U.S. News: Editorial, June 9, 1997 issue

BY MORTIMER B. ZUCKERMAN / EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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Is a China on the rise a country of promise or peril? A more powerful China will not be easy to deal with. It still carries the baggage of historical grievances and suspicion of foreign motives that is a legacy of a colonial era marked by humiliation. For China's leaders, "freedom" has historically meant its independence as a nation, not individual rights.

Do America's interests lie in trying to restrain China's rise, by cutting back on trade relations, warning about its military power, and confronting China in other ways? Or do we serve ourselves and the world best by strengthening our engagement with China, in the belief that its intentions are still flexible and that to treat China as an enemy will surely make it one?

In making this choice, we should realize that China, despite its potential and size, is too weak militarily to disrupt the Asian balance of power and will remain weak well into the 21st century. Yes, in 20 years it will be stronger. But the important issue is not absolute but relative military strength. As China's power grows, so will that of its neighbors, whose forces already substantially outnumber China's military in both quantity and quality.

Clear improvement. Perspective is crucial in all our assessments of China.

Although its economy is growing rapidly, it starts from an extremely low base: A 10 percent growth in China's GDP is roughly equal to a 1 percent growth in ours. Although human-rights abuses persist, the situation is vastly improved from the terror of the Cultural Revolution period. The difference is we know more about today's problems because of China's greater openness. Yes, China continues to suppress political dissent. But it has allowed dramatically more personal freedoms, more open debate, even the right to sue the government. People are largely free to find their own jobs, choose their careers, share opinions with their neighbors, move around the country, and do almost anything other than directly challenge the government. All evidence suggests that the average Chinese person sees life as becoming better and freer; surely the Chinese people's views should count for something.

In foreign policy, China's record is not that of a fundamentally hostile power. It wants to join international organizations, not oppose them. It has worked to prevent warfare in Korea and Cambodia. It has achieved peaceful agreements with Russia, India, Burma, Vietnam, and Thailand in the last year. Its historic concern is with security and territorial integrity, not expansion. America has placed too much stress on the areas of disagreement with China: human rights, orphanages, Tibet, Taiwan, missile sales. We have let ourselves be cast, in China's eyes, as the impediment to China's rise to its proper role. We opposed China's bid for the Olympic Games, as well as its entry into the World Trade Organization; we overlooked the threat to the one-China policy in permitting Taiwan's president to visit Cornell University, after giving clear signals that he would not get a visa; we seem always on the verge of applying sanctions.

A continued or escalated confrontation would not only accelerate China's military expenditures and increase the likelihood of military conflict. It would also strengthen China's hard-liners and weaken those who seek an opening to the West. It would retard the natural process by which economic growth would lead to preferences for law and due process, eventually building the institutions of democracy.

If China's historic caution changes if it seeks military hegemony or tries to expel the United States from Asia then surely we must resist. But we must know the difference between influence and hegemony. We must be careful not to bring about what we claim to fear.

We have a stake in human rights for China, as we do in every country of the world. But American policy has been most successful when we have brought that interest into balance with other objectives as we do in dealing with Mexico, or with Russia, which inflicted incomparably greater casualties in Chechnya than China did at Tiananmen. Surely we can distinguish a rising power from one that seeks dominance and fashion our policies accordingly.