America in two minds about China?

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.