The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power
By Thomas J. Christensen, W.W. Norton & Company, 400 pages, $28
“China has major incentives to avoid unnecessary conflict,” Thomas J. Christensen writes. But the United States has no experience “tackling the least appreciated challenge: persuading a uniquely large developing country with enormous domestic challenges and a historical chip on its national shoulder to cooperate actively with the international community”.
Christensen, a professor of politics at Princeton, served from 2006 to 2008 in the George W. Bush administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs. While he didn’t make policy, he was often present as a “backbencher” when China was being debated. (I would say he had a box seat.) He knows Chinese, and is well connected to Chinese academics, although seemingly not to more ordinary Chinese, whose opinions he does not report.
I don’t always agree with what he writes, but he is unarguably qualified to make the judgments he does. And when he contends, with the clarity that distinguishes his narrative, that China “is by far the most influential developing country in world history”, and emphasises that it “is being asked to do more at present than any developing country has in the past”, I take him seriously.
He deals here with the crises and collisions that bedevil China-US relations. He notes the big ideas that invariably add to the bedevilments. Many Chinese, whether sincerely or not, refer to imperialism and colonialism as factors that can never be forgotten, which the Communist Party overheats with waves of nationalism.
The US has numerous allies. Beijing has exactly one, North Korea, and some of Christensen’s high-ranking or well-informed interlocutors confide that this ally is a vexatious one. The grand problems also include climate change; nuclear proliferation, especially from Pyongyang and possibly Iran; the nature of Taiwan’s sovereignty; applying sanctions or not to third countries (Beijing usually vetoes these in the United Nations); Myanmar; who has what rights in the South China Sea. And add human rights in China and internationally — issues Christensen barely mentions.
There are also the sudden thunderclaps, impossible to foresee but with immense consequences, such as the accidental American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 during the Kosovo war, and the 2001 crash of a Chinese fighter jet into an American Navy intelligence aircraft in international airspace. In that incident, the Chinese pilot died; the American aircraft landed in China, and the crew was briefly detained. Each of these events Beijing labelled an act of American aggression.
Any of these issues, whether long-term or sudden, would be a first-class diplomatic headache. Christensen was present for some and has discussed others with Chinese experts. Some of those he talked to characterised most American positions as moves to humiliate China, or even to attempt regime change.
Christensen seems to be unusually even-handed. On climate change he states that China and the US together produce 40 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases. China is the greater culprit now, but he suggests that the developed world created this problem and that China has made some efforts to limit its polluting.
He notes as well that many developing countries cannot see how they can advance without burning fossil fuel. Recalling the UN’s attempted resolution in 2007 condemning Myanmar for human rights violations, which Beijing vetoed, he says that Washington and its allies were trying to shame the junta and implicitly its supporters, notably China.
This, Christensen writes, seemed unnecessary at the time and perhaps even foolish: “No matter how much one reviled the junta, it was the only feasible governing force.” To overthrow it “would produce more chaos in a country that was already suffering from violent regional and ethnic conflict” and lead to further convulsions that its giant neighbour, China, did not want. When change came in a moderate way, leaving the junta in charge but freeing political dissidents such as Aung San Suu Kyi, Beijing did not intervene.
As for North Korea, Christensen believes that some of his Chinese contacts are alarmed by Pyongyang’s unpredictability and internationally dangerous behaviour. But for Beijing to back away from Pyongyang, they told him, would be seen inside China as a betrayal of the hundreds of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers who died in Korea under Mao’s orders.
To abandon North Korea now, Christensen says, could lead to a final judgment on Mao as a “terrible economic, political and national security leader of the PRC. How could one justify keeping his portrait over Tiananmen?”
In his attempts to be fair, Christensen rarely loses his balance. He notes without equivocation China’s enormous corruption, disdain for many international and regional legal norms, internet hacking, academic plagiarism, the dire effects of the one-child policy and the thousands of local and regional uprisings by its increasingly poor peasants. He just touches on the vilification of the Dalai Lama and the imprisonment of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
But he recognises China’s neuralgic fears that its sovereignty remains in danger from neocolonialists and neo-imperialists, and insists that “Chinese patriots have every reason to reject a demand that they become ‘Western’, but no reason to reject ... basic standards of universal human rights and the spread of democracy itself”. Those standards, he notes, are upheld by many in Hong Kong, now a part of China.
Christensen is aware that China largely escaped the international financial crisis and that in some respects its economic size and successes have been daunting, at least until recently. Yet, in 2013, he adds, its per capita GDP was the equal of Ecuador’s, and “nobody is expecting Ecuadoreans to contribute greatly to global governance”.
Furthermore, Christensen bluntly contends, Beijing, which uses its military against dissenting civilians, and which briefly experienced international sanctions following the Tiananmen demonstrations, is “predictably less comfortable than the capitals of the advanced liberal democracies with condemning, sanctioning and intervening in authoritarian regimes in the developing world”.
Unlike some of his political science colleagues, he does not foresee a war with China (though he does not rule one out). Still, he points out that for the foreseeable future China’s military is no match for America’s. He slaps down those Beijing-watchers who see China as being on the verge of ruling the world.
So what to do? Beijing should pay attention. It is lucky to have in Thomas Christensen someone who can be severely critical about what’s going on inside China, but who wants to deal. He observes that “successful diplomacy is generally more about managing problems, not solving them outright”.
Where does China fit into that? The US must find a strategy that “accepts and even encourages China’s rise to greater power and prominence in international politics but shapes China’s choices so that it is more likely to forgo bullying behaviour ... Success requires an unusual mix of strength and toughness on the one hand and a willingness to reassure and listen to the Chinese on the other.”
As one who has met Chinese dissidents who were later imprisoned, seen many times how China behaves in Tibet and watched its army mow down peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, I find much of this hard to swallow. But because of Christensen’s powerful and reasonable book, seeing China as it sees itself is not an entirely indigestible idea.
–New York Times News Service
Jonathan Mirsky, a journalist and historian specialising in China, was named British International Reporter of the Year in 1990 for his dispatches from Tiananmen Square.
