Disagreements over how history might have unfolded if different decisions had been taken are ultimately impossible to resolve.
Following excerpts adapted from Getting China Wrong by Aaron L. Friedberg published by John Wiley & Sons
by Aaron L. Friedberg
The West’s strategy of engagement with China has failed. More than three decades of trade and investment with the advanced democracies have left that country far richer and stronger than it would otherwise have been. But growth and development have not caused China’s rulers to relax their grip on political power, abandon their mercantilist economic policies, or accept the rules and norms of the existing international system. To the contrary: China today is more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad, and more obviously intent on establishing itself as the world’s preponderant power than at any time since the death of Chairman Mao. What went wrong? Put simply, the democracies underestimated the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party. For far too long, the United States and its allies failed to take seriously the Party’s unwavering determination to crush opposition, build national power, and fulfill its ideological and geopolitical ambitions. In this timely and powerfully argued study, Aaron Friedberg identifies the assumptions underpinning engagement, describes the counterstrategy that China’s Communist Party rulers devised in order to exploit the West’s openness while defeating its plans, and explains what the democracies must do now if they wish to preserve their prosperity, protect their security, and defend their common values.
Contrary to the expectations of its architects and supporters, the policy of engagement did not induce the CCP regime to liberalize either politically or economically, nor did it result in China becoming a status quo power and a “responsible stakeholder” in the existing international order. Instead, over the course of the last three decades, Beijing has grown more repressive and militantly nationalistic at home, more aggressive and revisionist in its external behavior, and more committed to mercantilist, market-distorting economic practices.
Before turning to the question of how the United States and the other advanced industrial democracies should adjust their policies for dealing with China in light of these realities, this chapter will begin by addressing three final questions about the past: Is it, in fact, fair to say that engagement was a failure? To what extent can recent developments in China’s behavior be attributed to the idiosyncratic decisions of a single leader, as opposed to the functioning of the CCP system as a whole? And, whatever the cause, why did it take so long for Western observers and policy-makers to acknowledge what was happening and begin to respond?
The failure of engagement
The increasingly repressive trend in China’s domestic politics has triggered a wave of revisionism, especially, though not exclusively, in the United States: a reinterpretation or selective editing of the historical record that downplays the pervasive tone of optimism that persisted in many quarters well into the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Some analysts and former practitioners now go so far as to assert that encouraging China to become a liberal democracy was never “the goal or an achievable objective of US policy.” In the words of one leading scholar, it follows that “[e]ngagement can hardly be blamed for not achieving an outcome that it never took all that seriously or never expected to progress very far.” Political leaders may occasionally have used overly exuberant rhetoric to “shore up domestic support,” but “for the most part, the US government’s engagement strategy did not posit that systemic liberalization or democratization was inexorable or inevitable.”
These carefully worded assertions are misleading. Who was it, exactly, who never took liberalization “all that seriously”? As previous chapters have demonstrated at length and in detail, during the critical period extending from the early 1990s into the early 2000s high-ranking elected and appointed US officials, including presidents of both political parties, stated repeatedly that, among its other positive consequences, engagement would encourage China’s eventual political liberalization. Such an outcome was presented as highly probable, even if it was not always described as being inevitable. While, especially during the mid-1990s, public figures sometimes tempered their statements with caveats or words of caution, these were more like fine print than bold warning labels, easily lost in a torrent of hopeful imagery, seemingly persuasive arguments, and uplifting language.
If leaders in democratic societies used these arguments in order to persuade others and to justify their preferred policies, then they were consequential, regardless of whether they were deployed cynically or in earnest. Yet, rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding, there is little reason to doubt that officials were sincere in their expressions of optimism. Far from being the unique preserve of canny politicians intent on lulling a gullible public, similar views were widely shared across broad swaths of the business, journalistic, and academic communities, including many specialists in the study of Chinese politics.
Political liberalization aside, advocates argue that engagement yielded many other valuable benefits, including cooperation on a variety of global issues, mutual economic gains, and Beijing’s increasing acceptance of the existing international order. In the words of former Bush administration official Robert Zoellick: “Those who blithely assume that US cooperation with China didn’t produce results in America’s interests are flat wrong.” One recent attempt to “relitigate” the historical record notes that, starting in the 1990s, US policy-makers aimed “to prevent China from emerging as a security threat,” to encourage it to shift towards “a more open, market economy,” and, more specifically, to achieve a “consistent and concrete set of actionable goals,” including “preventing WMD [weapons of mass destruction] proliferation in East and South Asia, preventing the nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, cooperating on disease and environmental issues … [and] ensuring stability in the Taiwan Strait.”
