Reframing China

W.H. Auden famously wrote, “thou shalt not sit with statisticians, nor commit a social science.” I’m going to violate his prescription and commit a little social science. Henry Kissinger insightfully described the Sino-American relationship as “the key problem of our time. Each of us is strong enough to create situations around the world in which it can impose its preferences, but the importance of the relationship will be whether each side can believe that they have achieved enough to be compatible with their convictions and with their histories. That is a huge task. It has never been attempted systematically by any two nations in the world.”[1]

By Gregory F. Treverton

Note: The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of SMA, Inc.

I apologize, but it seems to me that against that challenge, the frames through which we now view China are not just wrong, they are disastrous. Neither of the usual scholarly and policy frames—so-called realism or liberal internationalism—is very helpful. I will be better, I fear, at diagnosis than at prescription.

The Realists

Our current politics have turned China into not just the rising power but also the main threat. John Mearsheimer, whom I admire and call a friend, is the starkest example. He is the realists’ realist. For him and the other realists, states are the name and power is the game: all that matters in international relations is the relative power of states. For him, NATO’s expansions in eastern Europe guaranteed that Russia would react, seeking to protect if not its empire, at least its “near abroad.” Suggesting that Ukraine and Georgia might join the alliance was the last straw: the 2008 attack on Georgia and the 2014 annexing of Crimea and proxy war on Ukraine were only to be expected.

Now, the United States is doubly dumb, exhausting resources in both Ukraine and Israel/Gaza when we should be pivoting dramatically to China. Indeed, in Mearsheimer’s logic, mirroring that of Nixon and Kissinger, at this point we should be pursuing better relations with Russia—not fighting it—as a counterbalance to China.

My mentor and colleague, Joseph Nye, got it right: Realism is the place to start in a world of sovereign states, but “realists stop where they start.” They seldom consider either the cosmopolitan sense of the human community across nations or the liberal view that while “there is no world government, there is a degree of world governance, and anarchy has its limits.”[2] The guidance to forget Ukraine and Israel, and instead pivot to China seems to me both callous in human terms and dangerous in international terms. It bespeaks a word in which only power matter and norms are irrelevant.

While realism is not inherently dismissive of diplomacy—after all, if diplomacy could increase state power, why not?—it does tend to focus on the dire consequences of missteps and tends to regard any concession as dangerous. It is a “one strike and you’re out” view of the anarchical world. To quote Mearsheimer again: “One step backward in the security realm might mean destruction, in which case there will be no next step—backward or forward.”[3] In this view, the risks of being taken for sucker are enormous, and thus to engage in diplomatic give and take can easily be assumed to be dangerous because any “give” will be.

Mearsheimer is right that “diplomacy” in the instance of Ukraine probably means what concessions Ukraine will have to make to end the killing. But in the instance of Gaza, if anything good comes of the horrific killing, it will take the most artful of diplomacy to achieve what three quarters of a century and too many wars have not—some decent space in which Palestinians can live.

The Liberal Internationalists

I naturally incline in this direction, both as a liberal and as one who believes in institutions. In this view, those international institutions gradually build not only the mechanisms but also the habits of cooperation and so of trust. John Ikenberry is perhaps the scholar now most identified with liberalism. In A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, he addresses criticisms of liberalism, especially from realists, by interpreting the Wilsonian tradition and the legacy of liberal internationalism as “confronting the dangers that imperil the survival of democracy,” not “to promote it on distant shores.” The “essential element and guiding impulse of this tradition is the cooperative organization and reform of international order as to protect and facilitate the security, welfare, and progress of liberal democracy—in short, to make the world safe for democracy.”[4]

Yet it must be said that, with respect to China, the best hopes of liberal internationalism have been dashed. I, and many others, hoped that as China prospered, it would become if not more democratic, at least more rule-abiding. That has not been the case. It has treated the international economy as a menu à la carte, adhering when useful but going its way when it wanted. The pull of international institutions and practices has been powerful but not enough to prevent China from circumventing them or creating its own alternatives, like the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank.

Is There a New Paradigm for Thinking about China?

I wish I had a clear “yes.” But I do not. The Biden administration’s principles, articulated by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, held that policy would be “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be.”[5] Those are surely the right ones, but they are essentially content free. My starting point is that cooperation is not a choice. It is an imperative. Otherwise, humankind is finished. The rub is that liberal internationalists generally seek cooperation on easier issues, building up to more important ones. The Biden administration seeks to cooperate on the most important issue, the climate crisis, while competing on lesser issues, such as semiconductor chips.

There is scope for much more cooperation, even where it might seem improbable. Sharing practices about Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be a natural, for the two countries have approached the issue differently but both share an interest in avoiding the worst possibilities. And the two share an interest in Taiwan, for all the gaming suggests that the island would be destroyed in a major war. It is in the interest of neither to see all that chip-making capacity destroyed. More generally, the dramatic rise in the power of non-state actors, like the big tech companies, on the one hand, and the horrific killing in Ukraine and Gaza, on the other, ought to drive home the need for a framing that puts people, not nations and power, at the center.

Finally, it is worth questioning the proposition that Xi Jinping is China, bent on doing what China has always sought, and China will always be aggressive in its quest for global dominance. On the contrary, consider how different Chinese leaders have been. Mao, a murderous agrarian populist, was followed by very different men, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, who were urban reformers. Hu Jintao, facing the social stresses caused by their reforms, curtailed social and market liberalization. Then, in William Overholt’s words: “Xi Jinping was chosen to deal with the centripetal forces of Hu Jintao’s decade: indecision, stalled reforms, ministers ignoring the prime minister, local governments ignoring the center, the private economy overrunning the state economy, civil society threatening the role of the Party, and military leaders focused on real estate deals.”[6]

The breadth of these changes in China’s politics is impressive in scope, ranging from radical land reforms, great leap forward, and privatizing agricultural land, to cultural revolution and market reforms. In the process, its political structure has moved from centralizing power to devolving it to centralizing it yet again.

If it is important to remember how different Chinese leaders have been, it is equally critical to bear in mind China’s dynamism. China is not just a monolithic Communist party, sitting in Beijing, hell bent on imposing its authoritarian ideology and state-centric development model around the world. So, too, American images of China’s burgeoning middle class tend to run to head-down money making and “parachute” children in Vancouver or Orange County.

A very different, and positive, view is laid out by Cheng Li in Middle Class Shanghai, one driven by looks at higher education, avant-garde art, architecture, and law. He argues that China’s cosmopolitan culture—both exemplified and led by Shanghai—could provide the basis for a reshaped American engagement with China, one based on the deep cultural and educational exchanges that have bound them together for decades.[7]

Gregory F. Treverton stepped down as Chair of the US National Intelligence Council in 2017. He is now Professor of the Practice at Dornsife College, University of Southern California, Chair of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum, and an SMA Executive Advisor.

[1] Kissinger, Henry, “The Key Problem of Our Time,” interview by Stapleton Roy, Wilson Center, September 20, 2018, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/the-key-problem-our-time-conversation-henry-kissinger-sino-us-relations

[2]Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Do Morals Matter: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2020)

[3] John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions.” International Security 19, no.3 (1994/5): 19

[4] G. John Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), p. xii., https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv15pjxns

[5] The official text of the speech is available at https://www.state.gov/a-foreign-policy-for-the-american-people/.

[6] As quoted in Stephens, Bret, “The Real China Challenge: Managing Its Decline,” New York Times, November 29, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/opinion/china-rise-series-declining-economy.html.

[7] Li, Cheng, Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement, (Washington, D.C.: Brookings), 2021.