Читать книгу After Engagement - Группа авторов - Страница 6

Viewing the relationship in terms of conflicting great power interests looks, to some extent, like a case of “back to the future.” The Sino-American rapprochement that began in earnest in the late 1970s had its roots in the realist logic of Cold War international relations. The reciprocal opening between the United States under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and China under Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai was fundamentally about countering their common adversary, the Soviet Union, at a time when Moscow seemed poised to gain influence (as the United States sought to extricate itself from the war in Vietnam) and when Sino-Soviet relations had reached a nadir (as was tangibly manifested in border clashes two years before Nixon’s pathbreaking visit to China). There was no ideological affinity between a regime in Beijing that was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution decade and an administration in Washington that was led by a president who owed his initial political ascent to his anti-communist credentials and maintained a formal security alliance with a Republic of China regime in Taipei still claiming to be the rightful government of all of China. With China’s policy of economic autarchy and the US’s policy of isolating communist states economically still in place, the beginnings of the trade and investment ties that would come to play so large a role in defining the bilateral relationship were several years in the future.

Against this backdrop, the changes that defined the long era of constructive engagement were remarkable and transformative. In 1979, the United States established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and severed formal diplomatic and security ties with Taipei. The US granted China conditional “most favored nation” trading privileges (now called normal trading relations), and the PRC adopted the first in a long series of increasingly liberal laws to allow inbound foreign investment (for which the United States quickly emerged as a major source). Washington had accepted Beijing’s resumption of the Chinese seat in the United Nations (and, thus, the PRC’s status as one of the veto-wielding five permanent members of the Security Council) in 1971, and from 1980 onward began to support China’s entry into other international institutions.⁶

During the nearly forty years that followed, US-China relations remained generally positive and China’s ties with the US, and a US-led and US-backed international order, developed across several dimensions. The prevalent frameworks for assessing the increasingly important bilateral relationship changed as well, moving away from concerns about the international distribution of power that had dominated the pre-normalization years.

The US-China security relationship moved further out of the shadows of earlier conflicts: the direct military hostilities during the Korean War, the more limited and indirect confrontation during the Vietnam War, and Maoist China’s support for left-leaning revolutions in the post-colonial world. With the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Moscow-backed regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, the shared interest in checking the Soviet Union that had been the initial underpinning for warming US-China relations evaporated. Instead, during the 1990s, the US and China focused on new opportunities for affirmative cooperation, with the Clinton administration eventually referring to China as a possible strategic partner. This change reflected the perception that China and the United States did not pose serious security threats to one another. China’s growing international role prompted the Clinton administration to undertake some modest hedging efforts, including steps to shore up US Cold War–rooted alliances in Asia in 1996–1997.⁷ But as late as the middle 1990s, China’s still-limited capabilities were not yet driving concern about its arrival as a peer competitor for the US.⁸

There were, to be sure, episodes of significant friction and limited-scale crises in US-China relations, including: the cross-Strait confrontation coinciding with Taiwan’s first fully democratic presidential election in 1996, when Chinese missile tests prompted the US to dispatch elements of the Seventh Fleet to the region; the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO-led coalition’s intervention in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1999; the 2001 collision of a Chinese air force jet with a US EP-3 reconnaissance plane, leading to the forced landing and brief detention of the American plane and crew; and resurgent tensions during the later 2000s between China and its maritime neighbors—several of them formal allies or close partners of the United States—as China moved to clarify and assert claims in the East and South China Seas. Many of these incidents reflected long-recognized conflicts between US and PRC interests in Asia and demonstrated that both sides were willing to take some risks to protect or advance those interests.

Nevertheless, the overall security relationship remained relatively free of serious or protracted conflicts and perceived threats to fundamental interests. China was still comparatively weak, which limited the relevance of prospective maritime competition in the Western Pacific.⁹ Both sides saw benefits in the bilateral relationship that outweighed conflicting interests. The US military presence and alliance structure in Asia was not fundamentally at odds with Beijing’s high-priority interests during a period when China had neither the will nor the capacity to expand its reach, and when its primary foreign policy imperative was to secure a peaceful and stable international environment in which to pursue economic development, partly through integration with the global economy.

