Читать книгу After Engagement - Группа авторов - Страница 13

A final dimension of the shift to more confrontational US-China relations is ideational. By the 2010s, hope had faded among those in the US who thought that policies of constructive engagement, the decades-long growth of economic and social ties, and the resulting rise in China’s per capita income and related social metrics would lead to a much more liberal or democratic China. The turn to a more authoritarian mode of politics in China under Xi proved especially devastating to such always-questionable expectations. China had, instead, become a great disappointment and a growing worry for those Americans who had embraced liberal-democratic evangelism as a central tenet of foreign policy during the era when the United States had emerged from the Cold War triumphant and peerless.⁵⁸

Defying such expectations and hopes, China had grown increasingly intolerant of what it saw as a US agenda of “peaceful evolution” (whereby China’s political order would transform into something more similar, and more palatable, to the United States). Although the criticism was not new, China’s denunciations of unacceptable interference in China’s internal affairs grew more strident. By the 2010s, PRC officials were more pointedly rejecting as unsuited to China a long list of norms (on human rights, constitutional governance, democracy, and the rule of law) that the United States and others in the advanced industrial world promoted as universally applicable.⁵⁹ Partly in response, previously tentative and ambivalent talk of a Chinese model resurfaced, with Xi declaring that developing countries might learn valuable lessons from China’s successful experience, while the BRI and other development-supporting initiatives were increasing the opportunities for Beijing to try to export those lessons to other countries.⁶⁰

US-China ideational conflict has deep roots. The American embrace of Western Enlightenment liberal values, and the belief that political rights associated with those values are universal, long has underpinned a “crusader state” version of US foreign policy. For China, US efforts, or demands, to alter China’s political order recall the painful nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century period of humiliating encroachment by, and subservience to, foreign powers that impelled generations of Chinese nationalist revolutionaries, including the early leaders of the CCP and the PRC. The clash of ideologies has now again become more salient, in part because it has become entwined with the increasingly contentious great power politics of US-China relations.

Although human rights and other values issues generally had been deemphasized during the Obama administration and the early Trump administration,⁶¹ such issues have been a chronic source of friction in bilateral relations, and the Trump-era’s volatile foreign policy at times wove arguments that stressed conflicting values into its framing of China as a rival and revisionist power. In a 2018 speech that was highly publicized in the US and very much noted in China, Vice President Mike Pence characterized China as “employing a whole-of-government approach, using political, economic, and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence and benefit its interests in the United States” while the US was “building new and stronger bonds with nations that share our values across the [Indo-Pacific] region.”⁶² Drawing on its predecessors’ Asia policies and expanding their geographic scope, the Trump administration made a Free and Open Indo-Pacific—including an alignment among democratic states along China’s periphery—the rhetorical centerpiece of its policy toward a vast region that included the front lines of growing US-China competition. The Biden administration pledged to outdo its predecessor on several of these fronts, placing even greater emphasis on cooperating with American allies in the Indo-Pacific, elevating the importance of democratic values in US foreign policy, and forging a united front with like-minded partners to confront China’s human rights violations.⁶³

In Beijing’s view, Washington’s ostensibly values-based criticism of China’s harsh treatment of human rights lawyers, democracy activists, and feminists; its restrictions on internet content and access; its massive detention and forced assimilation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang; and its erosion of the promises of autonomy, democracy, and the rule of law in Hong Kong—along with Washington’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific gambit—are part of a comprehensive strategy to preserve US dominance in the region amid relatively declining American power, and to thwart China’s return to its rightful role as a great power and preeminent Asian power.

For the Xi-era Chinese leadership, its mission of national rejuvenation requires the preservation of one-party rule and a Chinese political order that the US’s values agenda seeks to undermine. As feuding between Beijing and Washington over the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, conflict intensified on the ideational front. During Trump’s presidency, US officials and politicians began to frame the targets of their criticism as the policies and actions of “the Chinese Communist Party”—rather than “China”—in an attempt to challenge the claim that the Party represented the Chinese people and China’s national interests.⁶⁴ Under Biden, the US is less likely to embrace the most inflammatory rhetoric targeting the legitimacy of CCP rule. However, there is little appetite for returning to the approach that had delinked human rights issues from other concerns during the era of engagement. Instead, the Biden administration aims to balance its declared commitment to address such issues as Beijing’s harsh repression in Xinjiang, tightening restrictions on civil and political rights in Hong Kong, and evaporating tolerance for expression of dissident views among China’s elite with a professed preference to rebuild cooperation with Beijing on urgent matters of common interest, most notably the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.