America in two minds about China?

Tom Plate The Straits Times Asia News Network Singapore

The China question has not yet surfaced in the United States presidential election. Perhaps this is just as well. U.S. campaigns are blunt instruments at best for the mastication of complex issues.

For unless you are a geopolitical rocket scientist or a convinced ideologue, the surge of China presents the West in general and the U.S. in particular with vexing questions. Should American policy accommodate the all-but-inevitable? Or should it seek to contain the surge, or perhaps somehow unplug it?

Within the Bush administration, whatever its faults, these issues do get debated, though often in the manner of ideological armies of the night carrying samurai swords. And, sometimes, these policy conflicts surface in the news media and, embarrassingly, make you wonder if this U.S. administration is operating a two-China policy.

Here's the set-up: One group argues for the in-your-face approach -- Step over this line and we will blow you Middle Kingdomers back to the Middle Ages. This mentality was reflected in misconceived media claims recently that the U.S. was dispatching seven aircraft carrier groups to encircle China in order to get it to back off Taiwan.

And also in melodramatic renditions of U.S. Pacific Commander Tom Fargo's recent China trip, when the admiral was depicted practically wagging his finger in the face of the Chinese.

Neither tactic would be wisely advised. Sending carriers to surround China would have the unwanted effect of inspiring the People's Liberation Army to argue for acceleration of its military build-up.

The second would infuriate -- rather than intimidate -- Beijing and potentially retard positive geopolitical aspects of Sino-U.S. relations, especially efforts on terrorism and the Korean peninsula.

The Bush administration has moved more forces into the region -- not carriers but B-52 bombers to compensate (symbolically at least) for the redeployment of some U.S. ground troops out of South Korea to Iraq. The point here is not China but North Korea.

And no high-level U.S. representative in China will ever again engage in finger-wagging, especially after the unhappy experience of former secretary of state Warren Christopher: After delivering a human-rights dressing-down in the early 1990s, he was in effect shown the door and escorted to the airport.

Treating China as some sort of pathological preschooler in an Asian truancy center lacks the policy gravity this historic issue requires and commands. The more nuanced view in today's Republican Party instead emphasizes China's determination to become a great power once more.

This helps explain both Beijing's reunification fixation with Taiwan -- as with Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999 -- and its willingness, at the same time, to play ball with the U.S. on peripheral issues -- like Bosnia, even Iraq -- that do not damage its core interests, so as to advance the working relationship on issues -- like trade with the U.S. -- that are central to its national development.

But understanding China leads logically to a much tougher set of questions. As James A. Baker III, U.S. secretary of state under the first Bush presidency, declaimed recently, China "is in the midst of a great transformation -- economic, social and political -- of truly historic proportions".

American policy, said the statesman now based at Rice University's Institute for Public Policy that's named after him, must wish for China to emerge "as a full-fledged member of the community of democratic and peaceful nations".

But that Baker view slyly conceals as much as it reveals. It is true that China could transform itself into a democratic and peaceful regional power. It is also possible that China might emerge as a non-democratic and non-peaceful global power.

The world geopolitical community is presumably spacious -- and indeed gracious -- enough to accommodate the former, but not the latter. That is clear enough. What is less clear is whether the U.S. will accept any significant challenge to its pre-eminence, whether from a China that is peaceful and democratic or one that is otherwise.

This is not an academic question. For if this century will become the "Asian century", as so many predict, Asia's resurgence will surely be led by China.

A U.S. determined to maintain its position as top global dog would presumably give ground only grudgingly to an "inexorable" China rise.

If indeed it proves hard for a proud U.S. to go down without a fight, then the only real issue -- and the Chinese may have come to this conclusion -- is perhaps the form and nature of that fight.

From this perspective, putting China on constant edge with finger-pointing lectures and testosterone-arousing naval maneuvers would not seem to be the whip-smart Republican, Bakersonian approach to slowing down the inexorable rise.

If the U.S. wants China's "transformation" not to come at the expense of America's diminution, it needs a better policy than an aggressive posture that puts China on red alert 24/7. The best approach would help China modernize without turning it into a monster. But sometimes these errant press reports make you wonder how many China policies America has -- or, at least, whether it is of two profoundly different minds.