Judged against these expectations, the record of the last three decades is unimpressive, to say the least. Engagement has obviously not prevented China from becoming a challenge to the security of the United States and its democratic allies, nor has it stopped nuclear weapons from spreading to the Korean Peninsula and South Asia. Far from helping to ensure peace, Beijing itself is today the major source of potential instability in the Taiwan Strait. Whatever China’s past record of cooperation on public health issues, if it is not directly responsible for the COVID-19 outbreak, its initial handling of the pandemic helped unleash the worst global health crisis in over a century. Despite its professed commitment to green development, China, already the world’s leading carbon emitter, has continued to build numerous coal-burning power plants both at home and abroad, and is now trying to win concessions from other nations in return for promises of future emissions reductions that it may very well be unable or unwilling to fulfill.
Although decades of trade and investment with China did not result in its evolution into a fully open, market-based system, they did yield undeniable gains for many Western producers, consumers, and investors. To a far greater extent than most economists and policy-makers were at first willing to acknowledge, however, economic engagement also generated significant costs, including a loss of manufacturing jobs, productive capacity, and know-how, and the massive illicit extraction of intellectual property through theft or compulsory transfer. As for the general claim that, via engagement, Washington succeeded in getting “Beijing to endorse, or at least not oppose, US goals across the globe,” while this assessment may have appeared plausible during the 1990s or the early 2000s when China was still relatively weak, it is now badly out of date.
“There was no alternative”
Even if this retrospective assessment is correct, it is still possible that other, less drastic strategies might have produced more favorable outcomes. There are a number of points in the last thirty years, including in the aftermath of Tiananmen and during the runup to China’s entry into the WTO, when the United States and the other advanced democracies could have modulated their approach to engagement, not cutting ties altogether but using their leverage more forcefully to try to compel Beijing to modify its domestic policies. The United States and its allies could also have taken steps to slow the growth of China’s power and to impose constraints on its external behavior, for example by reacting sooner and more decisively to mounting evidence of China’s massive intellectual property theft or to its increasing assertiveness in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
Disagreements over how history might have unfolded if different decisions had been taken are ultimately impossible to resolve. Still, the claim that a full embrace of engagement was the only conceivable course, that any alternative to it would inevitably have produced even worse results, and therefore, by implication, that everything is for the best (or at least as good as it can possibly be) in this best of all possible worlds simply does not stand up to close scrutiny.
Is Xi to blame?
Much recent commentary places responsibility for the unfavorable turn in Chinese foreign and domestic policy squarely on Xi Jinping’s shoulders. Xi is widely perceived as having abandoned “hide and bide” and reversed China’s supposed progress towards economic and political liberalization. Perhaps if he had not risen to power in 2012 the story of the past decade would have been dramatically different. And perhaps, once he goes, China will revert to a more moderate, accommodating approach to managing its own affairs and dealing with the outside world.
As we have seen, each of the main tendencies associated with Xi’s reign – increased assertiveness, intensified repression, heightened nationalism, expanded reliance on high-tech industrial policy – was visible first under Hu Jintao. This is another way of saying that, in their broad outlines, Xi’s policies are a product of the collective assessments of the CCP elite regarding the challenges and opportunities that the Party and the nation confront and the range of acceptable options for dealing with them.
Xi has continued to pursue the same goals as his predecessors. But that does not mean that his personality, strategic instincts, and leadership style have made no difference.
To the contrary, unlike Hu Jintao, Xi is a bold, decisive, and risk-acceptant ruler. While he has not yanked the wheel and tried to change the direction in which China is moving, he has sought greatly to increase the speed at which it is traveling. Xi evidently hopes in this way to break through a daunting array of obstacles and barriers, both internal and external. This approach may yet succeed, but it could also result in a catastrophic crash.
Xi likely sees himself as the anti-Gorbachev, a man whose mistakes he has studied with great care. The last Soviet leader’s attempts at reforms came too late and violated the top-down, centralizing, anti-democratic principles of Leninism, unleashing waves of political turmoil that wound up destroying the system (and the nation) they were meant to save. Xi intends to act preemptively to fend off a terminal crisis. And he is doing so by working along classic Leninist lines: strengthening the Party, tightening its grip on society, crushing dissent, and using propaganda to mobilize the masses.
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