Security issues, emerging in the mids, now appear to be the most important factor affecting bilateral relations. Due primarily to differences in their worldviews, historical experiences and capabilities, China and the U. Chinese and U. While both sides will continue to pursue their own security interests in Asia, each country also has to adapt itself to the changing political, economic and security landscape in this region. To enable durable, peaceful coexistence, both sides will have to make certain shifts in their current security policies.
To address these questions more directly, this paper first considers some of the U. Then, the study explores how China perceives the U. Finally, the paper concludes with a few policy recommendations as to how China and the United States could manage the bilateral relationship more effectively.
Morrison One popular perception in the U. This observation is wrong. First, Beijing believes in the trend of multipolarization rather than unipolarization at both global and regional levels, and predicts that with continued economic development and growing intra-regional political consultation in Asia, influence on regional affairs will be more diversified and more evenly distributed. Secondly, even though China expects some relative increase in its influence in Asia, it understands that because of the limits of its hard power and especially its soft power, China can never achieve a position comparable to its role in the ancient past or to the U.
Another misperception is that in the long run China will endeavor to drive the U. Again this is not a correct assumption. In fact, Beijing has always welcomed a constructive U. At the same time however, Beijing also feels uneasy with certain aspects of U. As a superpower, the United States has been too dominant and intrusive in managing regional affairs.
It fails to pay due respect to the voices of other regional players, and sometimes gets too involved in the internal affairs of other states, lacking an understanding of their culture, history and values. While there is no danger of the U. This is in essence hegemonic stability.
Beijing believes, however, that regional security rests on the cooperation of regional members and a blend of various useful approaches unilateral, bilateral and multilateral, institutional and non-institutional, track I and track II, etc. The United States currently possesses the most powerful military in the world. However, it continues to pump resources into its defense industry to develop even more sophisticated offensive weaponry, thus retaining its paramount superiority in both conventional and strategic arsenals.
At the same time, Washington has been pursuing both national missile defense NMD and theater missile defense TMD systems, aimed at protecting itself from other countries. The Chinese believe that security is always mutual, and when one side tries to enhance its security, it has to take into account the impact on the security of others.
While any country has the legitimate right to develop its defensive and offensive capability as it likes, a responsible power should avoid seeking unilateral security and instead should promote mutual or common security.
In terms of capability, the United States is now the most secure country in the world. Any other country that initiates an attack on the U. Gauged by a notional security coefficient, the U. Yet, Washington seems intent on seeking absolute, or one-hundred percent, security by continuing to invest in both defensive and offensive weapons.
Nevertheless, if the United States were absolutely secure, other countries would then be absolutely insecure, totally subject to threats or coercion of the U. To avoid such a situation, they will certainly react by developing their own capabilities, which would result in an arms buildup cycle, wasted resources and eventually, increased tensions.
The Chinese, on the other hand, believe in relative security rather than absolute security. They would be content with simply preserving a reliable deterrence capability, both conventional and strategic. As Chinese security experts contend, there is simply no such thing as absolute security, and any effort geared in that direction is both irresponsible and futile.
In the post-Cold War era, with the decline of the likelihood of a war between major powers and the rise of nontraditional security challenges, military means have become less relevant in the national security equation. Nonetheless, the United States remains heavily dependent upon military approaches, preserving its superior military power, strengthening its security alliances and maintaining its forward deployments.
Surprisingly, the United States uses force even more frequently than it did in the Cold War era. In contrast to the force-prone military security approach on the part of the United States, China has been advocating the concept of comprehensive security since the demise of the Cold War.
China believes that overemphasizing military approaches not only does not help resolve disputes, but also runs counter to the prevailing trend of peace and development in the post-Cold War era. During the Cold War era, the United States forged security alliances with many countries to pursue strategic competition with the Soviet Union and to contain the Communist countries. American policy makers constantly argue that security alliances remain the basis for U.
From a Chinese perspective, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there should be no reason to preserve, and certainly not expand and strengthen, military blocs. Military blocs, while enhancing the security of some countries, undermine the security of other states, and cause suspicion, division and even aggravate confrontation. Therefore, China advocates the replacement of military blocs with normal state-to-state relations, with a stress on improving and enhancing political and economic relations, rather than security ties.
The differences in security concepts between China and the United States issue from a wide range of factors. One is the difference in their respective worldviews. Washington enjoys a unipolar world with the U. Hegemonic stability is nothing but a corollary of this logic. Beijing, on the other hand, insists on the trend of multipolarization and rejects the idea of security under U.
The second factor is the difference in available resources. The United States, as the only superpower in the post-Cold War world, feels less subject to external constraints on its use of force. With more resources than any other country in the world, the U. China, as a developing country, would like to devote its limited resources to its economic development, and would prefer an international environment in which disputes between nations are managed by peaceful means.
A third factor relates to different historical experiences. The United States benefited from its alliance arrangements during the Cold War era and wishes to preserve these assets in the post-Cold War world. China, on the other hand, does not have good memories about its alliance with the Soviet Union; besides, U. The final factor is the difference in their respective security philosophies. The Americans are basically technology determinists and believe in the prowess of technology.
In their opinion, with technological progress, everything is possible. The Chinese are more dialectical in their thinking. They believe nothing is absolute; if one side develops capable defensive or offensive weapons systems, then the other side will respond by developing their own means to nullify those weapons systems.
