When China Rules the World

China ’s relationship with the United States has remained the fundamental tenet of its foreign policy for some thirty years, being from the outset at the heart of Deng Xiaoping’s strategy for ensuring that China would have a peaceful and relatively trouble-free external environment that would allow it to concentrate its efforts and resources on its economic development. [1147] After Tiananmen Square, Deng spoke of the need to ‘adhere to the basic line for one hundred years, with no vacillation’, [1148] testimony to the overriding importance he attached to economic development and, in that context, also to the relationship with the United States. [1149] It was, furthermore, a demonstration of the extraordinarily long-term perspective which, though alien to other cultures, is strongly characteristic of Chinese strategic thinking. The relationship with the United States has continued to be an article of faith for the Chinese leadership throughout the reform period, largely unanimous and uncontested, engendering over time a highly informed and intimate knowledge of America. [1150]

The contrast between China ’s approach towards the United States and that of the Soviet Union ’s prior to 1989 could hardly be greater. The USSR saw the West as the enemy; China chose, after 1972, to befriend it. The Soviet Union opted for autarchy and isolation; China, after 1978, sought integration and interdependence. The USSR shunned, and was excluded from, membership of such post-war Western institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and GATT; in contrast, China waited patiently for fifteen years until it was finally admitted as a member of the WTO in 2001. The Soviet Union embarked on military confrontation and a zero-sum relationship with the United States; China pursued rapprochement and cooperation in an effort to create the most favourable conditions for its economic growth. The Soviet Union was obliged to engage in prohibitive levels of military expenditure; China steadily reduced the proportion of GDP spent on its military during the 1980s and 1990s, falling from an average of 6.35 per cent between 1950 and 1980 to 2.3 per cent in the 1980s and 1.4 per cent in the 1990s. [1151] The strategies of the two countries were, in short, based on diametrically opposed logics. [1152] The Chinese approach is well illustrated by Deng’s comment: ‘Observe developments soberly, maintain our position, meet challenges calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, remain free of ambition, never claim leadership.’ [1153] It goes without saying that the relationship between China and the United States during the reform period has been profoundly unequal. [1154] China needed the US to a far greater extent than the US needed China. The United States possessed the world’s largest market and was the gatekeeper to an international system the design and operation of which it was overwhelmingly responsible for. China was cast in the role of supplicant, or, as China expert Steven I. Levine puts it, the United States acted towards China ‘like a self-appointed Credentials Committee that had the power to accept, reject, or grant probationary membership in the international club to an applicant of uncertain respectability’. [1155] In the longer term, when China is far stronger, this rather demeaning experience might find expression – and payback – in the Chinese attitude towards the United States; it might be seen by them to have been another, albeit milder, expression of their long-running humiliation.