Engage a China in Broad Evolution

After last month’s collision of a U.S. surveillance plane with a Chinese fighter, President Bush and his foreign policy team slowly woke up to the fact that treating China in a brusquely confrontational way was not helpful. But they are still far from finding their way toward a promising China policy.

They view China as an Evil Empire oppressing its citizens, threatening Taiwan and planning to increase its power in southern Asia and the Western Pacific at the expense of U.S. interests. Calling for a new policy that redefines China as a “strategic competitor,” they are shifting from a posture of engagement to one of containment and encouraging the strident nationalism of the Taipei government.

These tendencies are misguided.

I say this as one who has been immersed in the study of China for 40 years, has deep roots in Taiwan and puts supreme priority on Taiwan’s security and prosperity. I have intensively interacted with the intellectual community in China since 1994. Later this year, I’ll teach a graduate seminar on modern Chinese political thought at Peking University.

The great degree of intellectual freedom in China today is illustrated by the fact that graduate students at Peking University in history, political science and philosophy will spend two months this fall discussing the modern history of Chinese political thought with someone like me, who thinks Mao’s revolution was a mistake and who admires Taiwan’s modernization and democratization.

This rise of intellectual pluralism, moreover, has been accompanied not only by great economic liberalization but also by the beginnings of local elections.

These reforms are animated by the widespread Chinese perception of an irresistible historical trend heading toward modernization and democratization and exemplified by the U.S. When Mao died in 1976, no one could have imagined that China would progress so much in 25 years.

It is therefore unrealistic to criticize China for not progressing faster. Yes, there still are “rules of the game” limiting political freedom. Many Chinese, however, recognize that these are needed to ensure political stability, allowing continuing progress in such a huge, largely rural society.

Nor should China’s Taiwan policy today be regarded as aggressive. If China were insisting that Taiwan accept the Hong Kong model of “one nation, two systems,” I would agree that the U.S. should help Taiwan resist such a drastic change. But China today demands only that Taiwan accept the one-China principle as a starting point for discussions. The crisis in Chinese-Taiwanese relations has been caused by Taipei’s refusal to honor this principle, which has for so long been basic to U.S., Chinese and Taiwanese policy.

Thus Taipei now is seeking to base its security not on finding a reasonable consensus with China but on becoming an American protectorate. As such, it becomes part of an intrusion into Chinese sovereignty that can only poison U.S.-Chinese relations, undermine economic interests around the Pacific and so thus jeopardized Taiwan’s own security and prosperity.

Instead of backing Taipei’s gratuitous nationalism, the U.S. should go back to the old “engagement” policy: insisting on U.S. military primacy in the Pacific to ensure the security of Japan, peace in Korea, peace in the Taiwan Strait and respect for international law in the South Seas; unambiguously reaffirming the one-China principle; and handling our disagreements with Beijing in a firm, businesslike, respectful way.

To be sure, after a few decades, China might become a modern, powerful nation able to imperil U.S. interests. Indeed, to prepare for this possibility, a containment policy backing Taiwan nationalism might be logically and morally plausible. It is, however, politically infeasible.

What is feasible is a policy of engagement that builds up economic and cultural ties between the U.S. and a modernizing China. In this way, China becomes more integrated into the world system and so increasingly lacks incentive to disrupt it. The real problem today is not the strains arising out of the aircraft collision but Bush’s failure to grasp the need for such a policy.