On China (69 page)

But what was Germany’s real goal? Was it natural evolution of German cultural and economic interests across Europe and the world, to which German diplomacy was giving traditional support? Or did Germany seek “a general political hegemony and maritime ascendancy, threatening the independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of England”?
³

Crowe concluded that it made no difference what goal Germany avowed. Whichever course Germany was pursuing, “Germany would clearly be wise to build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” And once Germany achieved naval supremacy, Crowe assessed, this
in itself
—regardless of German intentions—would be an objective threat to Britain, and “incompatible with the existence of the British Empire.”
⁴

Under those conditions, formal assurances were meaningless. No matter what the German government’s professions were, the result would be “as formidable a menace to the rest of the world as would be presented by any deliberate conquest of a similar position by ‘malice aforethought.’”
⁵
Even if moderate German statesmen were to demonstrate their bona fides, moderate German foreign policy could “at any stage merge into” a conscious scheme for hegemony.

Thus structural elements, in Crowe’s analysis, precluded cooperation or even trust. As Crowe wryly observed: “It would not be unjust to say that ambitious designs against one’s neighbours are not as a rule openly proclaimed, and that therefore the absence of such proclamation, and even the profession of unlimited and universal political benevolence, are not in themselves conclusive evidence for or against the existence of unpublished intentions.”
⁶
And since the stakes were so high, it was “not a matter in which England can safely run any risks.”
⁷
London was obliged to assume the worst, and act on the basis of its assumptions—at least so long as Germany was building a large and challenging navy.

In other words, already in 1907 there was no longer any scope for diplomacy; the issue had become who would back down in a crisis, and whenever that condition was not fulfilled, war was nearly inevitable. It took seven years to reach the point of world war.

Were Crowe to analyze the contemporary scene, he might emerge with a judgment comparable to his 1907 report. I will sketch that interpretation, though it differs substantially from my own, because it approximates a view widely held on both sides of the Pacific. The United States and China have been not so much nation-states as continental expressions of cultural identities. Both have historically been driven to visions of universality by their economic and political achievements and their people’s irrepressible energy and self-confidence. Both Chinese and American governments have frequently assumed a seamless identity between their national policies and the general interests of mankind. Crowe might warn that when two such entities encounter each other on the world stage significant tension is probable.

Whatever China’s intentions, the Crowe school of thought would treat a successful Chinese “rise” as incompatible with America’s position in the Pacific and by extension the world. Any form of cooperation would be treated as simply giving China scope to build its capacities for an eventual crisis. Thus the entire Chinese debate recounted in chapter 18, and the question of whether China might stop “hiding its brightness,” would be immaterial for purposes of a Crowe-type analysis: someday it will (the analysis would posit), so America should act now as if it already had.

The American debate adds an ideological challenge to Crowe’s balance-of-power approach. Neoconservatives and other activists would argue that democratic institutions are the prerequisite to relations of trust and confidence. Nondemocratic societies, in this view, are inherently precarious and prone to the exercise of force. Therefore the United States is obliged to exercise its maximum influence (in its polite expression) or pressure to bring about more pluralistic institutions where they do not exist, and especially in countries capable of threatening American security. In these conceptions, regime change is the ultimate goal of American foreign policy in dealing with nondemocratic societies; peace with China is less a matter of strategy than of change in Chinese governance.

Nor is the analysis, interpreting international affairs as an unavoidable struggle for strategic preeminence, confined to Western strategists. Chinese “triumphalists” apply almost identical reasoning. The principal difference is that their perspective is that of the rising power, while Crowe represented the United Kingdom, defending its patrimony as a status quo country. An example of this genre is Colonel Liu Mingfu’s
China Dream,
discussed in chapter 18. In Liu’s view, no matter how much China commits itself to a “peaceful rise,” conflict is inherent in U.S.-China relations. The relationship between China and the United States will be a “marathon contest” and the “duel of the century.”
⁸
Moreover, the competition is essentially zero-sum; the only alternative to total success is humiliating failure: “If China in the 21st century cannot become world number one, cannot become the top power, then inevitably it will become a straggler that is cast aside.”
⁹

Neither the American version of the Crowe Memorandum nor the more triumphalist Chinese analyses have been endorsed by either government, but they provide a subtext of much current thought. If the assumptions of these views were applied by either side—and it would take only one side to make it unavoidable—China and the United States could easily fall into the kind of escalating tension described earlier in this epilogue. China would try to push American power as far away from its borders as it could, circumscribe the scope of American naval power, and reduce America’s weight in international diplomacy. The United States would try to organize China’s many neighbors into a counterweight to Chinese dominance. Both sides would emphasize their ideological differences. The interaction would be even more complicated because the notions of deterrence and preemption are not symmetrical between these two sides. The United States is more focused on overwhelming military power, China on decisive psychological impact. Sooner or later, one side or the other would miscalculate.

Once such a pattern has congealed, it becomes increasingly difficult to overcome. The competing camps achieve identity by their definition of themselves. The essence of what Crowe described (and the Chinese triumphalists and some American neoconservatives embrace) is its seeming automaticity. Once the pattern was created and the alliances were formed, no escape was possible from its self-imposed requirements, especially not from its internal assumptions.

