Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Avery Goldstein is Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is the author, most recently, of Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century (Stanford University Press, 2000)

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Rising to the Challenge

Stanford University Press

Contents

1 Introduction................................................12 China's Changing Strategic Landscape........................143 Growing Capabilities, Growing Problems......................494 China's Growing Power: Why the Worry?.......................815 Stimuli for a New Strategy..................................1026 China Adjusts...............................................1187 China and the Major Powers..................................1368 Will the Current Grand Strategy Endure?.....................1779 The Rising Challenge........................................204Works Cited...................................................221Index.........................................................263

Chapter One

At the start of the twenty-first century, China and the United States teetered on the brink of a new Cold War. In early 2001 such an outcome seemed nearly inevitable as the two countries found themselves locked in a bitter dispute about the collision of an American reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet that left the Chinese pilot dead and the U.S. crew in Chinese custody. Within weeks, however, the incident that had touched raw nerves on both sides was defused, and within months Sino-American relations showed clear signs of recovery. U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick visited China and signaled continued American support for China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Secretary of State Colin Powell soon followed to lay the groundwork for a state visit by President Bush that was scheduled for October 2001, coinciding with his participation in the APEC meetings to be held in Shanghai. Although the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, led President Bush to modify his plans so that he met China's leaders only briefly during a short stay at the APEC session, the initiation of the war on terrorism also accelerated the trend toward improving Sino-American relations that had been evident since the early summer.

Yet even as the rhetoric of cooperation replaced that of conflict, both sides in this bilateral relationship clearly remained wary. Unlike the dramatic transformation in an initially cool Russo-American relationship that was begun by meetings between U.S. president Bush and Russia's president Putin during 2001, the tangible changes in Sino-American relations during 2001 were modest, tentative, and provisional. Potentially dangerous disagreements remained unresolved, and mutual suspicion about future capabilities and intentions endured. In short, the prospect of a renewed chill in relations hovered not very far in the background. Though it no longer seemed inevitable, a Sino-American Cold War remained possible.

Perhaps the tenuous nature of this bilateral relationship now seems unsurprising, yet when the current era of international politics began to emerge at the end of the 1980s, few anticipated such fragility in Sino-American relations. On the contrary, optimism about an emerging "new world order" that prevailed as the Cold War was ending, and nearly two decades of basically friendly ties between Beijing and Washington, instead seemed to bode well for the immediate future. In a sense, however, the strains that quickly emerged during the 1990s are easy to understand. They reflected changes in the international situation that accompanied the end of a Soviet-American rivalry that had dominated world affairs for four decades. The bedrock of Sino-American cooperation since 1972, after all, had been a shared interest in opposing a hostile and threatening U.S.S.R. As diplomacy eased the Soviet threat to both China and the United States during the 1980s, and especially as the U.S.S.R. itself collapsed in the early 1990s, the solid military-strategic foundation of self-interest that had encouraged Sino-American entente crumbled. When it did, areas of disagreement once obscured resurfaced. Without a common strategic purpose binding Beijing and Washington, the remaining incentives for cooperation were mainly mutual economic interests and shared perspectives on a few, less pressing, regional and international security concerns (most notably maintaining peace in Korea, fighting transnational crime, and preventing nuclear proliferation). Though these shared interests were far from trivial, after 1989 they were not sufficiently compelling in themselves to offset old differences that had been kept at a relatively low simmer during the final two decades of the Cold War while both parties focused on the need to deal with the more parlous threat from Moscow. Nor were remaining common interests sufficiently compelling to offset new differences that emerged at the end of the Cold War, differences that reflected both China's growing capabilities and the transformed international system. The combination of resurfacing old and newly emerging areas of disagreement provided the backdrop for a change in the character of the Sino-American relationship that began in the last decade of the twentieth century. The change in the Sino-American relationship also provided the most important impetus for China to embrace the grand strategy on which it settled after the mid-1990s and that is the focus of this book's subsequent chapters.

Old Sino-American Differences Reemerge

Political

In classic realpolitik fashion, during the 1970s and 1980s both Washington and Beijing had been willing to set aside deep-seated political-ideological differences as they faced a common enemy. Washington believed that the strategic benefits of cooperation with China justified overlooking the distastefulness of its authoritarian communist partner. Similarly, the Chinese regime (radically socialist during the era of Mao Zedong, economically pragmatic but politically still committed to Leninism under Deng Xiaoping) believed that the need for a military counter to Soviet capabilities it could not parry justified cooperation with the ideologically unappealing champion of capitalist democracy (intermittently lambasted as a hegemonic superpower).

After 1989, however, ideological preferences on both sides were no longer overshadowed by pressing concerns about a common enemy. As differences resurfaced, they weakened the bonds of Sino-American entente. Widespread antigovernment protests in China during April and May 1989, as well as the unfolding collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet empire, induced new fears among the leaders in Beijing. They no longer saw the United States primarily as a valuable military counterweight to a powerful and threatening superpower neighbor. Instead, in a throwback to rhetoric of the 1950s, they once again saw America as the leading advocate for a strategy of "peaceful evolution" (heping yanbian) designed to end communist rule in China as it was being ended elsewhere.

At the same time, Washington's late Cold War view of China as a helpful and hard-working strategic partner against the Soviet menace was decisively transformed when the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party decided to respond to the popular demonstrations in 1989 by declaring martial law in May and then resorting to the use of lethal force on the evening of June 3-4. Overnight, a broadly positive American perception of China-regularly bolstered by the public relations...