Rethinking China’s rise

As Mann noted in 2007: “Many in Washington believed that China’s Communist Party leadership intended to transform the country’s political system as well as its economic system.” The views of Friedberg and Mann, however, were outliers. Their warnings were dismissed as “hawkish.” But time has proven them correct.

China is menacing Taiwan and expanding its military and economic might far beyond east Asia. Out of all the numerous threats facing the United States — a long list that includes Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Islamic terrorism — only Beijing can be properly categorized as a “peer competitor,” one willing and able to challenge the U.S. at all levels.

“The history of the last half-century of relations between China and the West can be briefly summarized,” Friedberg writes. “The United States and the other liberal democracies opened their doors to China in the belief that, by doing so, they would cause its system to converge more closely with their own.” But “instead of a liberal and cooperative partner, China has become an increasingly wealthy and powerful competitor. Repressive at home and aggressive abroad.”

Friedberg is reluctant to call the West’s policy of engaging China a mistake, preferring instead to characterize it as an “experiment.” But it has been, he rightly concludes, a failure.

The West, Friedberg notes, was overtaken with the triumphalism that followed its victory in the Cold War. Capitalism and democracy were on the march. Communism and autocracy were such marked failures that surely the future would be open, tolerant, and liberal. After all: The Wall had come down, and the Soviet Union and its satellites had collapsed without the disastrous nuclear war that seemed all but certain.

But the Chinese Communist Party had other plans.

The very events that led then-President George H.W. Bush optimistically to herald a “New World Order” — the fall of the Soviet Union and the assembling of a broad coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait — were read differently in Beijing. In the West’s victory, the Chinese Communist Party saw portents of its future demise.

The West’s overconfidence, while understandable, proved to be its undoing.

A variety of entities came together to promote engagement, which Friedberg notes was characterized by “ever-deepening commercial, diplomatic, scientific, educational and cultural ties between the West and China.” Implicit in this bipartisan policy was the idea that China could be incorporated into a U.S.-led international order.

China, a nation with a millennia-long tradition of viewing itself as the center of the world, would acquiesce to being a junior partner to the U.S., which was founded a little more than a century before Mao Zedong was born. With hindsight, the hubris is readily apparent.

Among the most influential boosters of engagement was the business community, which saw in China unbounded economic opportunity. Business interests, Friedberg observes, were “crucial in shaping the attitudes of political elites” in the West.

Western policymakers, Friedberg observes, “misunderstood the character of China’s domestic political regime: they underestimated the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness of the CCP, misjudged the depths of its resolve to retain domestic political power, and failed to recognize the extent and seriousness of its revisionist international ambitions.”

China’s rulers spent years closely studying the fall of the Soviet Union, hoping to avoid its fate.

China, much less a China ruled via a Leninist political model, is not fertile ground for Western liberalism and reform. And the odds that the “gamble” of engagement would succeed “were always extremely long,” Friedberg writes.

Beijing, however, viewed engagement as a strategy to contain and control China’s growing power. Accordingly, while the U.S. spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s promoting engagement, CCP planners considered, if quietly at first, the U.S. to be the regime’s chief threat. And they acted accordingly.

For more than 30 years, Chinese strategists “found ways to exploit the opportunities afforded by engagement, expanding their nation’s economy, building up its scientific, technological and military capabilities, and enhancing its influence in Western countries, while at the same time maintaining and even reinforcing the Party’s grip on Chinese society.” Today, China is the largest police state in world history, with surveillance and technological capabilities that Hitler or Stalin could only dream of.

Friedberg deemphasized the role Xi has played in setting China’s fate. “Each of the main tendencies associated with Xi’s reign — increased assertiveness, intensified repression, heightened nationalism, expanded reliance on high-tech industrial policy — was visible first under Hu Jintao,” his predecessor. The policies themselves are but a “product of the collective assessments of the CCP elite.”

Xi might not have “yanked the wheel and tried to change the direction in which China is moving,” but he “has sought greatly to increase the speed at which it is traveling.” And that direction, it seems increasingly likely, might end in a great power confrontation between the U.S. and China.

A Sino-American conflict would, of course, be devastating. Accordingly, the U.S. must actively prepare for such a possibility. And Friedberg offers valuable insights on what the U.S. should do.

The U.S. must restructure its defense posture, concentrating greater resources to combat and deter Chinese aggression. This will require prioritizing some theaters over others. And it will also require creative thinking.

The U.S. and its allies “should continue to look for ways to pry Russia away from China and pull it closer to the West.” Although he correctly notes that “the prospects are not promising at present,” the goal “should be to deprive Beijing of its most capable strategic partner.” This would reduce the risk of Sino-Russian cooperation in a conflict, but it would also deny Beijing a “reliable source of overland energy.” Friedberg should be commended for saying out loud what many in Washington are afraid to utter, particularly with Moscow’s current belligerence.

The U.S. should also avoid overestimating Chinese power. While Chinese strategists are certainly aware of the dangers of imperial overstretch, they might find it unavoidable as their military might grows commensurate with their economic power. The Communist Party’s triumphalism, he notes, “is meant to encourage the belief that resistance is futile.” But the party’s autocrats are fallible.

Beijing’s resources, Friedberg observes, are large, “but they are by no means infinite, especially when compared to the combined wealth of the countries that might come together to oppose it.” Coalitions and allies will be key in counterbalancing China and in working to shore up their collective defense — both economic and otherwise.

Democracies must radically restructure their economic relations with China. “Nothing,” Friedberg rightly notes, “is more important and nothing will be more difficult.”

“At a minimum,” Friedberg says, “democracies can no longer afford policies that enable China to grow stronger and more quickly than it would otherwise do.” Longtime supporters of engagement, he warns, are “working hard to revive its reputation and give it new life.” But the U.S. and its allies can no longer afford to engage in a strategy in which failure is undeniable.

Mobilizing the public is an “essential precondition” for strategic success.

To build popular support for competition with China, public officials “must begin by acknowledging and explaining the failure of these past policies and conveying as accurately as possible the extent and urgency of the dangers their nations confront.” He adds: “The purpose should not be to cast blame but to build consensus.” Friedberg’s analysis of how and why the West has pursued a failed China policy in the post-Cold War era offers a good blueprint.

Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.