China Bash Week: a summary

For the last week, this blog has been all China, all the time. Why? Arguably, the approaching nail-biting climax of America's health care reform battle is more important. But in the long run, U.S.-China relations will define much of the course of the world for the next century. I feel that we are seeing a tipping point in those relations, and not for the better.

Dan Blumenthal, writing in Foreign Policy, shows that I am not the only one to notice a recent shift in American opinion against China:

Back in February, Robert Samuelson, one of America's top economic commentators, began his Washington Post column with a critique of China...Samuelson is neither an alarmist nor a reflexive China basher. He is calling it like he sees it. And I think he is correct. American elite opinion has been, for the most part, dead wrong about China. The People's Republic is not liberalizing and it is not aligning itself with the West to resolve the world's most pressing problems. Its military build-up is destabilizing and, in many cases, it is not playing by the rules of international trade.

But does Samuelson's piece reflect a change in elite opinion about China -- and if so, what is going on in China that has led to this change in opinion?

John Pomfret of the Washington Post may have found an explanation - the nature of Chinese politics. In a recent article, he describes the annual meeting of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's rubber stamp legislature...This year, Communist Party leaders have taken a decidedly anti-American, anti-Western tone.

The tone of the leaks and public statements is revealing. It seems that in China's domestic politics today, it pays to be populist, nationalistic, and anti-Western...

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the U.K.'s Telegraph says that China is "spoiling for a showdown with America." Why? Because it is badly misperceiving the global balance of power. Given the PRC's crippling domestic problems, its arrogance toward the United States is pure hubris. "There are echoes," Evans-Pritchard says, "of Anglo-German spats before the First World War, when Wilhelmine Berlin so badly misjudged the strategic balance of power and over-played its hand."

Evans-Pritchard's basic point is that if Beijing believes that it is overtaking the United States and that Washington, in turn, is willing to accept that fact, we may be in for a Chinese miscalculation of colossal and extremely dangerous proportions.

Another leading American China scholar, Minxin Pei, has been sounding a contrarian note against the "China is ten feet tall" line of argument for some time. Pei has argued that China is not that strong, has almost paralyzing economic troubles, and has a calcified political system that is unable to respond adequately to its people's needs.

See for example Pei's "Why China Won't Rule the World" in a December 2009 issue of Newsweek...If Pei is correct, and I believe he is, then China's desire to pick a fight with the United States may be driven in part by the need for its leaders to create a distraction from its multitude of regime-challenging internal problems.

On the other hand, two keen observers argue that what in fact explains China's newfound assertiveness is its strength, not its weakness. Its military modernization program continues apace. As King's College's Harsh Pant points out, though China's announced defense budget increase is less this year than it has been in a while, the lower numbers will not reflect what China actually spends...China is increasing its power projection capabilities, and its anti-piracy mission in the Gulf of Aden may reflect ambitions to project military power globally.

What to make of this small sample of articles -- all by influential writers and analysts -- recently printed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, and Telegraph?

All of these pieces were published during a time of demonstrably heightened Sino-American tension. But unlike past periods of Sino-American tension, when opinion-makers blamed America as much as China for bad relations, all of these writers put the blame for tense relations squarely at China's feet. They just disagree on whether China's arrogance is based on strength or weakness. Perhaps it took the departure of Bush-Cheney, so unpopular with elites, for these writers to begin to see China for what the American people know it to be: a growing threat to the United States.

So the answer to the first question is that for a variety of reasons -- including the end of the Bush presidency, the financial crisis, and aggressive Chinese behavior -- there seems to be a trend in elite opinion towards viewing China as a problem.

Blumenthal obviously agrees with this shift. So do I. Whether the root cause is domestic politics, geopolitical miscalculation, or simply the emergence of a long-suppressed institutional animosity toward the West, China is becoming increasingly adversarial toward the U.S. and our allies on the business, economic, diplomatic, and even military fronts.

And I agree with Blumenthal that the U.S. is mostly not to blame for this. After all, this is a fight we didn't want. The U.S. acted unilaterally to normalize trade relations with China in the 90s, and fought for China's inclusion in the WTO - the very thing that has enabled China's massive and continuing export-and-investment-fueled boom over the past decade. We have consistently taken a soft approach toward China - muting our criticism of their human rights record, opening our markets to their products without asking them to do the same in return, and calling over and over for giving China a more prominent and important role in world affairs (the "responsible stakeholder" idea).

Brad DeLong once said that the most important thing the U.S. can do is to make sure that China knows we helped them become rich and powerful. Well, we tried!

But instead of responding with friendliness and gratitude (as, say, India has), China has simply become more adversarial toward the U.S. the richer it gets. And so it is no surprise that, one by one, China has lost its friends in American elite opinion. Businesses are no longer optimistic about penetrating the Chinese market. The State Department is no longer sanguine about securing China's help in pressuring North Korea and Iran to give up nuclear weapons.

In fact, just about the only defenders China has left in the West are those businesses who still depend on cheap and unregulated Chinese labor and natural resources for their low-cost production. Thus, publications like The Economist, who tend to view low labor and resource costs as the paramount objective of policy, are becoming increasingly shrill in their assaults on the emerging China-skeptical consensus - calling Paul Krugman a neocon, for example. But this faction's days are numbered. as China grows richer, and its domestic firms stronger, it will rely less on foreign direct investment for its growth; the wave of economic nationalism barring foreign firms from the Chinese market will extend to foreign production bases, and labor laws and environmental standards will be used preferentially to raise costs for Western companies operating in China, in order to give its state-championed firms a cost advantage. Expect to see The Economist shift to an anti-China stance as soon as this occurs.

The debate will then shift to what to do about China's antipathy toward the West. It will mainly be a contest between appeasement and confrontation; the key question will be whether countering China's aggressive moves would come at too high a cost. This is not an easy question - Britain succeeded in countering Germany's move for European hegemony in the early 20th century, but doing so cost Britain its status as the biggest and richest empire on the planet (not to mention millions of lives lost). Our Cold War against the Soviet Union succeeded wildly - we experienced unprecedented economic growth, and the world became a more peaceful place - but this involved a generous helping of luck, as anyone who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis could tell you. Great-power struggles are never without huge risks and costs.

I've been pretty anti-China (or, more accurately, anti-CCP - I think the Chinese people and culture are great, and I'm glad to see them get rich), because as a one-post-a-day blogger with no vested interests, I was free to take that position long before more mainstream writers; I think we all realized as early as 6 or 7 years ago that China didn't want to be our friend. But once the consensus opinion converges with my view - and it is rapidly converging! - I won't necessarily be on the side of those who urge confrontation as the proper response.

The most important thing we can do, in my opinion, is to build a large coalition - not necessarily explicit - of powerful allies who also feel threatened by China - India, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, and hopefully someday Europe and Russia. Acting in concert on trade, macro policy, maritime security, and nuclear proliferation, such a grouping would be easily powerful enough to check Chinese moves. But more importantly, the existence of such a coalition would reduce both the need for and the chance of confrontation; seeing the forces tacitly arrayed against it, China would be less inclined to press its luck in a bid to overturn the existing international order. The sooner we finish pulling our heads out of the sand, the sooner we can start assembling that coalition - and the lower the chance of a disastrous full-on confrontation between China and the U.S.

And the best thing is, if a full-on confrontation never comes, eventually the Chinese people will start wondering why they have to live with the corrupt and restrictive rule of the CCP. But that day of reckoning will be much delayed if the world caves to every Chinese demand.

To sum up: it is unfortunate that China has decided not to be our friend. But it has happened, and now we must admit that fact, and deal with it as best we can.