可以肯定，中国崛起是世界秩序的一个划时代变化
2022-04-18 09:07阅读：
无疑，中国想挑战美国在亚洲的优势地位，但是否打算走得更远，是否想取代美国成为全球霸主，改变当下的国际秩序？若是这样，北京是否有足够的资源做到？对美国来说，正确的中国战略取决于对北京的战略雄心以及实现这些雄心的选项的正确评估。
这给华盛顿带来一个难题。中国关于全球雄心的表态往往模棱两可，美国政策制定者不得不进行解读，以了解中国战略意图。这些主观解读又会因美国政策制定者的不同视角而产生巨大差异。随着对“中国威胁”性质评估的变化，美国的对华政策也发生重大转变。
特朗普政府将中国视为对国际秩序和美国生活方式的生存威胁，从而把美国的中国政策进行了几十年来最为深刻的转变。拜登政府保留了特朗普的一些政策，但采取了不那么悲观的观点，只是将中国视为区域军事挑战和全球影响力的竞争者。但即使在拜登政府内部，有关政策也会受到相关决策者对中国不同评估的影响。因此，美国需要正确把握，才能知道如何应对。
可以肯定，中国崛起是世界秩序的一个划时代变化——这是一个新的大国的加入，其利益与美国只有部分一致，且在一些重要方面与美国利益相悖。但应对这一挑战的现实选项却有限。若将亚洲划分为中国势力范围和美国势力范围，将放弃太多美国的核心利益，并可能引发美国在其他地方的同盟解体。此类协议也不会让任何一个国家满意，反而会造成进一步的不稳定。而试图推翻中国执政党或破坏中国经济，是华盛顿无法做到的，即便是这样的尝试都会产生危险后果。淡化或夸大“中国威胁”，均不能让我们找到正确的政策。
拜登战略的成功与否，不应以遏制中国或达成（划分中美势力范围的）亚洲大协议来衡量。相反，若美国能保持
在亚洲的强大军事存在，维持同盟体系，在关键技术方面处于领先，并在全球机构中发挥更大影响力，那就算成功。
在美国政治分化的当前，拜登的战略能否持续——目标又能否实现——仍是问题。但有理由相信成功是有可能的。首先，与苏联不同，中国并没有要强加给世界的意识形态计划。其次，中国并没提出另一套世界秩序构想，而是寻求在现有秩序中发挥更大影响力。事实上，在主权和不干涉等全球规范方面，中国比美国更坚持。此外，尽管中国寻求扩大对声索领土的控制，但迄今并未宣布对更多领土的新主张。中国并非扩张主义者。
诚然，中国试图削弱美国的亚洲同盟体系，并在21世纪经济中发挥领导作用，这些雄心是对华盛顿利益的深刻挑战。但与俄乌战争不同，中国寻求大国地位的同时也着力避免引发军事或政治危机。中国领导人表现出雄心壮志，却也谨慎和务实。若美国领导人能表现出同样的力量和务实，那即使在一个竞争激烈的时代，也有可能避免最坏结果。
What Exactly Is America's China Policy?
The United States needs to right-size the China threat to know
how to counter it.
By Andrew J. Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia
University.
That China seeks to challenge the United States’ privileged
position in Asia is beyond doubt. But does China intend to go even
further—to replace the United States as the global hegemon, remake
the liberal international order, and threaten freedom and democracy
everywhere? And if so, does Beijing have the resources to do it?
The right China strategy for the United States depends on the
correct assessment of Beijing’s strategic ambitions and its options
to achieve them.
That presents Washington with a conundrum. Chinese pronouncements
about the country’s global ambitions are notoriously vague, forcing
U.S. policymakers to interpret them for hints of Beijing’s
strategy—reminiscent of the ways Kremlinologists once tried to
divine the Soviet Politburo’s intentions. These interpretations, in
turn, can vary greatly depending on a U.S. policymaker’s lens and
perspective. Unlike the relative constants of U.S. foreign policy,
such as its approach to North Korea, U.S. China policy has thus
undergone significant shifts as the assessment of the exact nature
of the China threat has evolved.
