. Not so, argue Bernstein and Munro. On the contrary, Beijing’s bellicosity cost it a major anti-China swing by Japan. Every American concerned with Asia should ponder the authors’ statement: “A huge amount of Japanese wealth is invested in the Southeast Asian nations that border on a waterway that might soon be controlled by the Chinese navy.”

“The Coming Conflict with China” is the first book to broach the delicate problem of the emergence of a “New China Lobby”--academics and businessmen who have fallen in love with China in the Clinton era. In the 1960s and ‘70s, friends of China were sympathetic to Maoism, pacifistically inclined, or simply enamored of the exotic. Their successors of the 1990s are either opportunistic or naive, say Bernstein and Munro. Scattered across the left-right spectrum, they have in common a wooden inability to focus on the American national interest in regard to China. The sad fact is Beijing calls the shots. “Those who play by China’s rules continue to meet with vice premiers in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. Those who don’t, don’t.” However, Bernstein and Munro are too harsh on the business activities of Kissinger and other ex-officials. After all, Kissinger is only offering the opinions of a private citizen on China policy. The United States government may take these opinions or leave them; the free press of America can and should point out that Kissinger speaks as a businessman involved in the China trade, more than as a former secretary of state.

More convincing is the analysis of the commercial activities of the Chinese military; in this case, there is no free press in Beijing to keep an eye peeled for corruption. Ten Chinese army business groups also operate in the United States. An executive of one of them, Wang Jun, played the access-for-donations game with the Democratic Party in 1996.

The book’s grasp of Chinese internal politics sometimes falters (Hua Guofeng is overlooked in the statement that Jiang Zemin has more formal power than anyone since Mao; Qiao Guanhua was not foreign minister in 1972.) Occasionally the authors exaggerate their case. They rely too much on newspaper reports, which at times compounds a gap between image and reality.

In the Cultural Revolution, head of state Liu Shiaoqi could not understand what he was doing wrong, that Mao should want to get rid of him. Ultimately, he realized his very existence as a possible rival of Mao was the problem. So it is with the Chinese Communist view of America today: Our very existence is a threat to Beijing.

At the same time, more than one voice exists in Beijing, even if a shrill one currently dominates. Perhaps, too, Bernstein and Munro slight the huge vulnerabilities of the Beijing regime. Moscow won’t give China a free ride in Central Asia forever. Tensions in Hong Kong will tarnish Beijing’s image. Above all, a Leninist regime in a post-Soviet Union world is a time bomb that could go off at any moment.

One objection to the argument of “The Coming Conflict with China” is that the building of an equilibrium to balance China would forestall the nightmare that the book foresees. Yet it is a contribution of the book to alert us to the need for such an equilibrium. “The Coming Conflict with China” is timely and intelligent, far more often right than wrong. I hope it is widely read.