THE CHINA CHALLENGE
Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power
Thomas J Christensen
WW Norton & Company
371 pages (illustrated); $27.95
"China has major incentives to avoid unnecessary conflict," Thomas J Christensen writes. But the United States has no experience "tackling the least appreciated challenge: persuading a uniquely large developing country with enormous domestic challenges and a historical chip on its national shoulder to cooperate actively with the international community."
Mr Christensen, a professor of politics at Princeton, served from 2006 to 2008 in the Bush administration as the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. While he didn't make policy, he was often present as a "backbencher" when China was being debated. (I would say he had a box seat.) And when he contends, with the clarity that distinguishes his narrative, that China "is by far the most influential developing country in world history," and emphasises that it "is being asked to do more at present than any developing country has in the past," I take him seriously.
He deals here with the crises and collisions that bedevil China-United States relations. He notes the big ideas that invariably add to the bedevilments. Many Chinese, whether sincerely or not, refer to imperialism and colonialism as factors that can never be forgotten, which the Communist Party overheats with waves of nationalism. The United States has numerous allies. Beijing has exactly one, North Korea, and some of Mr Christensen's high-ranking or well-informed interlocutors confide that this ally is a vexatious one. The grand problems also include climate change; nuclear proliferation, especially from Pyongyang and possibly Iran; the nature of Taiwan's sovereignty; applying sanctions or not to third countries (Beijing usually vetoes these in the United Nations); Myanmar; who has what rights in the South China Sea.
Mr Christensen seems to be unusually even-handed. On climate change he states that China and the United States together produce 40 per cent of the world's greenhouse gasses. China is the greater culprit now, but he suggests that the first world created this problem and that China has made some efforts to limit its polluting. As for North Korea, Mr Christensen believes that some of his Chinese contacts are alarmed by Pyongyang's unpredictability and internationally dangerous behaviour. But for Beijing to back away from Pyongyang, they told him, would be seen inside China as a betrayal of the hundreds of thousands of People's Liberation Army soldiers who died in Korea under Mao's orders. To abandon North Korea now, Mr Christensen says, could lead to a final judgment on Mao as a "terrible economic, political and national security leader of the PRC How could one justify keeping his portrait over Tiananmen?"
In his attempts to be fair, Mr Christensen rarely loses his balance. He notes without equivocation China's enormous corruption; disdain for many international and regional legal norms; internet hacking; academic plagiarism; the dire effects of the one-child policy; and the thousands of local and regional uprisings by its increasingly poor peasants. He just touches on the vilification of the Dalai Lama and the imprisonment of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
Mr Christensen is aware that China largely escaped the international financial crisis and that in some respects its economic size and successes have been daunting, at least until recently. Yet, in 2013, he adds, its per capita GDP was the equal of Ecuador's, and "nobody is expecting Ecuadoreans to contribute greatly to global governance." Furthermore, Mr Christensen bluntly contends, Beijing, which uses its military against dissenting civilians, and which briefly experienced international sanctions following the Tiananmen demonstrations, is "predictably less comfortable than the capitals of the advanced liberal democracies with condemning, sanctioning and intervening in authoritarian regimes in the developing world."
Unlike some of his political science colleagues, he does not foresee a war with China (though he does not rule one out). Still, he points out that for the foreseeable future China's military is no match for America's. He slaps down those Beijing-watchers who see China as being on the verge of ruling the world.
So what to do? Beijing should pay attention. It is lucky to have in Thomas Mr Christensen someone who can be severely critical about what's going on inside China, but who wants to deal. He observes that "successful diplomacy is generally more about managing problems, not solving them outright." Where does China fit into that? The United States must find a strategy that "accepts and even encourages China's rise to greater power and prominence in international politics but shapes China's choices so that it is more likely to forgo bullying behaviour. "Success requires an unusual mix of strength and toughness on the one hand and a willingness to reassure and listen to the Chinese on the other."
As one who has met Chinese dissidents who were later imprisoned, seen many times how China behaves in Tibet and watched its army mow down peaceful demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, I find much of this hard to swallow. But because of Mr Christensen's powerful and reasonable book, seeing China as it sees itself is not an entirely indigestible idea.
© The New York Times News Service