The Trump administration undertook the most profound shift of U.S.
China policy in decades, viewing China as an existential threat to
the international order and the American way of life. The Biden
administration, even as it kept in place key Trump-era policies,
has instead taken a less apocalyptic view, treating China as a
regional military challenge and a competitor for global influence.
Yet even within the Biden administration—which has outlined the
most comprehensive China strategy of any U.S. administration to
date—the shape and conduct of its policies will be influenced by
the various assessments of the China threat among the key
policymakers involved. The United States needs to right-size the
China threat to know how to counter it.
From U.S. President Richard Nixon’s surprise trip to China half a
century ago until Donald Trump’s accession to the presidency in
2017, the United States saw China as a potential partner—a country
that would want access to Western markets, capital, technology, and
universities and accept U.S. military encirclement and cultural
influence in return. At the 2005 Shangri-La Dialogue security
conference in Singapore, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
famously challenged Chinese defense officials: “Since no nation
threatens China, one must wonder: Why this growing investment [in
the Chinese military]? Why these continuing large and expanding
arms purchases? Why these continuing robust deployments?”
Rumsfeld surely knew the answer to these rhetorical questions. No
Chinese government, whether communist or democratic, was likely to
accept so much vulnerability indefinitely. Indeed, a more assertive
posture emerged in Beijing around the same time as U.S. financial
sector practices triggered the 2008 global financial crisis; as
China’s GDP approached that of the United States in purchasing
power parity terms; and as the Chinese military gained the ability
to hold U.S. aircraft carriers, airfields, and naval bases in the
Western Pacific at risk. Since taking power in 2012, Chinese
President Xi has expanded China’s navy, built up its maritime
gray-zone forces, constructed artificial islands in neighboring
countries’ waters in the South China Sea, mounted air and sea
challenges to Japan and Taiwan, ramped up economic espionage,
extended China’s financial and diplomatic influence through the
Belt and Road Initiative, invested in global media to spread
Beijing’s version of the news, banned and censored unfriendly
foreign scholars and journalists, and unleashed “wolf warrior”
diplomats to rattle cages around the world.
U.S. policymakers eventually began to push back, even as they
continued to think of China more as a potential partner than as a
looming threat. Writing in Foreign Policy in 2011, U.S. Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton called for what came to be known as the
“pivot to Asia” to help counteract China’s growing influence. But
the Obama administration was tied up in wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program, and
the attempted pivot brought little more than a heightened
diplomatic presence in the region. China still seemed manageable
through negotiation. U.S. President Barack Obama stood with Xi at
the White House podium in 2015 to announce China’s promise not to
militarize the sand islands it had built in the South China Sea or
to continue stealing U.S. technology through hacking. But China
went on to do both.
Only under the Trump administration did Washington make the
decisive policy change from cooperation to confrontation.
Only under the Trump administration did Washington make the
decisive policy change from cooperation to confrontation. In 2018,
the U.S. government, for the first time, labeled China a “strategic
competitor.” As significant as that change was, the Trump
administration was by no means united in its assessment of the
China threat. Various factions characterized the threat in various
ways: as systematically unfair trade, abusive economic espionage,
growing sway over U.S. corporations, or an assault on the regional
balance of power in Asia.
What eventually emerged as the dominant view under Trump was that
China posed a fundamental, existential threat to the United States
and its way of life. The U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning
Staff wrote in 2020: “The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] aims … to
fundamentally revise world order, placing the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) at the center and serving Beijing’s authoritarian goals
and hegemonic ambitions.” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
declared earlier that year: “If we don’t act now, ultimately the
CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order that
our societies have worked so hard to build. If we bend the knee
now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese
Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in
the free world.”
