US-China IR2
History of Engagement::
During HW Bush Era::The examples are plentiful. Following the 1989 Tiananmen Square
massacre, U.S. President George H. W. Bush sent an apologetic letter
to the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping expressing his determination
to “get the relationship back on track” after the United States had
imposed sanctions in response to the CCP’s brutal crackdown. Bush
presumably meant resuming work as tacit allies, with the United States
dropping sanctions and furnishing technology, intelligence, and eco-
nomic access to China.Clinton era: Nine years later, U.S. President Bill Clinton visited Beijing to cement
his engagement policy, which included granting China “most favored
nation” trading status without the human rights standards normally
required of a “nonmarket economy,” the designation the United States
assigns to former and current communist countries. In a gesture of
goodwill, Clinton became the first U.S. president to publicly articulate
the “three no’s” regarding Taiwan:
1) no independence,
2)no two Chinas,
3)no membership for Taipei in intergovernmental organizations. A few
months later, however, the Chinese leader Jiang Zemin warned the CCP
foreign policy bureaucracy that Washington’s “so-called engagement
policy” had the same aim as a “containment policy”: “to try with ulterior
motives to change our country’s socialist system.” Jiang further asserted
that “some in the United States and other Western countries will not
give up their political plot to westernize and divide our country” and
would “put pressure on us in an attempt to overwhelm us and put us
down..
During the following decade, the George W. Bush administration
encouraged China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the interna-
tional order and launched a series of U.S.-Chinese “strategic economic
dialogues.” The Obama administration expanded those dialogues to
cover all major issues in the relationship and put out a joint statement
respecting China’s “core interests”—all in pursuit of “strategic reassur-
ance.”Supporters of Engagement with China: Supporters of reengagement would like to see Washington explain
that it wants to include China in a positive-sum international order.
But Chinese leaders understand U.S. offers of inclusion perfectly
well, perhaps better than many Americans do. They saw what hap-
pened when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev tried to integrate
the Soviet Union into the Western order. As Deng predicted, open-
ing the window to the “fresh air” of U.S. engagement also allowed in
“flies” in the form of subversive political forces. To prevent something
similar from happening in China, the CCP developed an authoritarian
capitalist system designed to extract the benefits of an open global
order while keeping liberal political pressures at bay. For Americans,
this turned out to be as good as it got: a partial Chinese integration
that helped the CCP strengthen itself for a future contest over inter-
national borders and rules.
What sort of Engagement China needs::
That epic struggle now seems at hand. Determined not to suffer
Gorbachev’s fate, or worse, Chinese President Xi Jinping has spent
his time in power building a fortress around China and himself. His
national security strategy calls for the opposite of the reforms and
concessions that destroyed the Soviet Communist Party but also
brought the Cold War to a peaceful end. A massive military buildup,
the reassertion of party control over every institution, an epic campaign
to sanctions-proof the CCP: these are not the hallmarks of a regime
interested in reengaging with a liberal superpower. Rather, they are the
telltale signs of an aggrieved dictatorship gearing up for “worst-case
and extreme scenarios and . . . major tests of high winds, choppy waters,
and even dangerous storms,” as Xi now repeatedly warns his comrades.
Most probably scenrio: Realist say,
most likely scenario in the years to come is a cold war in which
the United States and China continue to decouple their strategic
economic sectors, maintain a military standoff in East Asia, promote
their rival visions of world order, and compete to produce solutions
to transnational problems. Cold wars are awful but better than hot
ones. Many ties that bind the United States and China—especially
their dense economic links—are exacerbating their insecurities and
becoming new arenas of conflict. For U.S. policymakers, it may be
better to find avenues to create buffers between the two sides than to
try to make them more interdependent.Containment: containment measures success by whether the United States
e²ectively defends its interests and values, not by whether U.S.-Chinese
relations are friendly. ose promoting reen-
gagement claim that competition with
China has consumed U.S. foreign policy and
that the United States lacks a vision for the
world beyond bludgeoning Beijing.
Can engagement be more dangerous than appeasement and containment::
Containment may seem counterproductive at Ùrst because Chinese
leaders will howl with the outrage typical of their “Wolf Warrior” diplo-
macy. But sometimes the policy that appears most fraught in the near
term o²ers the best chance for a lasting peace—and the policy that
seems safest in the moment could be disastrous in the long run. Re-
engagement, a seemingly prudent middle course between appeasement
and containment, may be the most dangerous of all because it nei-
ther satisÙes Chinese demands nor deters Beijing from taking what it wants by force. Since Chinese leaders repeatedly perceive U.S. offers of
engagement as stealth containment, the choice the United States faces
is not between engagement and containment but between a meek and
waffling, yet still provocative, form of containment and a clear and firm
version that at least has some hope of deterring Chinese aggression.
Possible repurcussions of US giving space to China in East Asia:
The problem with capitulation, however, is that Chinese demands
cannot be satisfied by the United States alone. To make the CCP happy,
Taiwan would have to accept absorption by a brutal dictatorship, and
neighboring countries would have to beg Beijing for permission to ven-
ture beyond their coastlines. None of that is likely, which is why the most
probable result of U.S. retrenchment would be not an immaculate transi-
tion to peaceful Chinese hegemony but violent chaos. A fully militarized
Japan; a nuclear breakout by Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo; and an emboldened
North Korea are only the most obvious risks. Less obvious are potential
knock-on effects, such as the collapse of Asian supply chains and U.S.
alliances in Europe, which might not survive the shock of seeing the
United States create a security vacuum for China to fill.
Perhaps Americans could ride out the resulting storm from the
safety of the Western Hemisphere, but the history of both world wars
suggests they would eventually be sucked into the Eurasian vortex. At
a minimum, the United States would need to arm itself to the teeth
to hedge against that possibility—as well as against the possibility of
a Chinese colossus that sets its sights on U.S. territories in the west-
ern Pacific after overrunning East Asia. Either way, the United States
would be back where it started—containing China—but without allies,
secure supply chains, forward-deployed forces, or much credibility.To
compensate, the United States might have to become a garrison state,
with its wealth and civil liberties eroded by breakneck militarization.
Conclusion: Hawks in Washington prefer to go harsh on China, opting containment as the fairly possible scenerio. While, Doves prefer engagement as the preferred option, by slashing down some of tarrifs and whipping up diplomacy, establishing relines etc.