Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

One reason for this complacency was greed. In the early 1990s, an engagement policy seemed logical because China was a minor military threat and a massive money-making opportunity. With 1.3 billion people, a long coastline in the heart of East Asia, and an authoritarian regime that was willing to repress dissent and trash the environment to make way for big business, China was simply too good to pass up as a consumer market and a low-wage production platform. So Western multinational companies and financiers pressed their governments to integrate China further into global supply chains. Those governments happily obliged, arguing—when they talked about the CCP’s grotesque human rights violations at all—that a more economically open China would eventually become more politically open. “Trade freely with China,” George W. Bush explained, “and time is on our side.”16