Containment or ~ David Shambaugh Engagement of China? Calculating Beijing’s Responses that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is becoming a defining element in post-Cold War international politics, but there is much debate about what this entails and how the world should deal with an ascendant China. China’s rise and behavior are particularly bedeviling to the United States, but Beijing also poses substantial challenges to Asian and European nations as well as interna- tional regimes. Whether China will become a military threat to its neighbors, an adversary of the United States, a systemic challenge to the global order, or an cultural-ideological challenge to the West remain open questions.’ But China’s sheer size and growing power are already altering the contours of Asian security, international commerce, and the global balance of power. A robust debate is under way in Western and Asian nations about how best to deal with the awakened dragon. The uncertainties about China’s future capabilities and intentions, and the debate about alternative policy options, have spawned a lucrative cottage industry among analysts and pundits in academia, corporations, banks, governments, and the media worldwide. Ana- lysts can reasonably estimate China’s economic and military power a decade or more hence based on its present and projected financial, technological and material resources. Far more difficult to predict is China’s internal political and social cohesion, and how Beijing will wield its new strength. Will China be a satisfied mature power or an insecure nounem riche power? Will it become a power at all? Will it flex its muscles or will they atrophy? Will China hold together or fall apart? Will its polity evolve liberally or revert to a dictatorial tyranny? Does Beijing seek regional hegemony or peaceful coexis- tence with its neighbors? Will the PRC play by the established rules of the international organizations and regimes, or does Beijing seek to undermine and change the rules and institutions? Do China’s leaders understand the rules and David Shambaugh is Professor of Political Science and lnternationul Affairs and Director of the Gaston Sigur Center for East Asian Studies at the George Washington University. He is Editor of The Journal of Northeast Asian Studies and former Editor of The China Quarterly. 1. See David Shambaugh, ”China’s Military: Real or Paper Tiger?” Washington Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 19-36. The best case for China as a cultural-ideological challenge is made by Samuel Huntington in “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 22-49. International Security, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall 1996), pp. 180-209 0 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 180 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.21.2.180 by guest on 03 October 2021 Containment or Engagement of China? 1 181 accept their premises? Can China meet its existing bilateral and multilateral obligations? These are some of the pressing questions that fuel the current debates about China and how to cope with it. This article explores these and related questions by addressing key domestic factors that will shape China’s external posture in the near term, and how domestic actors will respond to the international environment and alternative policies pursued by Asian and Western governments. Its central argument is that containment of China is a badly flawed policy option, but that a policy of ”engagement”-while preferable from a Western and Asian standpoint-will not be fully reciprocated by Beijing. For numerous reasons, China will be reluctant to respond positively to the policy of ”engagement,” yet this remains the best option available to the international community at present. Engagement, in and of itself, should not be the policy goal. Rather, it is a process and a vehicle to the ultimate goal of integrating China into the existing rule-based, institutionalized, and normative international system. Engagement is the means, integration the end. Much work needs to be done both to bring China into international multilateral regimes and to inculcate their norms in Chinese officials and citizens. The evidence presented in this article suggests that such inculcation and integration will be extremely difficult at best, and will most likely be resisted for many years to come. The next section places the current China debates in context, while the remainder of the article examines three domestic variables that will condition China’s external orientation in the near to medium term. It concludes by linking each set of variables to potential Chinese responses to policies of engagement or containment. Debating China Nearly half a century ago the debate and political witch-hunt over “Who lost China?” raged in the United States, precipitated by the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and conquest of Mao’s Communist forces. Americans soul-searched over the failure of their nation’s missionary effort to “save” and transform China.’ 2. Of the rich literature on America’s missionary attempt to remake China, see Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 (New York Bantam Books, 1970);James C. Thomson, Jr., While China Faced West: American Reformers in Nationalist China, 1928-1937 (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969); James C. Thomson, Jr., Peter W. Stanley, and John Curtis Perry, The American Experience in East Asia (New York Harper &I Row, 1981); and Michael H. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.21.2.180 by guest on 03 October 2021 International Security 21:2 I 182 Embedded in the debate was a brief ”recognition controversy” in 1949-50 over the merits of accepting and dealing with the new People’s Republic of China.3Such considerations were soon dashed with the outbreak of the Korean War and intervention of Chinese forces. This led to two decades of “contain- ment” of an expansionist ”Red China,” a policy with a profoundly flawed premise that cost the United States nearly 100,000 dead in two wars on the Asian mainland, incalculable losses of commercial and cultural interchange with China, and the polarization of America’s relations with Asia. In 1971, President Nixon jettisoned the containment policy in favor of an opening to China. Nixon’s reasoning was strategic and tactical, but he also recognized the folly of trying to contain the largest nation on earth. While not using the term, Nixon was the original architect of the policy of “engaging“ China-of trying to integrate the People’s Republic peacefully into the international order. Today, a quarter-century after the Nixon opening, another debate over China policy rages. The debate has again polarized into the competing schools of ”engagement” vs. ”containmenV-or what may reminiscently be described as ”open door” and ”closed door” policies? America’s longstanding propensity to see China in a series of extreme images is mirrored in today’s policy debate? Often missing in this debate, however, is consideration of China’s potential responses to these polarized policies and consideration of the domestic vari- ables inside China that will condition its external orientation. While the debate has tended to be dominated by foreign policy pundits, international relations specialists, and journalists, experts on China’s domestic affairs have generally not joined the fray6 Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). For a more contemporary exposition of the American ”missionary impulse” toward China, see Richard Mad- sen, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 3. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patferns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 2949-2950 (New York Columbia University Press, 1983). 4. The history of these debates is elaborated in David Shambaugh, ”Patterns of Interaction in Sino-American Relations,” in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh, eds., Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 197-223; and Nancy Bernk- opf Tucker, “China and America, 1941-1991,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 5 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 7592. 5. See Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on our Minds: American Images of China and India (New York John Day, 1958), and T. Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China, 2932-1949 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). For their part, Chinese similarly tend to perceive America in dichotomous images; see David Shambaugh, Beautiful Imperialist: China Perceives America, 2972- 2990 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 6. One laudable exception is Michael D. Swaine, China: Domestic Change and Foreign Policy (Santa Monica: RAND National Defense Research Institute, 1995). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.21.2.180 by guest on 03 October 2021 Containment or Engagement of China? I 283 The Western debate over the relative merits of engagement versus contain- ment seemingly treats Chna as a static entity that will simply have to adjust to whatever policy the other nations pursue. Another characteristic is the proclivity to treat China’s economic rise and growing power as an irreversible trend.7 That China will emerge as a superpower early in the twenty-first century has achieved the status of conventional wisdom, and is repeated regularly in global media and many specialist publications. Yet China’s mod- ernization could go off the rails, with potentially disastrous consequences. Even if growth continues unabated, it will breed severe social and political disloca- tions.8 Moreover, China has proven its capacity to reverse course and slip quickly into domestic strife due to unpredictable leaders and opportunistic citizens. A sober note of caution should thus be part of any prediction that China will be a global power in the next millennium.