It Is Time for America to Consider

Accommodation With China

Is a historic shift in U.S. policy toward the People's
Republic necessary?

BY HUGH WHITE, MARY KAY MAGISTAD, ZHA DAOJIONG- JUNE 8, 2015

The past several months have seen a growing chorus of calls for
the United States to take stock of its policy toward China. Some prominent voices
have called for greater efforts by the two countries to forge a substantive sense of
common purpose, while others reject the notion that they can ever coexist without
conflict and believe that the United States needs to contain China. Still others argue
that the basic assumptions of current U.S. diplomacy toward China should not change
despite escalating friction. This renewed attention to what has long been deemed the
worlds most important bilateral relationship takes place against the backdrop ofrising
tension between the countries in the South China Sea, and newly hostile rhetoric from
China about the dangers of the West. In this ChinaFileconversation, experts discuss
the options U.S. officials now face.
Hugh White, professor of strategic studies in the Strategic and Defence Studies
Center at the Australian National University:

Until now the assumption underlying U.S. policy toward China has been that nothing
fundamental need ever change. Since 1972, the basic pattern of the U.S.-China
relationship and the foundation of the wider Asian strategic order has been
Chinas acceptance of American strategic and political primacy in the Western Pacific.
Most U.S. policymakers and analysts have believed that this could and would continue
indefinitely because China didnt have the power, the will, or the motive to contest U.S.
primacy.
For a long time China encouraged this assumption thats what the policyof hid[ing]
our capacities and bid[ing] our time was all about. But China has abandoned that and
now overtly challenges the post-1972 order. It wants a new model of great power
relations and believes it now has the power to get it.
So how should the United States respond? It has only three basic options: to contest
Chinas challenge and try to preserve its primacy in Asia, to accommodate China to
some degree, or to withdraw from any substantial strategic role in Asia. Americas
instinct, of course, is to take the first course. This is what the Pivot to Asia aimed to do
in a halfhearted way, hoping that a merely symbolic show of resolve would suffice to
make China back off.
Alas, everything China has done since then has proved the opposite. If America wants
to perpetuate the old order, it will have to accept a very serious contest with China,
and this is what some people now advocate. But while America remains very strong,
China is more formidable in many ways than any previous adversary, and its strength
will most likely grow faster than Americas over coming decades. The costs and risks
of escalating rivalry could be very high, and Americans cannot assume that China is
any less determined to change the regional order than America is to preserve it.It is
time to ask whether preserving primacy in Asia is worth the price.
That means it is time for the United States to consider an accommodation with China,
as several influential voices are now urging. This would not be easy. The United
States would need to treat China as an equal for any deal to stand a chance, and
Americans have never treated any country as an equal before. But the United
States has never dealt with a country as powerful as China before, either. And the
United States would still need to back any deal with its power. Ultimately, China could
only be held to an agreement over a new regional order that America is willing to go to
war with it to enforce.
Otherwise, the United States will find itself facing the third alternative withdrawal
from Asia. No one should imagine that this is not a real possibility in future, just
because it has been wrongly predicted in the past. If America is going to stay engaged
in Asia, it must treat China as an equal or confront it as a rival.
Mary Kay Magistad, award-winning American journalist and former East Asia
correspondent for Public Radio International/BBCs The World:
Chinas leaders have closely studied the rise of great powers. CCTV aired a series on
the subject in 2006, focusing on the United States, Russia/the Soviet Union, France,

Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. Each of these was a colonial
power. (The United States colonized the Philippines, among other territories.) Each
used its might to expand its sphere of influence without waiting for permission or
international approval.
Some succeeded better and longer than others. Japans Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere, which promised to free fellow East Asian nations from Western
domination, certainly didnt go as planned.
And Chinas gamble in the South China Sea may not either. It doesnt bode well for
China that neighbors who happily had been sharing the fruits of Chinas selfproclaimed peaceful rise a decade ago, such as the Philippines, now are comparing
China and its aggression in the South China Sea to Hitlers Germany.
Of course, laying claim to a largely unpopulated expanse of water is materially
different from the human cost that came with Germanys and Japans occupation of
entire nations in the 1930s. But Chinas increasingly aggressive defense of its claims
in the South China Sea, including building artificial islands that could be used as
military bases, has alarmed and angered neighbors with conflicting territorial claims,
and made others in the region wonder what costs theyll eventually be made to bear in
service of Chinese President Xi Jinpings vision of the China Dream.
Xis calculation over the past couple of years seems to have been that China is now
powerful enough, its economy big enough, its neighbors dependent enough, and U.S.
military resolve uncertain enough that this is the time to act. Chinas leaders may also
fear that they have a finite window of time in which to act, given the slowing economy,
aging population, and other significant challenges at home.
And so, China has pushed its claims in multiple territorial disputes, for reasons both
practical and symbolic. In the South China Sea, its not just about control of
strategically important sea lanes, and access to oil and natural gas reserves and fish.
Its also about challenging a global order that has proved too constraining for Chinas
aspirations.Chinas leaders aim to change the rules of the game perhaps even the
game itself.
Chinese leaders like to talk about win-win opportunities, but when it comes to
challenging the United States in what they see as Chinas backyard, its closer to a
zero-sum game. Each time China has pushed in the South China Sea, and the United
States hasnt pushed back, Beijing has scored it as a point in Chinas favor and a loss
of U.S. face and credibility.
Now that the United States is pushing back, Chinese pragmatism may yet prevail. The
China-U.S. relationship is, after all, about much more than the South China Sea. The
two countries are economically interdependent and share common interests best
served by working together. Beyond that, its one thing to play brinkmanship, its
another to go to battle against a superior military power.
Perhaps, as Susan Shirk discussed with her Chinese colleagues at the Shangri-La
Dialogue, China could agree not to put missiles and other weapons on its new man-

made islands and to ease off on challenging foreign vessels that pass nearby. Or
perhaps, as Andrew Erickson predicts, China will continue to deploy its Coast Guard
and maritime militia to enforce its claims in the South China Sea, banking on the
reluctance of U.S. forces to attack non-military personnel.
However they maneuver at sea, Chinas leaders have a challenge of their own making
to navigate at home: controlling a constituency of vocal young nationalists they helped
create through a couple of decades of Patriotic Education indoctrination. Some of
these young nationalists see Chinas push in the South China Sea as part of China
reclaiming its rightful place, its historic place, as the regions preeminent power,
preferably on its way to global domination. They would be disappointed, even angered,
if their government pulled its punches now. As the Chinese saying goes, when you ride
a tiger, its hard to get off.
Zha Daojiong, senior Arthur Ross fellow at the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the
Asia Society:
Relations between China and the United States are not going well. Across the Pacific,
there is little disagreement about that. To take it a step further: What exactly could
be better? Which side should take the step that is sufficient to prevent a seemingly
downward spiral? Agreement is hard to come by.
In my view, a good many Chinese observers, including some officials and diplomats,
risk failing to fathom the depth of disquiet among American elites about the direction
that China as a civilization is going. Many Americans are asking: If Chinas pursuit of
further economic growth and a higher international profile is premised upon rejecting
Western values, does America conducting business as usual with China amount to
aiding an enemy?
I have been asked by a good number of American colleagues those who do not
often publish opinion pieces in mainstream newspapers about Document No. 9, an
internal Communist Party document that takes aim at Western values and Chinas no
Western values in class academic policies. Such questioning caught me by surprise.
The fact of the matter is that, as a full-time professor employed by a public university, I
have never been shown a copy of that allegedly comprehensive rejection of Western
values, nor have I been given specific instructions about my teaching and my
interaction with students. More and more Mandarin-speaking international students
(Americans among them) take political science or international studies courses
together with Chinese students. As a group, they are the proper source of information
about the much-feared ideological/cultural campaign.
A sorrowful situation has emerged. Across America, the belief about an ideologically
anti-Western China is spreading. Yet from China, general answers to the question
What does China want? are either evasive or given in a way that often is
incomprehensible to American audiences.
For their part, Americans seem obsessed with naming and shaming China. I observe
that more and more Chinese elites are beginning to ask, why is it that Americans

endlessly accuse Chinese of wrongdoing? On issues ranging from intellectual property

protection to anti-monopoly law enforcement, if Chinese society is as full of theft and
purposeful discrimination against American investors, what explains the vast number
of multinational corporations still operating in China, especially when a sustained rise
in factory workers wages has eroded the Chinese markets attractiveness relative to
many of its competitors?
The time has come for the Chinese people and Americans to debate seriously the
potential consequences of failing to address unspoken yet powerful questions about
each other. At the end of the day, critical even brutal self-examination will carry
each society forward. The current state of affairs must be treated as a wake-up call for
self-reflection in both.
Photo credit: Getty Images
Posted by Thavam