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and proceeded to dismantle established concepts of domestic and international order.
Mao’s concept of order—which he called the “great harmony,”
The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative.
In July 1971—during my secret visit to Beijing—Zhou Enlai summed up Mao’s conception of world order by invoking the Chairman’s claimed purview of Chinese emperors with a sardonic twist: “All under heaven is in chaos, the situation is excellent.”
the revolutionary’s dilemma.
The more sweeping the changes the revolutionary seeks to bring about, the more he encounters resistance, not necessarily from ideological and political opponents but from the inertia of the familiar.
Revolutionaries prevail when their achievements come to be taken for granted and the price paid for them is treated as inevitable.
1969, the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of attacking China
Mao calculated that the opening with the United States would end China’s isolation and provide other countries that were holding back with a justification for recognizing the People’s Republic of China.
Revolutions, no matter how sweeping, need to be consolidated and, in the end, adapted from a moment of exaltation to what is sustainable over a period of time. That was the historic role played by Deng Xiaoping.
“socialism with Chinese characteristics,”
Within less than a generation, China advanced to become the second-largest economy in the world. To speed up this dramatic transformation—if not necessarily by conviction—China entered international institutions and accepted the established rules of world order.
they expect—and sooner or later will act on this expectation—the international order to evolve in a way that enables China to become centrally involved in further international rule making, even to the point of revising some of the rules that prevail.
The cultural and political backgrounds of the two sides diverge in important aspects. The American approach to policy is pragmatic; China’s is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change. Americans outline an agenda of practical “deliverable” items; Chinese set out
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China is now governed by the fifth generation of leaders since the revolution. Each previous leader distilled his generation’s particular vision of China’s needs. Mao Zedong was determined to uproot established institutions, even those he had built in the original phase of his victory, lest they stagnate under China’s bureaucratic propensities. Deng Xiaoping understood that China could not maintain its historic role unless it became internationally engaged.
not to claim to lead but to extend China’s influence by modernizing both the society and the economy.
Jiang ...
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led the PRC into the international state and trading system as a full member. Hu Jintao,
skillfully assuaged concerns about China’s growing power and laid the basis for the concept of the new type of major-power relationship enunciated by Xi Jinping.
The Xi Jinping le...
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has projected a system that, while eschewing democracy, would be made more transparent and in which outcomes would be determined more by legal procedures than by the established pattern of personal and family relationships. It has announced challenges to many established institutions and practices—state-run enterprises, fiefdoms of regional officials, and large-scale corruption—in a manner that combines vision with courage
The composition of the Chinese leadership reflects China’s evolution toward participating in—and even shaping—global affairs. In 1982, not a single member of the Politburo had a college degree. At this writing, almost all of them are college educated, and a significant number have advanced degrees.
On the Chinese side, many American actions are interpreted as a design to thwart China’s rise, and the American promotion of human rights is seen as a project to undermine China’s domestic political structure.
On the American side, the fear is that a growing China will systematically undermine American preeminence and thus American security.
Two other issues are contributing to tension in Sino-American relations. China rejects the proposition that international order is fostered by the spread of liberal democracy and that the international community has an obligation to bring this about, and especially to achieve its perception of human rights by international action.
On the Chinese side,
national sovereignty is far more important than human rights,
upon the sovereignty of poor, weak countries of the Third World. Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is designed only to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony and practice power politics.
No formal compromise is possible between these views; to keep the disagreement from spiraling into conflict is one of the principal obl...
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a strategic partnership in the Pacific region, which is a way to preserve a balance of power while reducing the military threat inherent in it.
If the United States comes to be perceived as a declining power—a matter of choice, not destiny—China and other countries will succeed to much of the world leadership
Many Chinese may see the United States as a superpower past its peak.
The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.
In East Asia, the United States is not so much a balancer as an integral part of the balance.
For over a century—since
it has been a fixed American policy to prevent hegemony in Asia.
Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. In Asia, it must combine a balance of power with a concept of partnership. A purely military definition of the balance will shade into confrontation. A purely psychological approach to partnership will raise fears of hegemony. Wise statesmanship must try to find that balance. For outside it, disaster beckons.
America’s foreign policy has reflected the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary; that the real challenge of American engagement abroad was not foreign policy in the traditional sense but a project of spreading values that it believed all other peoples aspired to replicate.
While the Old World considered the New an arena for conquest to amass wealth and power, in America a new nation arose affirming freedom of belief, expression, and action as the essence of its national experience and character.
In Europe, a system of order had been founded on the careful sequestration of moral absolutes from political endeavors—if
In America, the proselytizing spirit was infused with an ingrained distrust of established institutions and hierarchies.
“In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole.”
The openness of American culture and its democratic principles made the United States a model and a refuge for millions. At the same time, the conviction that American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less than fully legitimate.
For Thomas Jefferson, America was not only a great power in the making but an “empire for liberty”—an ever-expanding force acting on behalf of all humanity to vindicate principles of good governance.
So defined, the spread of the United States and the success of its endeavors was coterminous with the interests of humanity.
The empire envisaged by Jefferson and his colleagues differed, in their minds, from the European empires, which they considered based on the subjugation and oppression of foreign peoples. The empire imagined by Jefferson was in essence North American and conceived as the extension of liberty.
Despite such soaring ambitions, America’s favorable geography and vast resources facilitated a perception that foreign policy was an optional activity. Secure behind two great oceans, the United States was in a position to treat foreign policy as a series of episodic challenges rather than as a permanent enterprise.
For much of this period, the implicit goal of American strategy beyond the Western Hemisphere was to transform the world in a manner that would make an American strategic role unnecessary.
Where Europe reconciled itself to achieving security through equilibrium, Americans (as they began to think of themselves) entertained dreams of unity and governance enabling a redeemed purpose.
the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power. It joined alliances not to protect a concept of international order but simply to serve its national interests strictly defined.
