In recent weeks a tsunami of papers, reports and articles have surfaced calling for a rethinking of U.S. policy toward China. They veer in all policy directions from reconciling differences and forming an Asia-Pacific community, to containment and confrontation. But they all reflect a troubling epiphany that has seized attention from policy-watchers: core assumptions that have guided a bipartisan China policy for eight presidencies, from Nixon to Obama are unraveling. One prominent China scholar has even boldly pronounced that we are witnessing is “the beginning of the end of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Though the Nixon opening was a strategic counter to the USSR, as China reformed and modernized its economy post-1979, U.S. policy has assumed that as a Chinese middle class grew, political reform, if not democratization would follow. This has been the case across Asia over the past three decades—in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, Thailand and Indonesia. It may eventually occur—China is, by several orders of magnitude larger than other Asian democratized states with a 3,000-year-old culture—but in its own way and on its own timeline. For now, the Communist Party has tightened political control.
A related assumption has been that as China integrated itself into the globalized economic and political system, Beijing, which has been a principal beneficiary of the U.S.-led system, would see its interests best served by being a “responsible stakeholder” in that system, one that would not be static, but adapt to new economic realities. When then Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, a realist, raised this idea in 2005, it was a reasonable notion — China’s economy was five times smaller than it is now ($10.3 trillion in 2014.)
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