The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (40 page)

During these years the public in each country became steadily less favorably disposed toward the other country. In 1985, 87 percent of the American public said they had a generally friendly attitude toward Japan. By 1990 this had dropped to 67 percent, and by 1993 a bare 50 percent of Americans felt favorably disposed toward Japan and almost two-thirds said they tried to avoid buying Japanese products. In 1985, 73 percent of Japanese described U.S.-Japanese relations as friendly; by 1993, 64 percent said they were unfriendly. The year 1991 marked the crucial turning point in the shift of public opinion out of its Cold War mold. In that year each country displaced the Soviet Union in the perceptions of the other. For the first time Americans rated Japan ahead of the Soviet Union as a threat to American security, and for the first time Japanese rated the United States ahead of the Soviet Union as a threat to Japan’s security.
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Changes in public attitudes were matched by changes in elite perceptions. In the United States a significant group of academic, intellectual, and political revisionists emerged who emphasized the cultural and structural differences between the two countries and the need for the United States to take a much tougher line in dealing with Japan on economic issues. The images of Japan in the media, nonfiction publications, and popular novels became increasingly derogatory. In parallel fashion in Japan a new generation of political leaders appeared who had not experienced American power in and benevolence after World War II, who took great pride in Japanese economic successes, and who were quite willing to resist American demands in ways their elders had not been. These Japanese “resisters” were the counterpart to the American “revisionists,” and in both countries candidates found that advocating a tough line on issues affecting Japanese-American relations went over well with the voters.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s American relations with China also became increasingly antagonistic. The conflicts between the two countries, Deng Xiaoping said in September 1991, constituted “a new cold war,” a phrase
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regularly repeated in the Chinese press. In August 1995 the government’s press agency declared that “Sino-American relationships are at the lowest ebb since the two countries established diplomatic relations” in 1979. Chinese officials regularly denounced alleged interference in Chinese affairs. “We should point out,” a 1992 Chinese government internal document argued, “that since becoming the sole superpower, the United States has been grasping wildly for a new hegemonism and power politics,, and also that its strength is in relative decline and that there are limits to what it can do.” “Western hostile forces,” President Jiang Zemin said in August 1995, “have not for a moment abandoned their plot to Westernize and ‘divide’ our country.” By 1995 a broad consensus reportedly existed among the Chinese leaders and scholars that the United States was trying to “divide China territorially, subvert it politically, contain it strategically and frustrate it economically.”
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Evidence existed for all these charges. The United States allowed President Lee of Taiwan to come to the United States, sold 150 F-16s to Taiwan, designated Tibet an “occupied soverign territory,” denounced China for its human rights abuses, denied Beijing the 2000 Olympics, normalized relations with Vietnam, accused China of exporting chemical weapons components to Iran, imposed trade sanctions on China for sales of missile equipment to Pakistan, and threatened China with additional sanctions over economic issues while at the same time barring China’s admission to the World Trade Organization. Each side accused the other of bad faith: China, according to Americans, violated understandings on missile exports, intellectual property rights, and prison labor; the United States, according to the Chinese, violated agreements in letting President Lee come to the United States and selling advanced fighter aircraft to Taiwan.

The most important group in China with an antagonistic view toward the United States was the military, who, apparently, regularly pressured the government to take a tougher line with the United States. In June 1993, 100 Chinese generals reportedly sent a letter to Deng complaining of the government’s “passive” policy toward the United States and its failure to resist U.S. efforts to “blackmail” China. In the fall of that year a confidential Chinese government document outlined the military’s reasons for conflict with the United States: “Because China and the United States have longstanding conflicts over their different ideologies, social systems, and foreign policies, it will prove impossible to fundamentally improve Sino-U.S. relations.” Since Americans believe that East Asia will become “the heart of the world economy . . . the United States cannot tolerate a powerful adversary in East Asia.”
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By the mid-1990s Chinese officials and agencies routinely portrayed the United States as a hostile power.

