What Killed US-China Engagement?
By Joseph S. Nye, Jr. - January 4, 2024
When
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with US President Joe Biden last fall,
some interpreted it as a return to engagement. In fact, it heralded
only a minor détente, not a major change in policy.
The
United States’ engagement with the People’s Republic of China began
with Richard Nixon in 1972 and was expanded by Bill Clinton. Since then,
critics have described US policy as naive, owing to its failure to
understand the Communist Party of China’s long-term objectives.
Underpinning the policy was the prediction, from modernization theory,
that economic growth would propel China down the same liberalizing path
as other Confucian societies like South Korea and Taiwan. Xi, however,
has made China more closed and autocratic.
Still,
America’s engagement policy always had a realistic dimension. While
Nixon wanted to engage China to balance the Soviet threat, Clinton made
sure that engagement accompanied a reaffirmation of the US-Japan
security treaty for the post-Cold War era. Those who accuse Clinton of
naivete ignore that this hedge came first, and that the US-Japan
alliance remains a robust and fundamental element of the balance of
power in Asia today.
To
be sure, there was some artlessness, such as when Clinton dismissed
China’s efforts to control the internet by joking that it would be like
“trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” In fact, China’s “Great Firewall”
of state censorship has worked quite well. Similarly, there is now broad
agreement that China should have been punished more for its failure to
comply with World Trade Organization rules, especially considering that
it owes its WTO accession to the US.
Nonetheless,
there were signs that China’s rapid economic growth was producing some
liberalization, if not democratization. Many experts argued that Chinese
citizens were enjoying greater personal freedom than at any time in
China’s history. Before taking office, National Security Adviser Jake
Sullivan and White House Asia coordinator Kurt Campbell – the Biden
administration’s two leading officials on Asian policy – noted that “the
basic mistake of engagement was to assume that it could bring about
fundamental changes to China’s political system, economy, and foreign
policy.” On balance, they were correct about the inability to force
fundamental changes in China. But that doesn’t mean no changes
occurred.
On
the contrary, Chinese foreign policy on key issues such as nuclear
non-proliferation and United Nations sanctions against Iran and North
Korea underwent notable revisions. Moreover, China watchers pointed to
other signals such as greater freedom to travel, increases in foreign
contacts, a broader range of published views, and the emergence of
human-rights NGOs. When I was serving in the Clinton administration, I
told Congress (to quote from a later commentary) that, “If we treated
China as an enemy, we were guaranteeing an enemy in the future. If we
treated China as a friend, we could not guarantee friendship, but we
could at least keep open the possibility
of more benign outcomes.” US Secretary of State Colin Powell echoed
this point in 2001, telling Congress that, “China is not an enemy, and
our challenge is to keep it that way.”
Looking
back now, I still think engagement was realistic, though I plead guilty
to having had higher expectations for Chinese behavior than what we
have seen from Xi. While some Chinese blame Donald Trump for killing
engagement, he was more like a boy who poured gasoline on a fire that
China had lit.
This
brings us to Xi, who came to power in late 2012 and immediately cracked
down on political liberalization, while trying to preserve market
openness. In recent years, he has shifted to increasing support for
state-owned enterprises and tightening controls on private firms,
telling US officials that he wants a “new model for great-power
relations” that stresses equal partnership. Meanwhile, he has ordered
top commanders of the People’s Liberation Army to prepare for conflict,
because the West would never accept China’s peaceful rise.
While
Trump and Xi each played important roles in the Sino-American rupture,
the death of engagement has deeper roots. From the late 1970s, Deng
Xiaoping used market reforms to lift China out of poverty, while
maintaining a modest foreign policy based on the proverbial advice to
“hide your strength and bide your time.” But under Hu Jintao, Chinese
elites saw the 2008 global financial crisis (which started on Wall
Street) as a sign of American decline, and thus discarded Deng’s foreign
policy.
Although
China had benefited from the liberal international economic order, its
leaders now wanted more. Not only did they use state subsidies that
distorted international trade; they also engaged in large-scale cyber
theft of intellectual property. In the South China Sea, it went far
beyond legal limits in creating artificial islands. In 2015, Xi told US
President Barack Obama that he would not militarize the islands, but
then went ahead and did so. In 2016, when the International Tribunal for
the Law of the Sea ruled against China’s claims in a case brought by
the Philippines, China ignored the verdict.
China
had begun to act like a great power, but its actions produced
reactions, not least from America, where embitterment was reinforced by
the loss of jobs to Chinese imports. Voters in the affected areas
responded readily to Trump’s populism and protectionism in 2016.
Thus,
we can date engagement’s last gasp to 2015, when China and the US
cooperated in supporting the Paris climate agreement. While Xi and Obama
also held a summit and agreed not to use cyber espionage for commercial
purposes, that understanding became a dead letter when Trump took
office in 2017.
In
any case, disillusionment had already set in, and engagement was
effectively dead by 2016. In today’s era of great-power competition,
“managed competition” and “competitive coexistence” have replaced
engagement. RIP.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a professor at Harvard University and a former US assistant secretary of defense, is the author of Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the forthcoming memoir A Life in the American Century (Polity Press, January 2024).