Key figures outside of the administration who were close to Trump
and frequently advised him went even further by comparing China to
the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Committee on the Present
Danger: China, co-founded by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon,
declared in March 2019: “As with the Soviet Union in the past,
Communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to
the United States and to the idea of freedom.” Later that year,
former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich
characterized China as “the greatest threat to us since the British
Empire in the 1770s, much greater than Nazi Germany or the Soviet
Union.”
Having decisively broken with previous, more benign U.S.
assessments of China, the Trump administration adopted a series of
new policies aimed at translating its harsh threat assessment into
a tougher line on China. Washington launched a trade war, upgraded
the diplomatic treatment of Taiwan, resuscitated the Quadrilateral
Security Dialogue, conducted more frequent freedom of navigation
patrols in the South China Sea, and set up a China Initiative at
the Justice Department to root out economic espionage.
As confrontational as they were, these measures hardly rose to the
level of seriousness and strategic heft that the Trump
administration’s more extreme threat assessments seemed to require.
And despite the common thread of taking a harder line against
China, it was unclear what exactly these policies aimed to achieve.
Was the goal a more level playing field in economic competition—or
putting a brake on Chinese economic growth and slowing its rise?
Was it about U.S. military deterrence in Asia—or pushing Japan,
South Korea, and Taiwan to be able and willing to defend
themselves? Was it forcing China to comply with established norms
in global institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World
Health Organization (WHO), and U.N. Human Rights Council—or
withdrawing the United States from those institutions because Trump
considered them useless? Was it establishing mutual tolerance
between Xi and Trump as fraternal strongmen—or seeking an end to
CCP rule?
By not answering these questions, Trump’s policies never reached
the coherence and depth that Washington’s new view of China as an
existential threat would have required. And whatever their intent,
Trump’s disparate policies produced no visible change in Chinese
military deployments, trade policies, economic espionage,
ideological positions, or diplomatic strategies.
Many expected a Democratic president to take a less confrontational
approach to China than Trump—including in Beijing, where Joe Biden
was a familiar face from friendlier times under Obama. Instead, the
Biden administration has kept its predecessor’s hard-line policies
in place. These include the trade tariffs, expanded cooperation
among the Quad, South China Sea naval patrols, and U.S. diplomatic
support for Taiwan. The FBI’s campaign to investigate Chinese
economic espionage recently received a new name but probably not a
new function. Both administrations clearly have seen China as a
strategic competitor, not a potential partner whose rise should be
facilitated.
But a closer look reveals important differences between the Trump
and Biden administrations’ assessments of the China challenge and
the resulting policy conclusions. It may appear as a paradox:
Biden’s China policy is based on a less alarmist assessment of the
China threat than Trump’s—but is being pursued with a seriousness
and strategic depth that makes it a much more formidable challenge
to China. Whether it will be effective remains to be seen.
The Biden administration’s two principal shapers of China
policy—National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Indo-Pacific
advisor Kurt Campbell—laid out their threat assessment in a jointly
written article in Foreign Affairs a little over a year before
Biden took office. Key to what subsequently became the dominant
view of China in the Biden administration was to discard what
Sullivan and Campbell saw as fuzzy and inaccurate Cold War
comparisons, especially in the military realm. “In contrast to the
military competition of the Cold War, which was a truly global
struggle, the [military] dangers for Washington and Beijing are
likely to be confined to the Indo-Pacific,” they wrote. These
dangers were substantial, involving “at least four potential hot
spots: the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait,
and the Korean Peninsula.” But they considered the risk of conflict
“by no means as high” as it was with the Soviet Union in Cold War
Europe. The threat posed by China was regional, not global.
To call the military threat regional, however, was not to treat it
as trivial. Taiwan is the most dangerous of the four military flash
points. China needs to control the island if it is to prevent the
United States or any other hostile power from using it as a base to
threaten the mainland. The United States insists on the “peaceful
resolution of the Taiwan issue,” a policy that goes back to the
1972 Shanghai Communiqué. Were Washington to abandon its position,
the credibility of its international commitments would take a
severe hit. Taiwan, of course, has compelling reasons to avoid
coming under the control of the increasingly repressive Chinese
regime. There is obviously no way to satisfy all three actors.