The reader of the Crowe Memorandum cannot fail to notice that the specific examples of mutual hostility being cited were relatively trivial compared to the conclusions drawn from them: incidents of colonial rivalry in Southern Africa, disputes about the conduct of civil servants. It was not what either side had already done that drove the rivalry. It was what it might do. Events had turned into symbols; symbols developed their own momentum. There was nothing left to settle because the system of alliances confronting each other had no margin of adjustment.

That must not happen in the relations of the United States and China insofar as American policy can prevent it. Of course, were Chinese policy to insist on playing by Crowe Memorandum rules, the United States would be bound to resist. It would be an unfortunate outcome.

I have described the possible evolution at such length to show that I am aware of the realistic obstacles to the cooperative U.S.-China relationship I consider essential to global stability and peace. A cold war between the two countries would arrest progress for a generation on both sides of the Pacific. It would spread disputes into internal politics of every region at a time when global issues such as nuclear proliferation, the environment, energy security, and climate change impose global cooperation.

Historical parallels are by nature inexact. And even the most precise analogy does not oblige the present generation to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors. After all, the outcome was disaster for all involved, victors as well as defeated. Care must be taken lest both sides analyze themselves into self-fulfilling prophecies. This will not be an easy task. For, as the Crowe Memorandum has shown, mere reassurances will not arrest the underlying dynamism. For were any nation determined to achieve dominance, would it not be offering assurances of peaceful intent? A serious joint effort involving the continuous attention of top leaders is needed to develop a sense of genuine strategic trust and cooperation.

Relations between China and the United States need not—and should not—become a zero-sum game. For the pre–World War I European leader, the challenge was that a gain for one side spelled a loss for the other, and compromise ran counter to an aroused public opinion. This is not the situation in the Sino-American relationship. Key issues on the international front are global in nature. Consensus may prove difficult, but confrontation on these issues is self-defeating.

Nor is the internal evolution of the principal players comparable to the situation before World War I. When China’s rise is projected, it is assumed that the extraordinary thrust of the last decades will be projected into the indefinite future and that the relative stagnation of America is fated. But no issue preoccupies Chinese leaders more than the preservation of national unity. It permeates the frequently proclaimed goal of social harmony, which is difficult in a country where its coastal regions are on the level of the advanced societies but whose interior contains some of the world’s most backward areas.

The Chinese national leadership has put forward to its people a catalogue of tasks to be accomplished. These include combating corruption, which President Hu Jintao has called an “unprecedentedly grim task” and in the fight against which Hu has been involved at various stages of his career.
¹⁰
They involve as well a “Western development campaign,” designed to lift up poor inland provinces, among them the three in which Hu once lived. Key proclaimed tasks also include establishing additional ties between the leadership and the peasantry, including fostering village-level democratic elections, and enhanced transparency of the political process as China evolves into an urbanized society. In his December 2010 article, discussed in chapter 18, Dai Bingguo outlined the scope of China’s domestic challenge:

The Chinese domestic challenge is, by the description of its leaders, far more complex than can be encompassed in the invocation of the phrase “China’s inexorable rise.”

Amazing as Deng’s reforms were, part of China’s spectacular growth over the initial decades was attributable to its good fortune that there existed a fairly easy correspondence between China’s huge pool of young, then largely unskilled labor—which had been “unnaturally” cut off from the world economy during the Mao years—and the Western economies, which were on the whole wealthy, optimistic, and highly leveraged on credit, with cash to buy Chinese-made goods. Now that China’s labor force is becoming older and more skilled (causing some basic manufacturing jobs to move to lower-wage countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh) and the West is entering a period of austerity, the picture is far more complicated.

Demography will compound that task. Propelled by increasing standards of living and longevity combined with the distortions of the one-child policy, China has one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations. The country’s total working-age population is expected to peak in 2015.
¹²
From this point on, a shrinking number of Chinese citizens aged fifteen to sixty-four need to support an increasingly large elderly population. The demographic shifts will be stark: by 2030, the number of rural workers between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine is estimated to be half its current level .
¹³
By 2050, one-half of China’s population is projected to be forty-five or older, with a full quarter of China’s population—roughly equivalent to the entire current population of the United States—sixty-five and older.
¹⁴

A country facing such large domestic tasks is not going to throw itself easily, much less automatically, into strategic confrontation or a quest for world domination. The existence of weapons of mass destruction and modern military technologies of unknowable ultimate consequences define a key distinction from the pre–World War I period. The leaders who started that war had no understanding of the consequences of the weapons at their disposal. Contemporary leaders can have no illusions about the destructive potential they are capable of unleashing.

The crucial competition between the United States and China is more likely to be economic and social than military. If present trends in the two countries’ economic growth, fiscal health, infrastructure spending, and educational infrastructure continue, a gap in development—and in third-party perceptions of relative influence—may take hold, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. But this is a prospect it is in the capacity of the United States to arrest or perhaps reverse by its own efforts.

The United States bears the responsibility to retain its competitiveness and its world role. It should do this for its own traditional convictions, rather than as a contest with China. Building competitiveness is a largely American project, which we should not ask China to solve for us. China, fulfilling its own interpretation of its national destiny, will continue to develop its economy and pursue a broad range of interests in Asia and beyond. This is not a prospect that dictates the confrontations that led to the First World War. It suggests an evolution in many aspects of which China and the United States cooperate as much as they compete.