Although Taiwan remained a chronic source of discord in US-PRC relations and, in Beijing’s view, a core question of sovereignty and, thus, national security, cross-Strait and triangular relations remained relatively manageable during the long period that followed the normalization of US-PRC relations. Beijing consistently condemned Washington’s robust informal support for Taiwan as improper US intervention in China’s internal affairs, but Beijing’s policy was to tolerate the cross-Strait status quo. China would acquiesce in the autonomy and the de facto independence of Taiwan that US support made possible so long as Taiwan did not drift, or steer, too close to formal independence.

Several steps on both sides further limited the adverse impact of Taiwan issues on US-PRC relations, including: the third Joint Communiqué’s provisions on reducing US arms sales (even though the commitment was constrained by the Taiwan Relations Act and accompanied by President Reagan’s Six Assurances, which supported ongoing arms sales, frustrating Beijing’s expectations); President Clinton’s “three noes” policy (which promised no US support for Taiwan independence, Taiwan’s membership in states-member-only international organizations, and a “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan” policy); and the George W. Bush administration’s pointed rebukes of moves by Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian that, in Washington’s and Beijing’s views, threatened to change the cross-Strait status quo and to inflame the vexed issue of Taiwan’s international status.

The improving security relationship increasingly was overshadowed by a rapidly growing economic relationship. Beginning from near-zero baselines, bilateral trade in goods and services reached approximately $150 billion by 2002 and nearly $650 billion in 2018 before declining as the effects of the escalating Trump-era trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. In recent years, the US and China often have ranked as one another’s top trading partners (and each has been consistently among the other’s top few). After the PRC opened to foreign direct investment (FDI) in 1979, the US became a major source, accounting for tens of billions of dollars in accumulated stock by the 2010s. PRC investment in the US, though starting later, grew rapidly and reached more than one-third the levels of US FDI in China by the middle 2010s.¹⁰

Such statistics arguably understate the significance of the bilateral economic relationship that had emerged. As global supply chains developed in the 2000s, Chinese factories and firms became essential links in multistep manufacturing processes that connected producers across many countries as suppliers and importers of components and finished goods. US investment in China increasingly was for the purpose of providing goods and services to rapidly expanding Chinese domestic markets. Much—though not all—of the US business community became potent supporters of positive and cooperative bilateral relations, influencing policymakers in Washington and in Beijing as well. In China, too, enterprises and elements within the party-state that gained under the policy of opening to the outside world emerged as significant constituencies for economic engagement, including with the United States.¹¹

Economic relations, of course, were not uniformly positive. From early on, the US complained about a changing list of what it saw as unfair advantages for Chinese firms and disadvantages for US competitors. These stemmed from several factors: China’s not-fully-marketized economy; its limitations on market access for US firms; its relatively weak protection of US companies’ intellectual property; its neo-mercantilist trade policy; its undervalued currency; its extensive industrial policy to foster development of favored and targeted sectors; and its state-linked espionage targeting commercially valuable information from US businesses.

In both countries, the mutual economic opening and integration threatened some sectors and interests, mobilizing critics of openness that ranged from uncompetitive state-owned enterprises and parts of the old-line bureaucracy in China to labor unions and import-vulnerable companies, as well as human rights and environmental groups in the United States. Such factors and forces were not enough, however, to derail the trend toward more extensive and intensive economic ties over many years after 1979. Although significant, such issues were much smaller concerns, especially on the US side, than they would become during the 2010s.

Burgeoning economic ties—as well as muted security concerns—led to interdependence becoming the apparent defining feature of the bilateral relationship.¹² US engagement with the PRC went beyond facilitating the more open and robust economic ties associated with interdependence to an agenda of integrating China institutionally, supporting its membership and participation in the major formal organizations of the international order. Early in the era of reform and opening, China joined the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. At the end of the 1990s, the US dropped its opposition to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), marking the successful completion of China’s decade-and-a-half quest to join the principal international institution for the global economy.