Russia’s assault on Ukraine has increased anxiety over an already
tense situation. A war over Taiwan would likely draw in other
powers, wreak tragic destruction, present a risk of nuclear
escalation, and spawn decades of disastrous political consequences
for all involved.
Sullivan and Campbell went on to describe China as a formidable
threat in other domains as well, all of them involving serious
stakes. One is the economic domain, where leadership in
high-technology sectors such as advanced semiconductors, 5G
networks, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology,
and renewable energy technology will enable a country to set
standards that other countries must follow, dominate markets, build
advanced military applications, and gain a technological advantage
in spying on others. With the stakes so high, competition cannot be
entirely a clean fight but will involve espionage,
counterespionage, and other tools. Competition in what Sullivan and
Campbell called the political and global governance domains is also
consequential. Increased Chinese and Russian revisionism—with
significant similarities between Beijing’s view of Taiwan and
Moscow’s view of Ukraine—has made it increasingly clear that
nonaggression, human rights, and other principles of international
law are more than values to which the West sentimentally clings but
structural rules in which the West has an overriding
interest.
Sullivan and Campbell portrayed China as the most serious challenge
faced by the United States in the 21st century, but they refrained
from drawing it in apocalyptic terms. In their view, the Cold War
really was an existential struggle, but the relationship with China
should instead be one of “competition without catastrophe.” Though
by no means returning to the old days of seeing China as a benign
global partner, they counseled that the United States should seek
to establish “favorable terms of coexistence with Beijing.”
Not everyone in the Biden administration appears to accept Sullivan
and Campbell’s assessment of China as a less-than-existential
threat. Rush Doshi, a China director on the White House National
Security Council (NSC), outlined a far more aggressive, global
threat to the United States and its allies in his 2021 book, The
Long Game. Written when he ran the Brookings Institution’s China
Strategy Initiative, the book argues that China’s long-term goals
are to break up the U.S. alliance system, establish a global
network of military bases, monopolize cutting-edge 21st-century
technologies, dominate trade, and support authoritarian elites
around the world. In a similar vein, Elizabeth C. Economy, a
leading China expert who is now a senior advisor in the U.S.
Commerce Department, argues in her book The World According to
China that Xi “envisions a China that has regained centrality on
the global stage.” Under Xi, she writes, China “has reclaimed
contested territory, assumed a position of preeminence in the Asia
Pacific, ensured that other countries have aligned their political,
economic, and security interests with its own, … and embedded its
norms, values, and standards in international laws and
institutions.”
The administration has bulked up with other think tank and academic
China specialists with a diversity of views. In the Defense
Department, there’s Ely Ratner of the Center for a New American
Security; in the State Department, Melanie Hart of the Center for
American Progress; on the NSC, Julian Gewirtz and Mira Rapp-Hooper
of the Council on Foreign Relations and Laura Rosenberger of the
Alliance for Securing Democracy. They and others represent a range
of views on the nature and scope of the China challenge.
But in contrast to the Trump administration, the Biden team does
not seem to be divided over how to respond to the challenge. In
their pre-administration publications, none of them offered policy
recommendations radically different from Sullivan and Campbell’s.
For example, Doshi called for the United States to blunt China’s
influence through more active multilateral diplomacy and to rebuild
the U.S.-centered international order by encouraging domestic
revival and strengthening alliances, and Economy recommended that
the United States work with allies and partners, emphasize values
and norms, and repair political and economic dysfunction at home.
Much of this would come to define the Biden administration’s
policies.
Like its threat assessment, the Biden administration’s China policy
differs from its predecessor’s in a fundamental way. Despite the
label of strategic competition, Trump’s China policy was neither
strategic nor competitive; Biden’s China policy is strategic
competition not only in name but in fact.
