On China (66 page)

The underlying issue is therefore political not economic. A concept of mutual benefit rather than recriminations over alleged misconduct must emerge. This makes it important to evolve the concept of co-evolution and of Pacific Community discussed in the epilogue.

Nonproliferation and North Korea:
Throughout the Cold War, nuclear weapons were in the possession primarily of the United States and the Soviet Union. For all their ideological and geopolitical hostility, their calculation of risk was essentially parallel, and they possessed the technical means to protect themselves against accident, unauthorized launches, and, to a considerable extent, surprise attack. But as nuclear weapons spread, this balance is in jeopardy: the calculation of risk is no longer symmetrical; and technical safeguards against accidental launch or even theft will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to implement—especially for countries without the expertise of the superpowers.

As proliferation accelerates, the calculus of deterrence grows increasingly abstract. It becomes ever more difficult to decide who is deterring whom and by what calculations. Even if it is assumed that new nuclear countries have the same reluctance as the established ones with respect to initiating nuclear hostilities against each other—an extremely dubious judgment—they may use their weapons to protect terrorist or rogue state assaults on the international order. Finally, the experience with the “private” proliferation network of apparently friendly Pakistan with North Korea, Libya, and Iran demonstrates the vast consequences to the international order of the spread of nuclear weapons, even when the proliferating country does not meet the formal criteria of a rogue state.

The spread of these weapons into hands not restrained by the historical and political considerations of the major states augurs a world of devastation and human loss without precedent even in our age of genocidal killings.

It is ironic that nuclear proliferation in North Korea should emerge on the agenda of the dialogue between Washington and Beijing, for it is over Korea that the United States and the People’s Republic of China first encountered each other on the battlefield sixty years ago. In 1950, the just established People’s Republic went to war with the United States because it saw in a permanent American military presence on its border with Korea a threat to Chinese long-term security. Sixty years later, the commitment of North Korea to a military nuclear program has created a new challenge re-creating some of the same geopolitical issues.

For the first ten years of North Korea’s nuclear program, China took the position that it was a matter for the United States and North Korea to settle between themselves. Because North Korea felt threatened primarily by the United States, so the Chinese argument went, it was chiefly up to the United States to provide it with the requisite sense of security to substitute for nuclear weapons. With the passage of time it became obvious that nuclear proliferation into North Korea would sooner or later affect China’s security. If North Korea were to be accepted as a nuclear power, it is highly likely that Japan and South Korea, and possibly other Asian countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia, would ultimately also join the nuclear club, altering the strategic landscape of Asia.

China’s leaders oppose such an outcome. But equally, China fears a catastrophic collapse of North Korea, since that could re-create at its borders the very conditions it fought to prevent sixty years ago.

The internal structure of the Korean regime compounds the problem. Though it proclaims itself to be a Communist state, its actual authority is in the hands of a single family. In 2011, at this writing, the head of the ruling family is in the process of devolving his power to a twenty-seven-year-old son with no previous experience of even Communist management, much less international relations. The possibility of an implosion from unpredictable or unknowable elements is ever present. Affected countries might then feel obliged to protect their vital interests by unilateral measures. By that time, it would be too late or perhaps too complicated to coordinate action. To prevent such an outcome must be an essential part of a Sino-American dialogue and of the Six Party Talks involving the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas.

In the pursuit of dealing with a growing list of issues, Beijing and Washington during the 2000s searched for an overall framework to define their relationship. The effort was symbolized by the inauguration of the U.S.-China Senior Dialogue and the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue (now merged into one Strategic and Economic Dialogue) during George W. Bush’s second term. This was in part an attempt to revitalize the spirit of candid exchange on conceptual issues that prevailed between Washington and Beijing during the 1970s, as described in earlier chapters.

In China, the search for an organizing principle for the era took the form of a government-endorsed analysis that the first twenty years of the twenty-first century represented a distinct “strategic opportunity period” for China. The concept reflected both a recognition of China’s progress and potential for strategic gains, and—paradoxically—an apprehension about its continuing vulnerabilities. Hu Jintao gave voice to this theory at a November 2003 meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee’s Political Bureau, where he suggested that a unique convergence of domestic and international trends put China in the position to advance its development by “leaps and bounds.” Opportunity was linked to danger, according to Hu Jintao; like other rising powers before it, if China “lost the opportunity” presented, “it might become a straggler.”
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Wen affirmed the same assessment in a 2007 article, in which he warned that “[o]pportunities are rare and fleeting,” and recalled that China had missed an earlier opportunity period because of “major mistakes, especially the ten-year catastrophe of the ‘great cultural revolution.’” The first fifth of the new century was an opportunity period “which we must tightly grasp and in which we can get much accomplished.” Making good use of this window, Wen assessed, would be “of extreme importance and significance” for China’s development goals.
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What did China have the strategic opportunity to accomplish? To the extent the Chinese debate on this question can be said to have had a formal beginning, it may be found in a series of special lectures and study sessions convened by Chinese academics and the country’s top leadership between 2003 and 2006. The program concerned the rise and fall of great powers in history: the means of their rise; the causes of their frequent wars; and whether, and how, a modern great power might rise without recourse to military conflict with the dominant actors in the international system. These lectures were subsequently elaborated into
The Rise of Great Powers,
a twelve-part film series aired on Chinese national television in 2006 and watched by hundreds of millions of viewers. As the scholar David Shambaugh has noted, this may have been a uniquely philosophical moment in the history of great power politics: “Few, if any, other major or aspiring powers engage in such self-reflective discourse.”
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What lessons could China draw from these historical precedents? In one of the first and most comprehensive attempts at an answer, Beijing sought to allay foreign apprehensions over its growing power by articulating the proposition of China’s “peaceful rise.” A 2005
Foreign Affairs
article by the influential Chinese policy figure Zheng Bijian served as a quasi-official policy statement. Zheng offered the assurance that China had adopted a “strategy . . . to transcend the traditional ways for great powers to emerge.” China sought a “new international political and economic order,” but it was “one that can be achieved through incremental reforms and the democratization of international relations.” China, Zheng wrote, would “not follow the path of Germany leading up to World War I or those of Germany and Japan leading up to World War II, when these countries violently plundered resources and pursued hegemony. Neither will China follow the path of the great powers vying for global domination during the Cold War.”
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Washington’s response was to articulate the concept of China as a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system, abiding by its norms and limits and shouldering additional responsibilities in line with its rising capabilities. In a 2005 speech at the National Committee on United States–China Relations, Robert Zoellick, then Deputy Secretary of State, put forward this American response to Zheng’s article. While Chinese leaders may have hesitated to grant the implication that they had ever been an “irresponsible” stakeholder, Zoellick’s speech amounted to an invitation to China to become a privileged member, and shaper, of the international system.

