On China (70 page)

The issue of human rights will find its place in the total range of interaction. The United States cannot be true to itself without affirming its commitment to basic principles of human dignity and popular participation in government. Given the nature of modern technology, these principles will not be confined by national borders. But experience has shown that to seek to impose them by confrontation is likely to be selfdefeating—especially in a country with such a historical vision of itself as China. A succession of American administrations, including the first two years of Obama’s, has substantially balanced long-term moral convictions with case-to-case adaptations to requirements of national security. The basic approach—discussed in previous chapters—remains valid; how to achieve the necessary balance is the challenge for each new generation of leaders on both sides.

The question ultimately comes down to what the United States and China can realistically ask of each other. An explicit American project to organize Asia on the basis of containing China or creating a bloc of democratic states for an ideological crusade is unlikely to succeed—in part because China is an indispensable trading partner for most of its neighbors. By the same token, a Chinese attempt to exclude America from Asian economic and security affairs will similarly meet serious resistance from almost all other Asian states, which fear the consequences of a region dominated by a single power.

The appropriate label for the Sino-American relationship is less partnership than “co-evolution.” It means that both countries pursue their domestic imperatives, cooperating where possible, and adjust their relations to minimize conflict. Neither side endorses all the aims of the other or presumes a total identity of interests, but both sides seek to identify and develop complementary interests.
¹⁵

The United States and China owe it to their people and to global well-being to make the attempt. Each is too big to be dominated by the other. Therefore neither is capable of defining terms for victory in a war or in a Cold War type of conflict. They need to ask themselves the question apparently never formally posed at the time of the Crowe Memorandum: Where will a conflict take us? Was there a lack of vision on all sides, which turned the operation of the equilibrium into a mechanical process, without assessing where the world would be if the maneuvering colossi missed a maneuver and collided? Which of the leaders who operated the international system that led to the First World War would not have recoiled had he known what the world would look like at its end?

Such an effort at co-evolution must deal with three levels of relationships. The first concerns problems that arise in the normal interactions of major power centers. The consultation system evolved over three decades has proved largely adequate to that task. Common interests—such as trade ties and diplomatic cooperation on discrete issues—are pursued professionally. Crises, when they arise, are generally resolved by discussion.

The second level would be to attempt to elevate familiar crisis discussions into a more comprehensive framework that eliminates the underlying causes of the tensions. A good example would be to deal with the Korea problem as part of an overall concept for Northeast Asia. If North Korea manages to maintain its nuclear capability through the inability of the negotiating parties to bring matters to a head, the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout Northeast Asia and the Middle East becomes likely. Has the time come to take the next step and deal with the Korea proliferation issue in the context of an agreed peaceful order for Northeast Asia?

An even more fundamental vision would move the world to a third level of interaction—one that the leaders prior to the catastrophes of the First World War never reached.

The argument that China and the United States are condemned to collision assumes that they deal with each other as competing blocs across the Pacific. But this is the road to disaster for both sides.

An aspect of strategic tension in the current world situation resides in the Chinese fear that America is seeking to contain China—paralleled by the American concern that China is seeking to expel the United States from Asia. The concept of a Pacific Community—a region to which the United States, China, and other states all belong and in whose peaceful development all participate—could ease both fears. It would make the United States and China part of a common enterprise. Shared purposes—and the elaboration of them—would replace strategic uneasiness to some extent. It would enable other major countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Australia to participate in the construction of a system perceived as joint rather than polarized between “Chinese” and “American” blocs. Such an effort could be meaningful only if it engaged the full attention, and above all the conviction, of the leaders concerned.

One of the great achievements of the generation that founded the world order at the end of the Second World War was the creation of the concept of an Atlantic Community. Could a similar concept replace or at least mitigate the potential tensions between the United States and China? It would reflect the reality that the United States is an Asian power, and that many Asian powers demand it. And it responds to China’s aspiration to a global role.

A common regional political concept would also in large part answer China’s fear that the United States is conducting a containment policy toward China. It is important to understand what one means by the term “containment.” Countries on China’s borders with substantial resources, such as India, Japan, Vietnam, and Russia, represent realities not created by American policy. China has lived with these countries throughout its history. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected the notion of containing China, she meant an Americanled effort aimed at creating a strategic bloc on an anti-Chinese basis. In a Pacific Community effort, both China and the United States would have constructive relations with each other and all other participants, not as part of confronting blocs.

The future of Asia will be shaped to a significant degree by how China and America envision it, and by the extent to which each nation is able to achieve some congruence with the other’s historic regional role. Throughout its history, the United States has often been motivated by visions of the universal relevance of its ideals and of a proclaimed duty to spread them. China has acted on the basis of its singularity; it expanded by cultural osmosis, not missionary zeal.

For these two societies representing different versions of exceptionalism, the road to cooperation is inherently complex. The mood of the moment is less relevant than the ability to develop a pattern of actions capable of surviving inevitable changes of circumstance. The leaders on both sides of the Pacific have an obligation to establish a tradition of consultation and mutual respect so that, for their successors, jointly building a shared world order becomes an expression of parallel national aspirations.