The headline element is competition. Biden and his China team have
framed China’s rise as something akin to the Sputnik moment—when
the Soviet Union’s launch of the world’s first artificial satellite
in 1957 shocked the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations into a
broad overhaul of domestic policies. In this vein, Biden has argued
that the United States must “build back better” or else China will
“eat our lunch.” The administration has introduced new measures to
protect key U.S. economic sectors and seeks federal money to
accelerate research and development in the key 21st-century
technologies. The administration’s recently published Indo-Pacific
Strategy states that “the United States is investing in the
foundations of our strength at home, aligning our approach with
those of our allies and partners abroad, and competing with the PRC
to defend the interests and vision for the future that we share
with others.”
The second strategic element is an effort to repair the damage
Trump did to the U.S. alliance system. Rapp-Hooper, who directs
Indo-Pacific policy at the NSC, pointed out before joining the
administration that the United States’ large network of allies is a
primary strategic asset for Washington because it complicates the
calculations of rivals. To this end, administration officials,
including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary
Lloyd Austin, have worked to restore Japan’s faith in the U.S.
defense commitment while engaging Tokyo in the effort to deter the
Chinese threat to Taiwan. Washington has reaffirmed its commitment
to NATO and the European Union that Trump had brought into
question, demonstrated dramatically by the coordinated allied
response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United States has
reengaged with WHO and the U.N. Human Rights Council. It negotiated
the AUKUS pact with Australia and the United Kingdom to provide
nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian navy. As stated in the
Indo-Pacific Strategy, the objective is “to shape the strategic
environment in which [China] operates, building a balance of
influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United
States, our allies and partners, and the interests and values we
share.”
The strategy’s reference to “interests and values” draws attention
to a third element of Biden’s China strategy: a consistent emphasis
on human rights. In contrast to the Trump administration’s mixed
messages, such as endorsing Xi’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims before
calling it a genocide, the Biden administration calls out China’s
human rights violations on a regular basis and has issued a stream
of sanctions on abusive officials and Xinjiang-linked Chinese
corporations. Human rights are more than strategy—to any liberal
polity, they should be an end in themselves—but they have strategic
value in several ways: as an issue that resonates with the American
public, as the issue on which most U.S. allies share similar views,
and as a Chinese weak point in the competition for international
influence. Of course, foreign criticism of China’s human rights
abuses will not change Beijing’s policies with respect to Xinjiang,
Hong Kong, democracy activists, religious believers, or lawyers
challenging the state. But drawing attention to human rights is a
dramatic way to articulate and highlight the core issue in
U.S.-China competition: the clash of value systems.
The final feature of Biden’s China strategy is the pursuit of
limited cooperation on global problems such as climate change,
nuclear proliferation, and the spread of infectious diseases. “We
believe it is in the interests of the region and the wider world
that no country withhold progress on existential transnational
issues because of bilateral differences,” the Indo-Pacific Strategy
affirms. Cooperation on public health and nonproliferation has
proved elusive so far. But Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, has
achieved some success in gaining at least verbal cooperation with
China on climate policy.
To judge whether Biden’s China policy fits the challenge, it would
help to know what China aims to achieve. Unfortunately, Xi’s
voluminous utterances on foreign policy offer little insight into
his plans for China’s role in the world. He has often spoken about
China’s global ambitions, but his words are usually vague and
subject to interpretation. At the opening of the 19th Party
Congress in October 2017, Xi gave an address that caused
considerable alarm around the world. He said China was ready to
move “closer to center stage” and make “greater contributions to
mankind,” claiming that the Chinese system “offers a new option for
other countries and nations who want to speed up their development
while preserving their independence; and it offers Chinese wisdom
and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.” To
many, these remarks implied that China intended to export its
authoritarian governance model on a global basis, with
“independence” being a code word for shucking off Western
influence.
