Knowledge, Not Fear, Is Key to China Ties

Is China’s importance overrated?

For most people, especially in Asia, China is the 800-pound gorilla. Although Japan’s 20th century history as a fearsome aggressor is unparalleled, the sheer proportions of China’s population, reawakened economy and relentless ambition would seem to mark it down as a world-class VIP--very important problem.

Actually, that’s not so, argues Gerald Segal of London’s International Institute of Strategic Studies. China really isn’t that important, he says in his essay in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, “Does China Matter?”

The less we think of China as an emerging superpower and more as a mundane mediocrity, he contends, the better off we’ll be. “Until China is cut down to size in Western imagination and treated more like a Brazil or an India,” he declaims, “the West stands little chance of sustaining a coherent and long-term policy.”

Try selling that line to anyone who lives in the neighborhood, and in return they may try to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn. Don’t monkey around with Beijing, they’ll tell you: It’s becoming a lean and maybe even a mean machine. And that’s the good news. The bad is that it has so many internal problems that the shaky edifice of the People’s Republic of China could someday collapse, with sections of the country wanting to break off, as in Indonesia. The result for Asia would be a mess. It’s hard for people in the region to accept that China isn’t all-important, or that the China-U.S. relationship isn’t a key to global stability.

Of course, puffing up China into a phenomenon it’s not won’t help. If we overrate China, cower in its shadow, the West starts to shadowbox with its fears. In “Managing U.S.-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century” (with Gregory C. May), a surpassingly sensible new study issued by the Nixon Center in Washington, Johns Hopkins professor David Lampton, head of the center’s Chinese studies program, believes this has already started to happen. He argues that Washington’s fears of Chinese militarization are overwrought, that the United States has been the overall economic winner in the relationship, that the Nixon-originated policy of ambiguity toward Taiwan and China has actually benefited both, and “on the human rights question the overall trend is positive.” In short, until relatively recently, Washington was doing fine with China but didn’t realize it.

Lampton, California-born and Stanford-educated, deeply respects the impulses that led Nixon and Henry Kissinger to China, so he still can’t accept that it took President Clinton until the fifth year of his presidency to travel there. He accepts the limits on any China-U.S. friendship, and the frictions that would test any administration, but he judges that Clinton has done a poor job of relationship management. He’s furious about the bungling of the World Trade Organization issue: “U.S. policy on China and the WTO has fluctuated wildly. China’s admission is possible by the end of the year, but the situation is getting progressively less hopeful.”

Lampton suspects Clinton’s failure to accept Premier Zhu Rongji’s April concessions on WTO will go down in history as a monumental diplomatic blunder: “Clinton showed a tremendous lack of courage when those concessions were handed to him--he was unwilling to go to Capitol Hill and sell them.” Bringing Beijing into the WTO would also bring Taipei in (that’s the deal in the wings--assuming Clinton can still get it done next month at the WTO summit in Seattle). It would also benefit the U.S. economy. And it would increase Beijing’s stake in its own economic development.

The Lampton report, which posits the Taiwan issue as a great threat to world peace, accepts that the bilateral face-off will never approach a condition of true love and warns Americans away from the idea that there could ever be “a sincere strategic partnership.” But episodic U.S. efforts to challenge the legitimacy of the Beijing regime are juvenile. So is a policy that ignores opportunities to come to China’s aid when disasters like floods kill tens of thousands of people but harps instead on the plight of the same small group of 2,000-or-so political dissidents. U.S. human rights policy, says Lampton, is: “Zero dollars, zero thoughts.”

The contrast between Segal and Lampton is striking. Where the former would take China down a few notches on the West’s priority list, the latter would notch the issue up. The United States especially needs to put one high-level official in charge of day-to-day China policy and needs a president whose attention span doesn’t wander like Clinton’s.

Lampton is not endorsing anyone for president, of course, but in producing the single most important assessment of the possibilities and limitations of the all-important relationship with China, he has provided the next president, whoever he (or she) is, with a sound basis on which to guide an inherently difficult policy. There’s no sense making a complicated bilateral relationship even more difficult by becoming an 800-pound gorilla ourselves.

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Times contributing editor Tom Plate’s column runs Wednesdays. The full text of the Lampton interview can be found at www.asiamedia.ucla.edu.