When China Rules the World

Compared with China ’s huge investment in its relationship with the United States, the American attitude towards China, so far at least, stands in striking contrast. Its relationship with China has been seen by the US as one of only many international relationships, and usually far from the most important. As a result, American attention towards China has been episodic, occasionally rising to near the top of the agenda, but for the most part confined to the middle tier. [1156] During the first Clinton administration, for example, China barely figured. [1157] Although George W. Bush made strong noises against China during his first presidential election campaign, describing it as a ‘strategic competitor’, China sank down the Washington pecking order after 9/11 and relations between the two rapidly returned to the status quo ante. [1158] In line with the differential investment by the two powers in their relationship, China ’s impressive knowledge of the United States is not reciprocated in Washington beyond a relatively small coterie. [1159] Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the passing of the Cold War, the US was obliged to rethink the rationale for its relationship with China. [1160] It was not difficult. With its embrace of the market and growing privatization, China was seen, not wrongly, as moving towards capitalism. Furthermore, given China ’s double-digit economic growth and its huge population, it was regarded as offering boundless opportunities for US business. [1161] China became a key element in the American hubris about globalization in the 1990s, an integral part of what was seen as a process of Westernization which would culminate in the inevitable worldwide victory of Western capitalism, with the rest of the world, including China, increasingly coming to resemble the United States. Many assumptions were wrapped up in this hubris, from the triumph of Western lifestyles and cultural habits to the belief that Western-style democracy was of universal and inevitable applicability. [1162] George W. Bush declared in November 1999: ‘Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.’ [1163] Or as Thomas Friedman wrote: ‘ China ’s going to have a free press. Globalization will drive it.’ [1164] It was regarded as axiomatic, American author James Mann suggests, that, ‘the Chinese are inevitably becoming like us’. [1165] This view, which is still widely held, burdens American policy towards China with exaggerated expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled. [1166] The idea of globalization which lay at its heart was profoundly flawed.

During the course of the 1990s, US policy towards China was assailed by a growing range of different interest groups, from the labour unions which, concerned about the huge increase in Chinese imports, criticized China ’s trade practices, to human rights groups that protested about the treatment of dissidents and the subjugation of Tibet. [1167] While China policy remained a presidential rather than a congressional matter, it was relatively invulnerable to the critics’ complaints. However, it should not be assumed that the present American position towards China will inevitably be maintained into the indefinite future. Until the turn of the century, China impinged little on the conduct of American foreign policy, apart from in East Asia, and that was largely confined to the question of Taiwan. True, China’s exports to the United States – combined with the lack of competitiveness of the US’s own exports – had combined to produce a huge trade deficit between the two countries, but this was mitigated by China’s purchase of US Treasury bonds, which fuelled the American credit boom, and the benefit that American consumers enjoyed from the availability of ultra-cheap manufactured goods from China. But as China began to spread its wings at the beginning of the new century – its economy still growing at undiminished pace, the trade gap between the two countries constantly widening, the amount of Treasury bonds held by China forever on the increase, Chinese companies being urged to invest abroad, the state-sponsored quest for a sufficient and reliable supply of natural commodities drawing the country into Africa, Central Asia and Latin America, and its power and influence in East Asia expanding apace – it became increasingly clear that China no longer occupied the same niche as it had previously: across many continents and in many countries, the United States found itself confronted with a growing range of Chinese interests and, as a result, a steady growth in the sources of potential disagreement and conflict between the two countries. [1168]