Almost concurrently, Hu Jintao delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, entitled “Build Towards a Harmonious World of Lasting Peace and Common Prosperity,” on the same theme as Zheng Bijian’s article. Hu reaffirmed the importance of the United Nations system as a framework for international security and development and outlined “what China stands for.” While reiterating that China favored the trend toward democratization of world affairs—in practice, of course, a relative diminution of American power in the direction of a multipolar world—Hu insisted that China would pursue its goals peacefully and within the framework of the U.N. system:

The “peaceful rise” and “harmonious world” theories evoked the principles of the classical era that had secured China’s greatness: gradualist ; harmonizing with trends and eschewing open conflict; organized as much around moral claims to a harmonious world order as actual physical or territorial domination. They also described a route to great power status plausibly attractive to a generation of leadership that had come of age during the social collapse of the Cultural Revolution, that knew its legitimacy now depended in part on delivering China’s people a measure of wealth and comfort and a respite from the previous century’s upheavals and privations. Reflecting an even more measured posture, the phrase “peaceful rise” was amended in official Chinese pronouncements to “peaceful development,” on the reported grounds that the notion of a “rise” was too threatening and triumphalist.

Over the next three years, through one of the periodic confluences of random events by which historical tides shift, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression coincided with a period of protracted ambiguity and stalemate in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the aweinspiring 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and a continued period of robust Chinese economic growth. The confluence of events caused some of China’s elites, including portions of the upper echelons of China’s government, to revisit the assumptions underlying the gradualist position articulated in 2005 and 2006.

The causes of the financial crisis and its worst effects were primarily in the United States and Europe. It led to unprecedented emergency infusions of Chinese capital to Western countries and companies, and appeals by Western policymakers for China to change the value of its currency and increase its domestic consumption to foster the health of the world economy.

Ever since Deng’s call to “reform and open up,” China had seen the West as a model of economic prowess and financial expertise. It was assumed that whatever the Western countries’ ideological or political shortcomings, they knew how to manage their economies and the world’s financial system in a uniquely productive manner. While China refused to acquire this knowledge at the cost of Western political tutelage, the implicit assumption among many Chinese elites was that the West had a kind of knowledge worthy of diligent study and adaptation.

The collapse of American and European financial markets in 2007 and 2008—and the spectacle of Western disarray and miscalculation contrasted with Chinese success—seriously undermined the mystique of Western economic prowess. It prompted a new tide of opinion in China—among the vocal younger generation of students and Internet users and quite possibly in portions of the political and military leadership—to the effect that a fundamental shift in the structure of the international system was taking place.

The symbolic culmination of this period was the drama of the Beijing Olympics, which took place just as the economic crisis was beginning to tear at the West. Not purely a sporting event, the Games were conceived as an expression of China’s resurgence. The opening ceremony was symbolic. The lights in the vast stadium were darkened. At exactly eight minutes after eight o’clock (China time), on the eighth day of the eighth month of the year, taking advantage of the auspicious number that had caused that day to be selected for the opening,
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two thousand drums broke the silence with one huge sound and continued playing for ten minutes, as if to say: “We have arrived. We are a fact of life, no longer to be ignored or trifled with but prepared to contribute our civilization to the world.” After that, the global audience saw an hour of tableaux on themes of China’s civilization. China’s period of weakness and underachievement—one might call it China’s “long nineteenth century”—was officially drawn to a close. Beijing was once again a center of the world, its civilization the focus of awe and admiration.

At a conference of the World Forum on China Studies held in Shanghai in the aftermath of the Olympics, Zheng Bijian, the author of the “peaceful rise” concept, told a Western reporter that China had at last overcome the legacy of the Opium War and China’s century of struggles with foreign intrusion, and that it was now engaged in a historic process of national renewal. The reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, Zheng said, had allowed China to solve the “riddle of the century,” developing rapidly and lifting millions out of poverty. As it emerged as a major power, China would rely on the attraction of its model of development, and relations with other countries would be “open, non-exclusive and harmonious,” aiming to “mutually open up the route to world development.”
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