China entered a wide range of major international bodies from which it had been absent through the late 1970s, from APEC and the Asian Development Bank to Interpol and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The PRC became a party to almost every major global treaty governing issues from trade and finance to nuclear proliferation to the law of the sea and of outer space to climate change and human rights (with the notable exception of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). Beijing sought, and gained, observer status or similar relationships with institutions where the US had been a key member and where China’s membership would be anomalous or seemingly barred by the institution’s structure and purpose, including the Arctic Council, the Organization of American States, and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

When US administrations supported China’s accession, or access, to these numerous and varied international regimes, they did so largely free of the concerns that would emerge by the 2010s that China was undermining the rules-based international order or setting up potentially rivalrous institutions. For China during the first three decades of the era of reform and opening, the allure was obvious: avoiding potential impediments to a growth strategy that rested significantly (if ultimately decreasingly) on international trade and investment; acquiring indicia of normal state and great power status; and exercising some (albeit, in the near term, modest) influence in shaping the rules of important international organizations and treaty-based regimes.

For the United States, the often-expressed reasons were to steer China toward being a more reliable adherent to, and supporter of, an existing international order that generally served US interests and reflected American influence. Washington hoped and expected that, as China grew in wealth and power, an engaged and institutionally integrated China would be—in the words of George W. Bush’s deputy secretary of state and later World Bank president Robert Zoellick—a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system, doing more to share the burdens of promoting common interests.¹³ Examples of progress in this direction included China’s significant role in the G20, which added China and other emerging economies to supersede the G8 in responding to the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, and Beijing’s pivotal place in the (unsuccessful) Six-Party Talks and other efforts to address North Korea’s nuclear program.

A more expansive and more normative version of this pro-engagement view aligned with constructivist theories of international relations:¹⁴ participation in international institutions and regimes could socialize China into supporting prevailing international norms on issues ranging from human rights (where post-Tiananmen China officially accepted the notion of universal human rights in 1991, and the PRC became an inaugural member of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006) to a liberal international economic order (where China’s accession to the WTO entailed promises of rapid progress toward thoroughgoing adherence to international standards after a relatively brief transition period and without the concessions enjoyed by other developing countries and by economies transitioning from socialist planning).

Some US assessments of China’s expected trajectory went further still, although they reflected the imperatives of American domestic politics at least as much as they represented beliefs about Chinese reality. For example, in seeking the congressional action needed to clear the way for the US to support China’s WTO entry, the Clinton administration argued that China’s WTO membership would foster market-oriented economic reforms, prosperity, and, in turn, political liberalization in China.¹⁵ Versions of these arguments were relatively widespread, drawing in part on theories about the relationship between economic development and political democracy, the trajectory of now-wealthy and democratic East Asian states whose earlier-stage economic models China was partly imitating, and post–Cold War liberal democratic triumphalism.¹⁶

During the first few decades following the normalization of US-PRC relations, when China’s economic and political reforms seemed to go hand in hand (albeit with significant setbacks and occasional divergences), the hope that engagement could promote a more liberal domestic order in China appealed for reasons that went beyond benevolence or evangelism in American values-based foreign policy. In an era that included the heyday of the democratic peace theory, influential views in US foreign policy circles held that a state’s type of domestic political system shaped its foreign policy behavior, and that a more liberal and democratizing China’s foreign policy would be more compatible with US interests and preferences.¹⁷

By the mid-2010s, caricatures of these hopeful views would become a central feature of the bipartisan indictment of US policies of engagement and the arguments for a tougher, even Cold War–like US policy toward China.¹⁸ But, from the 1980s through the 2000s, US politicians and leaders felt little pressure to adopt a harder-line, hawkish policy toward China. To be sure, candidates for office from both major parties (including presidential contenders Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush) pledged to stand up to China and condemned as too soft the policies of the administrations in power (including the Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton administrations). But, once in office, new presidents and their administrations found that the costs of confrontation outweighed the benefits of maintaining a generally positive relationship that served US interests. The usually low salience of China issues in US domestic politics and the support for good relations with China among influential constituencies (including US businesses) meant that US leaders faced, at most, modest political costs for abandoning campaign pledges to “get tough on China.”