But speaking at the United Nations in Geneva in January 2017, Xi
put forward what sounded like a more cooperative slogan: “Work
Together to Build a Community of Shared Future for Mankind.” This
concept was soon enshrined in both the CCP’s and the country’s
constitutions as the official guiding principle of Chinese foreign
policy. In his speech, Xi said no country should intervene in
another’s internal affairs; all countries should jointly “manage
global affairs”; international issues should be settled not by war
but “through dialogue and consultation”; “big countries should
treat smaller ones as equals”; countries should cooperate to “build
a world of common prosperity”; the world should build an “open
world economy … beneficial to all”; and countries should treat the
diversity of civilizations not as a source of global conflict but
as “an engine driving the advance of human civilizations.” Some
read these remarks as reassuringly nonaggressive; others saw them
as a broadside against U.S. influence in international affairs and
a claim to define for others what the “shared future” should
be.
As Doshi has pointed out, Xi often uses the phrase “great changes
unseen in a century”—but despite Doshi’s impressive research in
Chinese documents, it remains ambiguous whether Xi thinks these
great changes extend beyond China’s domestic “rejuvenation” and
achievement of major-power status to a global displacement of U.S.
power. All this confusion and ambiguity underlines the futility of
relying on Xi to provide clarity about China’s international
aims.
Will China seek to sway the world by the power of its example—or
will it build up power at home to leverage abroad?
In a further attempt to gain insight into China’s strategic
thinking, analysts often turn to the writings of ranking Chinese
academics, on the perhaps flawed assumption that they know—or even
have influence on—what Xi is thinking. But these writings offer no
more help because they, too, are abstract and vague. For example,
Yan Xuetong, the dean of Tsinghua University’s Institute of
International Relations and one of China’s most prominent
foreign-policy experts, has called on China to exercise “humane
authority” to establish a new international order. “Fairness,
justice, and civility are higher than equality, democracy, and
freedom as universal values,” he elaborated in his book Inertia of
History. “If China proposes these values, then it will have more
legitimacy in claiming global leadership than the United States.”
Does this mean China should be fair and civil—or establish an
international hierarchy under Chinese hegemony? In an interview
with the International Herald Leader, a newspaper run by the
official state news agency Xinhua, Yan denied any contradiction
between fairness and civility and exercising punishment on rival
countries: “Treating enemies with benevolence and righteousness is
not consistent with humane authority.” China, he went on to
suggest, should exercise authority over other countries as a way to
demonstrate its morals and virtues. Despite his credentials, Yan
delivers only a worldview—not a strategy and least of all a
policy.
Or consider Zhao Tingyang, a member of one of the country’s most
important academic organizations, the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences. He has reinterpreted the old Chinese concept of tianxia
(“all under heaven”)—the idea that the known world centered on the
Chinese emperor, known as the “son of heaven”—for the modern age.
Zhao proposes to replace “American imperialism, [with its]
hegemonic dominance … over the politics, economics, and knowledge
production of other countries” with an “all-under-heaven world
system harmonizing all nations”—in effect, the bending of other
countries’ interests into compatibility with China’s. But is this
China-led harmony to be achieved by moral influence alone or more
coercive means?
Western China analysts also sometimes turn to Yao Zhongqiu, a
professor at Beihang University who writes under the pen name Qiu
Feng. He argues that China should leverage its “historical moment”
to export Confucian values, which he considers universal. In tune
with Xi’s directive for all Chinese to display “four
confidences”—in the country’s path, theory, system, and culture—Yao
writes that “there is always a country assuming the role of the
leader” that creates and maintains world order. That country will
naturally be China. But first, Yao argues, Beijing must “stabilize
the domestic population and gain their support for assuming a
global historical role.” Will China seek to sway the world by the
power of its example—or will it build up power at home to leverage
abroad?
These leading academics—and others like them—provide a heady
ideology for Chinese dominance but rarely venture into concrete
foreign policy. They are making their careers as philosophers and
visionaries, not as strategic planners. Xi is doubtless a
strategist, but his public statements are designed to buttress
China’s reputation, burnish its image, reassure partners of China’s
goodwill and honesty, and demonstrate at home that China is treated
with respect abroad. Anyone looking to Chinese leaders or academics
for clarity on Beijing’s global goals would be wise to heed the
advice of the ancient Daoist philosopher Laozi: “Those who speak do
not know, and those who know do not speak.”
