Getting China Wrong

Aaron L. Friedberg

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509545131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Mondialisation

The West's strategy of engagement with China has failed. More than three decades of trade and investment with the advanced democracies have left that country far richer and stronger than it would otherwise have been. But growth and development have not caused China's rulers to relax their grip on political power, abandon their mercantilist economic policies, or accept the rules and norms of the existing international system. To the contrary: China today is more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad, and more obviously intent on establishing itself as the world's preponderant power than at any time since the death of Chairman Mao. What went wrong?

Put simply, the democracies underestimated the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party. For far too long, the United States and its allies failed to take seriously the Party's unwavering determination to crush opposition, build national power, and fulfill its ideological and geopolitical ambitions. In this timely and powerfully argued study, Aaron Friedberg identifies the assumptions underpinning engagement, describes the counterstrategy that China's Communist Party rulers devised in order to exploit the West's openness while defeating its plans, and explains what the democracies must do now if they wish to preserve their prosperity, protect their security, and defend their common values.

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 universities and participate in research in the United States. These opportunities proved even more attractive than had been anticipated, and the number of visas granted for educational purposes more than tripled over the course of the 1980s.⁸ During this period, a total of around 80,000 Chinese citizens came to study in the United States, the vast majority of them in science and engineering fields. In 1989, roughly 43,000 were still enrolled and another 11,000 had become permanent residents. The rest had returned to China to teach others, conduct their own research, and help rebuild a scientific establishment ravaged by years of political turmoil.⁹

American policy-makers took other steps to assist China in strengthening its economy and thus the foundations of its long-term national power. In 1972, the Nixon administration lifted a twenty-three-year embargo on all commerce with the PRC, clearing the way for an increase in bilateral trade from close to zero to over a billion dollars by the end of the decade.¹⁰ In 1979, the Carter administration announced its intention to grant China most favored-nation (MFN) status, lowering tariffs on its exports to the same level as those imposed on any other trading partner.¹¹ Coinciding with the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s program of economic “reform and opening up” in the same year, this enabled a further increase in two-way trade, which grew by an order of magnitude over the course of the 1980s.¹²

The Carter administration also helped China obtain much-needed capital by supporting its entry into the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In keeping with his preference for private enterprise, Ronald Reagan subsequently expanded the use of domestic institutions like the Export–Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to help finance the export of American products to China and to encourage investment there by US firms. As with its relaxation of restraints on technology transfer, these moves reflected the judgment contained in a 1984 National Security Decision Directive that it was in the nation’s strategic interest to “lend support to China’s ambitious modernization effort.” In the words of a 1981 State Department memorandum: “[O]nly the interests of our adversaries would be served by a weak China that failed to modernize.”¹³ With significant assistance from the United States, China had begun its transformation from a poor and backward nation into a global manufacturing and export powerhouse.

For as long as the Cold War was underway, American policy-makers generally downplayed or ignored the repressive, illiberal character of the CCP regime. In a widely read 1967 article in which he made the case for easing Maoist China out of its “angry isolation” and coaxing it back inside “the family of nations,” Richard Nixon argued that “the world cannot be safe until China changes.” It followed that, “to the extent that we can influence events,” the aim of US policy “should be to induce change.”¹⁴ At least so far as its domestic institutions were concerned, however, once in office, Nixon explicitly rejected the idea of trying to change China. As he told Mao during their first meeting: “[W]hat is important is not a nation’s internal philosophy. What is important is its policy towards the rest of the world and towards us.”¹⁵

Despite significant differences in outlook, for all practical purposes, Nixon’s successors followed a similar path. Jimmy Carter wanted to make the defense of universal human rights into the centerpiece of his foreign policy, and Ronald Reagan sought to rally the free world against the evils of Communism, but both ultimately bowed to the necessity of staying close to China in order to offset the greater threat posed by the Soviet Union.

As Deng’s economic reforms began to unfold, it also became easier to believe that political liberalization could not be far behind. Following a 1984 visit during which the authorities censored portions of his speeches in which he discussed the virtues of faith and freedom, Reagan nevertheless concluded that China’s embrace of markets ...