Soliciting China—a Failed Policy

When he visited Washington in February of last year, then Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping talked about “a new type of relationship between major countries in the 21st century.” Since then, he has been elevated to general secretary of the Communist Party and this formulation has been shortened to “a new type of great-power relationship.”

American analysts still wonder what the phrase means. In a short piece in the first (July-August) issue of the Asan Forum, Peking University’s Wang Jisi states that the concept envisions a future where China and the US avoid “the same old disastrous road of great power rivalry that lead to catastrophe.”

As no one is in favor of catastrophic outcomes, Wang, one of China’s most visible foreign policy specialists, finds no argument on that score. Yet he is unable to articulate anything useful beyond that basic proposition. Again, unfortunately, we are left without a guide as to what Chinese leaders ultimately want.

Wang tells us the phrase entails “really new elements and new work” that will avoid antagonism and “push” China and the US toward cooperation, and he refers to Zhou Enlai’s 1955 exhortation to “seek common ground while reserving differences.” He then writes this: “The key to developing a truly new model of great power relations between the United States and China is an expansion of their common economic and security interests, which now go far beyond East Asia.”

Do Wang’s words mean anything? To his credit, he first notes that the US and China have kept the peace for more than four decades and then acknowledges that the avoidance of war is nothing new. Yet he fails to state that Washington, during that time, has desperately tried to find common ground and has gone out of its way to assist Chinese development, both economic and political.

The truth is that Sino-US relations have recently deteriorated—especially in the last three years—and this is an indictment of the general American approach of seeking cooperation with China in the post–Cold War period. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton in February 2009 famously talked about downgrading human rights in America’s conversations with China. In November of that year, Jeffrey Bader, then the top East Asia hand on the National Security Council, talked about China’s assent as central to everything Washington was trying to accomplish.

These signals of cooperation from the Obama administration were immediately rebuffed. And it’s not hard to figure out why. Beijing officials believed Clinton had just performed a rhetorical “kowtow,” as one analyst based in the Chinese capital wrote at the time. Not surprisingly, Chinese policymakers immediately pressed their advantage by harassing unarmed Navy ships in international waters. And in the same month as Bader told a Washington audience how essential China’s cooperation was, already arrogant Chinese officials decided to use this veto that the American official had effectively handed them. Around the same time, China’s leader Hu Jintao consistently brushed off President Obama during their summit in Beijing.

So perhaps the path to better relations with China lies in being less solicitous. That would signal to Beijing that America knows it is holding the stronger hand and would be willing to play it. The ruthlessly pragmatic Communist Party of China has always respected strength and scorned weakness.

This is not to say American leaders need to go back to Reagan’s “we win, they lose” formulation—this decade is not yet the zero-sum world of the 1980s—but we should make sure our norms and values prevail and those of the Communist Party do not. The world we want is where citizens engage in robust debate, oceans and skies are open for commerce, and nations contribute to the maintenance of the rules-based international system. The one-party state in China, unfortunately, undermines all these fundamental notions.

We do not know what Xi Jinping contemplates when he talks about the “new type of great-power relationship,” and, judging from Wang Jisi’s vague comments, he doesn’t either. Yet we do not need authoritarian Beijing’s guidance in shaping the international system. The West’s postwar ideals of free markets and free societies have proven to be successful and enduring, and they remain popular across cultures and continents.

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