Whatever China’s strategic vision, its ambitions are constrained by
the hard realities of demography, economy, geography, and global
politics. Internally, Beijing struggles to recruit the loyalty of
its 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities—especially Tibetans,
Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Mongolians, who occupy large strategic
territories around the rim of the Han Chinese heartland. Within the
heartland, the regime races to keep up with the growing welfare
demands of a new, large, urban middle class, even as the population
ages and the economy slows.
China shares land or sea borders with 20 countries, all distrustful
to varying degrees and most seeking to balance against Chinese
influence with ties to the United States, Japan, and one another.
The sea lanes on which China’s highly globalized economy depends
are vulnerable to interdiction by the U.S. and other navies. And
China faces five independent power centers—the United States, the
EU, India, Japan, and Russia—in a multipolar system that is not
going to disappear. As China’s power increases, all but Russia have
turned increasingly resistant to Chinese influence, as have most of
China’s smaller neighbors. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has
deepened Moscow’s dependence on Beijing for economic and diplomatic
support, but in the long run, that dependence will also feed
Russia’s long-standing fear and resentment of Chinese power.
Not only are these conditions unfavorable to China’s prospects for
achieving global hegemony. They actually give China a positive
stake in important features of the international status quo—the
norm of territorial integrity, the principle of sovereignty, and
the system of open trade and investment.
To be sure, the rise of China represents an epochal change in the
world order—the accession of a new great power with interests only
partially consistent with the United States’ and in important ways
adverse to them. But the realistic options for dealing with this
challenge are limited. A grand bargain that divides Asia between
Chinese and U.S. spheres of influence would give up too many core
U.S. interests—human rights, Taiwan, Washington’s Asian
alliances—and probably spark an unraveling of U.S. alliances
elsewhere. Nor would such a bargain satisfy either country, instead
generating further instability. On the other hand, trying to
overthrow China’s ruling party or crash its economy is beyond
Washington’s means and would produce dangerous consequences even in
the trying. The right policy will be found neither by minimizing
the China threat nor by hyping it.
Success for Biden’s strategy should not be measured in terms of
containing China in its current position or negotiating a grand
bargain in Asia. Rather, it should be counted a success if the
United States prevents the forcible takeover of Taiwan, keeps a
robust military presence in Asia, maintains its alliance system,
leads in key 21st-century technologies, and exercises more
influence than other countries in global institutions.
Whether Biden’s strategy can be sustained in the current state of
U.S. political polarization—and if so, whether these goals can be
achieved—remains in question. But several features of the China
challenge make it reasonable to hope that such a success is
possible. First, unlike the former Soviet Union, China does not
have an ideological program to impose on the world—even as it seeks
to protect its own prestige. Second, China does not articulate a
vision of an alternative set of norms for the world order but seeks
more influence in the existing one. Indeed, it is in some ways more
conservative than the United States on global norms such as
sovereignty and nonintervention. Third, although China seeks to
expand control over territories it has long claimed, it has so far
not announced novel claims to additional territories. In this
sense, unlike Adolf Hitler’s Germany, China is not
expansionist.
China’s ambitions to take over Taiwan, weaken the U.S. alliance
system in Asia, and lead in the 21st-century economy are profound
challenges to Washington’s interests. But unlike Russia with its
war on Ukraine, China—even under Xi—has managed its push for
great-power status in a way that seems designed to avoid triggering
a military or political crisis. Chinese leaders display
ambition—but also caution and realism. If U.S. leaders can show an
equal combination of strength and realism—and the kind of strong
alliance leadership demonstrated in the Russia-Ukraine crisis—it
will be possible to avoid the worst outcomes even in an era of
sharp competition. The United States can compete and win as long as
it invests in its greatest assets: alliances, innovation, and the
appeal of democratic values.
