With the rise of China, the world’s fastest-growing economic powerhouse and a potential military colossus, the United States faces vast opportunities for financial fortune as well as reasons to fear for the stability of its own economy.
In one of the world’s most complicated relationships, the U.S. confronts an influential ally, with the power to contain the nuclear ambitions of threats such as North Korea, as well as a potential adversary, with risks of war over long-simmering disputes such as the independence of Taiwan.
As President Bush prepares for a private meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao at a United Nations summit in New York on Tuesday, the economic and strategic conflicts of the U.S.-Chinese relationship serve as backdrop for talks that will emphasize their mutual interests but could boil down to painful questions such as an inability of the two to agree to limits on exports of Chinese textiles to the U.S.
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After months of tension with the U.S. over trade, energy and China’s growing military strength, Chinese leaders say Bush and Hu have an opportunity to defuse criticism and avoid greater confrontation.
Hu faces social turmoil at home and is unlikely to make bold concessions. Chinese diplomats hope to press the case for China and the U.S. to cooperate, rather than compete, in the development of energy resources.
Yet U.S. officials still want to press for greater openness of the Chinese economy to American interests.
And Bush, as the stronger hand in the relationship, is likely to concede little–and be politically vulnerable if he does. While influential voices in Congress have questioned China’s economic motives, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has admonished it for a military buildup.
“We have never before seen so much economic competition, and we have never seen American officials at such senior levels express concern about China’s military buildup,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at People’s University in Beijing.
Negotiations over the textile trade had broken down on the eve of a presidential meeting that was delayed a week by Hurricane Katrina and was supposed to have taken place at the White House. Instead the leaders will meet “on the sidelines” of the UN summit.
Any talks between Bush and Hu are saddled by the conflicts that have emerged since diplomatic relations were restored in 1979. Experts on both sides of the world say U.S. policy toward China has, at best, lacked coherence, and at worst, been riven with inconsistencies.
While American-owned companies are producing one-quarter of the goods being exported from China to the U.S., members of Congress were outraged when the state-controlled China National Offshore Oil Corp. recently attempted to buy an American energy company, Unocal.
Counting on clout
At the same time, as the U.S. counts on China’s clout with North Korea to try to persuade the Kim Jong Il regime to abandon nuclear weaponry, the U.S. has admonished China for its own military buildup.
And while the U.S. has long opposed independence for Taiwan, with Americans officially supporting the concept of one united China, American armsmakers have supplied the buildup of Taiwan’s military.
The economies of the U.S. and China have become inextricably linked. As China’s economy has doubled in the past decade, and promises to double again in the next decade, the two countries have become primary trading partners. China’s $1 trillion in foreign trade made it the world’s third-largest trading nation last year, outpaced only by the U.S. and Germany.
“This is a highly interdependent relationship now, much more so than it’s ever been,” said David Zweig, director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
American congressional leaders and textile manufacturers alike complain that the connection has become a one-way street, with Chinese imports of more than $160 billion last year accounting for one-quarter of a record U.S. trade deficit, a situation made worse by an overvalued Chinese currency. Yet after a decade of tying its currency to the dollar–with the yuan pegged at 8.28 to the dollar–China’s move to another measure this year adjusted the yuan’s value by only 2 percent.
Economists warn that China holds an even more powerful card: the ability to disrupt the U.S. economy by selling off billions of dollars in U.S. Treasury notes that its central banks hold as possessors of American debt.
And there are leaders in China who suspect that the ultimate aim of the U.S. is to suppress China’s growth for fear that a new superpower in Asia will at some point assert not only its dominance but also will try to expand.
John Mearsheimer, a political scientist and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, has publicly debated Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, on a key question: “Can China rise peacefully?”
Mearsheimer’s argument: No.
“A realist like me would say that you cannot know what China’s intentions will be in the future,” Mearsheimer said. “The problem that you face is that you are creating a colossus that may have malicious intentions.”
The conflict between the two nations remains, at its heart, a cultural clash. For all its movement toward a market-based economy, the world’s most populous nation remains a communist regime with little regard for human rights. In its voracious quest for energy to fuel its growing economy, China has gone to Sudan for oil and stationed supportive troops in a nation the world has condemned for genocide.
Suspicious of motives
Within China, the American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 during the war in Kosovo is viewed by some not as an accident, for which the U.S. has apologized, but as a warning shot. Also, the contempt that the U.S. and others showed for China after its suppression of protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989 was an affront to the internal demands of a nation struggling to maintain order.
“The Chinese believe that was a strategic move to stabilize the country,” Zweig said. “China believes they would not have risen as they have had they not crushed the students.
“The lesson of Tiananmen is you can to do things to keep order in your own country and the Americans will punish you for it.”
The American brand of punishment also has been conditional. The U.S. and other nations imposed sanctions on China after Tiananmen, but then lifted them to secure China’s support for the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
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China is awash in growing unrest. Each year brings thousands of demonstrations and riots over layoffs, corruption and a widening gap between the rich and the poor. In response, Hu has turned away from liberalization and reaffirmed state-controlled one-party discipline.
The challenge for Chinese and American leaders today involves capitalizing on China’s ambitious growth without sacrificing the interests of either nation, no small order for two parties that cannot agree on details of a textile treaty.
“We live in a smaller and smaller world, but the capacity to misunderstand each other is enormous,” said Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the School of Public Policy in Singapore.
“But there is absolutely no reason why the United States and China should be on a collision course,” he said. “China is like a big boulder moving down the mountain. There is nothing you can do to stop it. The question is if you want to do something positive.”
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