When China and the United States first restored relations forty years ago, the most significant contribution of the leaders of the time was their willingness to raise their sights beyond the immediate issues of the day. In a way, they were fortunate in that their long isolation from each other meant that there were no short-term day-to-day issues between them. This enabled the leaders of a generation ago to deal with their future, not their immediate pressures, and to lay the basis for a world unimaginable then but unachievable without Sino-American cooperation.

In pursuit of understanding the nature of peace, I have studied the construction and operation of international orders ever since I was a graduate student well over half a century ago. On the basis of these studies, I am aware that the cultural, historic, and strategic gaps in perception that I have described will pose formidable challenges for even the best-intentioned and most far-sighted leadership on both sides. On the other hand, were history confined to the mechanical repetition of the past, no transformation would ever have occurred. Every great achievement was a vision before it became a reality. In that sense, it arose from commitment, not resignation to the inevitable.

In his essay “Perpetual Peace,” the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways: by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

When Premier Zhou Enlai and I agreed on the communiqué that announced the secret visit, he said: “This will shake the world.” What a culmination if, forty years later, the United States and China could merge their efforts not to shake the world, but to build it.

1
John W. Garver, “China’s Decision for War with India in 1962,” in Alastair Iaian Johnston and Robert S. Ross, eds.,
New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 116, citing Sun Shao and Chen Zibin,
Ximalaya shan de xue: Zhong Yin zhanzheng shilu
[
Snows of the Himalaya Mountains: The True Record of the China-India War
] (Taiyuan: Bei Yue Wenyi Chubanshe, 1991), 95; Wang Hongwei,
Ximalaya shan qingjie: Zhong Yin guanxi yanjiu
[
The Himalayas Sentiment: A Study of China-India Relations
] (Beijing: Zhongguo Zangxue Chubanshe, 1998), 228–30.

2
Huaxia
and
Zhonghua,
other common appellations for China, have no precise English meaning, but carry similar connotations of a great and central civilization.

1
“Ssuma Ch’ien’s Historical Records—Introductory Chapter,” trans. Herbert J. Allen,
The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
(London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1894), 278–80 (“Chapter I: Original Records of the Five Gods”).

2
Abbé Régis-Evariste Huc,
The Chinese Empire
(London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1855), as excerpted in Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell, eds.,
Imperial China: The Decline of the Last Dynasty and the Origins of Modern China—The 18th and 19th Centuries
(New York: Vintage, 1967), 31.

3
Luo Guanzhong,
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
, trans. Moss Roberts (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1995), 1.

4
Mao used this example to demonstrate why China would survive even a nuclear war. Ross Terrill,
Mao: A Biography
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 268.

5
John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman,
China: A New History
, 2nd enlarged ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 93.

6
F. W. Mote,
Imperial China: 900–1800
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 614–15.

7
Ibid., 615.

8
Thomas Meadows,
Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China
(London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1847), as excerpted in Schurmann and Schell, eds.,
Imperial China
, 150.

9
Lucian Pye, “Social Science Theories in Search of Chinese Realities,”
China Quarterly
132 (1992): 1162.

10
Anticipating that his colleagues in Washington would object to this proclamation of Chinese universal jurisdiction, the American envoy in Beijing obtained an alternate translation and textual exegesis from a local British expert. The latter explained that the offending expression—literally “to soothe and bridle the world”—was a standard formulation, and that the letter to Lincoln was in fact a (by the Chinese court’s standards) particularly modest document whose phrasing indicated genuine goodwill.
Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the First Session of the Thirty-eighth Congress
, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1864), Document No. 33 (“Mr. Burlingame to Mr. Seward, Peking, January 29, 1863”), 846–48.

11
For a brilliant account of these achievements by a Western scholar deeply (and perhaps excessively) enchanted by China, see Joseph Needham’s encyclopedic multivolume
Science and Civilisation in China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).

12
Fairbank and Goldman,
China
, 89.

13
Angus Maddison,
The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective
(Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006), Appendix B, 261–63. It must be allowed that until the Industrial Revolution, total GDP was tied more closely to population size; thus China and India outstripped the West in part by virtue of their larger populations. I would like to thank Michael Cembalest for bringing these figures to my attention.

14
Jean-Baptiste Du Halde,
Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise
(La Haye: H. Scheurleer, 1736), as translated and excerpted in Schurmann and Schell, eds.,
Imperial China
, 71.

15
François Quesnay,
Le despotisme de la Chine
, as translated and excerpted in Schurmann and Schell, eds.,
Imperial China
, 115.

16
For an exploration of Confucius’s political career synthesizing classical Chinese accounts, see Annping Chin,
The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics
(New York: Scribner, 2007).

17
See Benjamin I. Schwartz,
The World of Thought in Ancient China
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 63–66.

18
Confucius,
The Analects,
trans. William Edward Soothill (New York: Dover, 1995), 107.

19
See Mark Mancall, “The Ch’ing Tribute System: An Interpretive Essay,” in John King Fairbank, ed.,
The Chinese World Order
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 63–65; Mark Mancall,
China at the Center: 300 Years of Foreign Policy
(New York: Free Press, 1984), 22.