The growing antagonism between China and the United States was in part driven by domestic politics in both countries. As was the case with Japan, informed American opinion was divided. Many Establishment figures argued for constructive engagement with China, expanding economic relations, and
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drawing China into the so-called community of nations. Others emphasized the potential Chinese threat to American interests, argued that conciliatory moves toward China produced negative results, and urged a policy of firm containment. In 1993 the American public ranked China second only to Iran as the country that posed the greatest danger to the United States. American politics often operated so as to produce symbolic gestures, such as Lee’s visit to Cornell and Clinton’s meeting with the Dalai Lama, that outraged the Chinese, while at the same time leading the administration to sacrifice human rights considerations for economic interests, as in the extension of MFN treatment. On the Chinese side, the government needed a new enemy to bolster its appeals to Chinese nationalism and to legitimize its power. As the succession struggle lengthened, the political influence of the military rose, and President Jiang and other contestants for post-Deng power could not afford to be lax in promoting Chinese interests.

In the course of a decade American relations thus “deteriorated” with both Japan and China. This shift in Asian-American relations was so broad and encompassed so many different issue areas that it seems unlikely that its causes can be found in individual conflicts of interest over auto parts, camera sales, or military bases, on the one hand, or dissident jailings, weapons transfers, or intellectual piracy, on the other. In addition, it was clearly against American national interest to allow its relations simultaneously to become more conflictual with both major Asian powers. The elementary rules of diplomacy and power politics dictate that the United States should attempt to play one off against the other or at least to sweeten relations with one if they were becoming more conflictual with the other. Yet this did not happen. Broader factors were at work promoting conflict in Asian-American relations and making it more difficult to resolve the individual issues that came up in those relations. This general phenomenon had general causes.

First, increased interaction between Asian societies and the United States in the form of expanded communications, trade, investment, and knowledge of each other multiplied the issues and subjects where interests could, and did, clash. This increased interaction made threatening to each society practices and beliefs of the other which at a distance had seemed harmlessly exotic. Second, the Soviet threat in the 1950s led to the U.S.-Japan mutual security treaty. The growth of Soviet power in the 1970s led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China in 1979 and ad hoc cooperation between the two countries to promote their common interest in neutralizing that threat. The end of the Cold War removed this overriding common interest of the United States and the Asian powers and left nothing in its place. Consequently, other issues where significant conflicts of interest existed came to the fore. Third, the economic development of the East Asian countries shifted the overall balance of power between them and the United States. Asians, as we have seen, increasingly affirmed the validity of their values
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and institutions and the superiority of their culture to Western culture. Americans, on the other hand, tended to assume, particularly after their Cold War victory, that their values and institutions were universally relevant and that they still had the power to shape the foreign and domestic policies of Asian societies.

This changing international environment brought to the fore the fundamental cultural differences between Asian and American civilizations. At the broadest level the Confucian ethos pervading many Asian societies stressed the values of authority, hierarchy, the subordination of individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoidance of confrontation, “saving face,” and, in general, the supremacy of the state over society and of society over the individual. In addition, Asians tended to think of the evolution of their societies in terms of centuries and millennia and to give priority to maximizing long-term gains. These attitudes contrasted with the primacy in American beliefs of liberty, equality, democracy, and individualism, and the American propensity to distrust government, oppose authority, promote checks and balances, encourage competition, sanctify human rights, and to forget the past, ignore the future, and focus on maximizing immediate gains. The sources of conflict are in fundamental differences in society and culture.

