target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#u74b774ae-fcbc-5469-a525-92b2d1813df4">Chapter 5 will make the case that, as is true of its domestic political and economic policies, the outward-directed elements of China’s grand strategy are also strongly shaped by the character of the CCP regime and its distinctive ideological worldview. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Beijing faced an international system that it saw as profoundly threatening, not only to its physical security but also to its very legitimacy. While for a time China lacked the power to challenge the status quo, the notion that it would want nothing more than to be accepted as a member in good standing of the existing regional and global orders was always fanciful. As their capabilities have grown, China’s leaders have gone over to the offensive, pushing back at the meddlesome presence of US and allied military forces in their own backyard, challenging America’s position as the preeminent global power, and seeking to neutralize the threat posed by the pervasiveness and continuing appeal of the liberal democratic ideals it espouses.
What comes through plainly in each of these three domains – political, economic, and strategic – is the consistency of the CCP’s goals and the relentless determination with which they have been sought by successive generations of leaders. Since taking power in late 2012, Xi Jinping has felt emboldened to express those ends more openly and to pursue them more forcefully than his predecessors. Contrary to the way in which he is sometimes portrayed in the West, however, Xi does not represent a break from the past. To the contrary, he is following in the footsteps of his forebears and attempting to attain the same objectives.
For their part, the United States and its allies are presently suspended between a set of old policies that have not achieved the aims set for them and a new, not yet fully defined alternative strategy to guide their future actions. Before looking forward, Chapter 6 will look back one last time, examining the question of whether engagement’s failure was inevitable and explaining why it has taken so long for Western policy-makers to acknowledge that it has, in fact, failed.
The democracies now find themselves confronted, not by a cooperative partner, but by a powerful and hostile state, deeply enmeshed in their societies and economies, and ruled by a technologically sophisticated, dictatorial regime that seeks to reshape the world in ways that are threatening to their interests and inimical to their values. This reality is unpleasant but it is also undeniable and must be faced. Continuing to engage with China on the same terms as in the past will help it grow even stronger and, instead of inducing positive change, such an approach will only strengthen the hand and encourage the ambitions of the CCP regime.
The book will close by laying out the main elements of a new strategy for meeting the challenge that Beijing now poses. Although there will be costs, the United States and its allies need to constrict engagement with China and invest more in the capabilities necessary to balance against its growing power. Abandoning the illusory post-Cold War goal of transforming the country by incorporating it into an all-inclusive international order operating on liberal principles, the democracies must focus instead on strengthening the sinews of a partial liberal system: an assembly of states that, whatever their differences, share a commitment to upholding and defending the rights and freedoms on which their societies are based.
Notes
1 1. I will use the terms “West” and “liberal democracies” interchangeably. Once confined to the trans-Atlantic zone, liberal democracies can now be found in every region of the world. These are countries with popularly elected governments whose powers are restrained by the rule of law and which are committed to protecting the civil rights of all their citizens.
2 2. Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the European Council, and the Council, “EU–China – A Strategic Outlook,” March 12, 2019, p. 1.
1 The Origins of Engagement
During the climactic closing decades of the Cold War, US policy-makers viewed engagement with Beijing primarily through the lens of their ongoing competition against the Soviet Union. As the United States pulled back from its bruising defeat in Vietnam, the Soviets appeared to be moving boldly in the opposite direction. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, Moscow continued an ambitious, broad-based military buildup and launched a series of interventionist adventures of its own in Afghanistan, southern Africa, and Central America. Faced with these troubling trends, American strategists began to look for ways to enhance China’s military, economic, and technological capabilities in order to build it into a more effective counterweight to Soviet power.
Working with Beijing required a revolution in American diplomacy. For two decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Washington had refused even to recognize its existence, clinging instead to the fiction that the Nationalist regime that fled to Taiwan after being defeated by the Communists in 1949 was the legitimate government of all of China. Following the first tentative, secret contacts in 1969, successive American administrations took a series of steps that moved Washington and Beijing away from intense mutual animosity and towards a close, albeit wary, strategic alignment against a common foe.
Starting with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s first visit to China in 1971, American officials provided their counterparts in Beijing with satellite photographs and other intelligence information about the capabilities and disposition of Soviet forces, and began to discuss possible contingencies involving a military confrontation with the USSR.1 Together with these sensitive exchanges, Presidents Nixon and Ford also authorized the sale or transfer of limited numbers of so-called “dual-use” systems with both commercial and potential military applications, including satellite ground stations, civilian jet aircraft, and high-speed computers. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, Jimmy Carter added “non-lethal” military equipment such as transport aircraft, helicopters, communications hardware, and over-the-horizon radar systems to the list of items for sale. Seeking to strike a balance between countering Soviet power and upholding the continuing US commitment to Taiwan’s security, four years later Ronald Reagan took a significant further step, approving the sale of weapons deemed “defensive” in nature, including torpedoes and both anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.2
Chinese planners ultimately proved less interested in buying military hardware than in gaining access to Western technology of all kinds. Within certain limits, the Americans were happy to oblige. Soon after Reagan’s election in 1980, US officials indicated their willingness to relax controls on high-tech exports to China and to start treating it, as one put it, “as a friendly less-developed country and no longer as a member of the international Communist conspiracy.”3 In 1983, the Reagan administration announced that, for purposes of granting export licenses, the US government would henceforth treat China as “a friendly, non-aligned country.” Among the commodities now deemed suitable for export were computers, integrated circuits, precision measuring devices, and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.4 At the same time as it relaxed its own controls, Washington worked with its allies to synchronize national policies and ease collective export restrictions.5
According to one former State Department official, the “driving force” behind this loosening of controls was “overwhelmingly strategic, it had nothing to do with commercial factors.”6 As far as the US government was concerned, the object of the exercise was to strengthen China rather than to promote the fortunes of American companies. Still, the shift in policy was undeniably good for business. By the end of the 1980s, US high-tech exports to China (including both dual-use and purely commercial items) had increased in value by a factor of thirty.7
Technology transfer took other forms as well. Even before the resumption of formal diplomatic relations in 1979, the Carter administration agreed to permit several hundred Chinese students and scholars to attend
