Understanding China

Kishore Mahbubani

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005

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Summary:  The United States has done much to enable China's recent growth, but it has also sent mixed signals that have unnerved Beijing. More consistent engagement is in order, because the course of the twenty-first century will be determined by the relationship between the world's greatest power and the world's greatest emerging power.

KISHORE MAHBUBANI is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. This essay is adapted from his book Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World.

THE WAKING DRAGON

China today is like a dragon that, waking up after centuries of slumber, suddenly realizes many nations have been trampling on its tail. With all that has happened to it over the past 200 years, China could be forgiven for awakening as an angry nation, and yet Beijing has declared that it will rise peacefully. This good disposition stems partly from China's awareness that it is relatively weak. But it is also a sign that Beijing has endorsed the vision of progress that the United States has extolled since World War II. States no longer need to pursue military conquest to prosper, the theory goes; trade and economic integration pave a surer path to growth. And Beijing has noted how much adhering to this philosophy helped Japan and Germany emerge from the ruins of World War II.

As the main architect of the world order today, the United States should be among the first to celebrate China's progress. For if Beijing continues to abide by Washington's rules, peace and stability could reign, and the United States, as both a society and an economy, could benefit a great deal from the renaissance of Chinese civilization. Curiously, however, the United States is doing more to destabilize China than any other power. And no one in Washington seems to be proposing, much less pursuing, a comprehensive new strategy for U.S.-Chinese relations. The working assumption appears to be that with a little tinkering here and there, the relationship will stay firmly on track. In fact, however, nagging suspicions and mutual misunderstandings are already threatening to derail it.

One key point needs to be emphasized at the outset: although there is almost nothing China can do to disrupt the political stability of the United States, the United States can do plenty to destabilize China. Hence, the signals that Washington sends to Beijing matter a great deal. Unfortunately, Washington's current China policy lacks coherence, and a conviction is growing among Chinese policymakers that the United States is bent on curtailing China's rise. Unlike most Americans, for example, the Chinese have not forgotten the 1999 missile attack on their embassy in Belgrade during the war in the Balkans. U.S. officials have claimed that it was a mistake, regretted it, and moved on, but many Chinese remain convinced that the bombing was deliberate. Pointing to the sophistication of U.S. surveillance technology, they hold on to the belief that the attack was intended as a message to China: beware of U.S. power.

Such mistrust is dangerous, for the history of the twenty-first century will largely be determined by the relationship that emerges between the world's greatest power and the world's greatest emerging power. History teaches that such transitions are inherently fraught with danger and that they are best managed with grand visions. Thus, it would serve the interests of the United States and China to rethink their relationship in terms as broad and bold as the 1972 understanding that then President Richard Nixon and National ...

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