These differences had particular consequences for the relations between the United States and the major Asian societies. Diplomats made great efforts to resolve American conflicts with Japan over economic issues, particularly Japan’s trade surplus and the resistance of Japan to American products and investment. Japanese-American trade negotiations took on many of the characteristics of Cold War Soviet-American arms control negotiations. As of 1995 the former had produced even fewer results than the latter because these conflicts stem from the fundamental differences in the two economies, and particularly the unique nature of the Japanese economy among those of the major industrialized countries. Japan’s imports of manufactured goods have amounted to about 3.1 percent of its GNP compared to an average of 7.4 percent for the other major industrialized powers. Foreign direct investment in Japan has been a minuscule 0.7 percent of GDP compared to 28.6 percent for the United States and 38.5 percent for Europe. Alone among the big industrial countries, Japan ran budget surpluses in the early 1990s.
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Overall the Japanese economy has not operated in the way the supposedly universal laws of Western economics dictate. The easy assumption by Western economists in the 1980s that devaluing the dollar would reduce the Japanese trade surplus proved false. While the Plaza agreement of 1985 rectified the American trade deficit with Europe, it had little effect on the deficit with Japan. As the yen appreciated to less than one hundred to the dollar, the Japanese trade surplus remained high and even increased. The Japanese were thus able to sustain both a strong currency and a trade surplus. Western economic thinking tends to posit a negative trade-off between unemployment and inflation, with an unemployment rate significantly less than 5 percent thought to trigger
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inflationary pressures. Yet for years Japan had unemployment averaging less than 3 percent and inflation averaging 1.5 percent. By the 1990s both American and Japanese economists had come to recognize and to conceptualize the basic differences in these two economic systems. Japan’s uniquely low level of manufactured imports, one careful study concluded, “cannot be explained through standard economic factors.” “The Japanese economy does not follow Western logic,” another analyst argued, “whatever Western forecasters say, for the simple reason that it is not a Western free-market economy. The Japanese . . . have invented a type of economics that behaves in ways that confound the predictive powers of Western observers.”
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What explains the distinctive character of the Japanese economy? Among major industrialized countries, the Japanese economy is unique because Japanese society is uniquely non-Western. Japanese society and culture differ from Western, and particularly American, society and culture. These differences have been highlighted in every serious comparative analysis of Japan and America.
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Resolution of the economic issues between Japan and the United States depends on fundamental changes in the nature of one or both economies, which, in turn, depend upon basic changes in the society and culture of one or both countries. Such changes are not impossible. Societies and cultures do change. This may result from a major traumatic event: total defeat in World War II made two of the world’s most militaristic countries into two of its most pacifist ones. It seems unlikely, however, that either the United States or Japan will impose an economic Hiroshima on the other. Economic development also can change a country’s social structure and culture profoundly, as occurred in Spain between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, and perhaps economic wealth will make Japan into a more American-like consumption-oriented society. In the late 1980s people in both Japan and America argued that their country should become more like the other country. In a limited way the Japanese-American agreement on Structural Impediment Initiatives was designed to promote this convergence. The failure of this and similar efforts testifies to the extent to which economic differences are deeply rooted in the cultures of the two societies.

While the conflicts between the United States and Asia had their sources in cultural differences, the outcomes of their conflicts reflected the changing power relations between the United States and Asia. The United States scored some victories in these disputes, but the trend was in an Asian direction, and the shift in power further exacerbated the conflicts. The United States expected the Asian governments to accept it as the leader of “the international community” and to acquiesce in the application of Western principles and values to their societies. The Asians, on the other hand, as Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said, were “increasingly conscious and proud of their accomplishments,” expected to be treated as equals, and tended to regard the United States as “an international nanny, if not bully.” Deep imperatives within Ameri
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can culture, however, impel the United States to be at least a nanny if not a bully in international affairs, and as a result American expectations were increasingly at odds with Asian ones. Across a wide range of issues, Japanese and other Asian leaders learned to say no to their American counterparts, expressed at times in polite Asian versions of “buzz off.” The symbolic turning point in Asian-American relations was perhaps what one senior Japanese official termed the “first big train wreck” in U.S.-Japanese relations, which occurred in February 1994, when Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa firmly rejected President Clinton’s demand for numerical targets for Japanese imports of American manufactured goods. “We could not have imagined something like this happening even a year ago,” commented another Japanese official. A year later Japan’s foreign minister underlined this change stating that in an era of economic competition among nations and regions, Japan’s national interest was more important than its “mere identity” as a member of the West.
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