The positive side includes the following:. The United States has been playing a key role in maintaining a generally stable security environment in East Asia since the end of the Vietnam War, and China has been both a significant contributor to and a major beneficiary of peace and stability in the region. United States policy towards Japan, despite its shortcomings, has so far helped to ensure that Japan remains a pacifist country, which serves the interests of both Japan and the entire region.
In and , the Obama administration promoted a rebalance to Asia, promising to redirect U. Through the BRI and its resulting web of infrastructure, China hoped to more closely link its economy and markets with those of its neighbors, making it increasingly difficult for them to side with the United States.
In , Xi presided over a BRI Forum designed to boost the initiative, a forum that brought together representatives and leaders from fifty-seven countries. International reactions to the hoopla in China have tended to reinforce the sizable expectations of the BRI that so far have outpaced its practical achievements. This outcome evoked an earlier theory that China is building around the Indian Ocean a string of pearls, or military bases for its expanding navy to exercise greater influence.
Many Chinese suspect that Washington resents that a newcomer is outspending it in a region long dominated by U. In fairness, the risk of unmanageable debt is not trivial. IMF Director Christine Lagarde has spoken publicly on this topic to China and its partners while urging them to pay attention to transparency, fiscal soundness, dispute-resolution mechanisms, and environmental impact. This approach to the BRI appears to have lessons to teach U. By focusing on the potential negative effects of the initiative, Washington draws attention to itself in unflattering ways; it looks petulant, jealous, and unable to compete any longer.
The United States would do better to take a more constructive approach. By virtue of its existing network of alliances and friendships, the United States enjoys a huge advantage over China in the Asia Pacific.
Habits of cooperation in the region have long been institutionalized, even if they are occasionally affected by day-to-day events. The United States enjoys a large endowment of relevant military equipment and experience in the region as well. The accumulated stockpile of ships, aircraft, bases, and relevant experience is considerable, though naturally some of these assets are in need of updating.
Japan is the most consequential U. It sits astride vital maritime straits. In some respects, these features can also be viewed as vulnerabilities: Japanese cities could be crippled by targeted enemy attacks on critical infrastructure. Likewise, some of these bases could be rendered ineffective by conventional missile attacks, and surface ships could be sunk. Tokyo has been making modest efforts to redeploy forces and weapon systems from the north, where Japan long faced the Soviet Union, to the southern end of the archipelago, where China is increasingly active.
In addition, Japan is developing small, flat-topped naval vessels that can accommodate F short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft, vessels that could potentially be used as improvised aircraft carriers, increasing the number of threats and targets potential adversaries would have to anticipate. In an era of modern missile technology, the resiliency to absorb attacks is a major consideration. Additionally, increasing the size of the U.
Meanwhile, Japan is offering to provide assistance to Russian healthcare and social welfare projects, according to interviews with senior Japanese officials. Such an outcome would remove most of the trade frictions that in the past have bedeviled U. This, in turn, would further strengthen the political climate surrounding the alliance. Looking ahead, the sense of rivalry and historical animosity that suffuses Sino-Japanese relations will not dissipate anytime soon.
The relationship will remain volatile. This dynamic has helped Tokyo refrain from exploiting its latent capacity to become a nuclear-weapon state in exchange for the protection of the U. Washington has repeatedly sought to inject an increasingly regional dimension into the alliance, but Seoul remains resistant. South Korea remains focused on the nearby threat and is reluctant to be drawn into arrangements that might lead to conflict with China by, for example, helping the United States defend Taiwan.
Furthermore, having been colonized by Japan in the first half of the twentieth century, South Korea remains extremely ambivalent and sensitive about partnering with Tokyo, even though both countries are U. This fraught relationship has posed challenges for U. From the U. The terms of this equation are constantly changing. Meanwhile, the United States is currently at the outset of a third major round of negotiations to try to compel and cajole North Korea into denuclearizing, after previous two attempts ultimately failed.
This objective requires and has received considerable support from South Korea at considerable cost to Seoul. This helped draw North Korean leader Kim Jong Un out of isolation and created a pretext for him to seek a thaw in relations with China and the United States.
China is back in the game on the peninsula at little cost to itself and mostly due to the efforts of others. At the same time, the United States has engaged in presidential summitry with North Korea and so far has found itself no closer to its goal of denuclearization. As a middle power in the shadow of a rising great power China and a still major power Japan , South Korea has an interest in sustaining an independent relationship with the outside great power the United States as a counterbalance.
Careful judgments need to be made in terms of balancing U. Moreover, U. The Philippines is another important U. S forces at a relatively low cost to Washington. Not seriously threatened by its neighbors, the country had modest defense expenses, much of which were devoted to domestic security against challenges including a relatively small communist insurgency in the north and disaffected Islamic separatists in the south as well as to domestic garrison duty.
After then president Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law in , his authoritarian rule eventually embroiled the alliance in Philippine domestic politics, as he justified his control to the United States as necessary to hold back communist infiltration. When scandals and ill health enabled a populist movement to dethrone him in , his democratically elected successor, Corazon Aquino, the widow of a murdered Marcos opponent, negotiated a new basing agreement, but she was unable to attain approval from the skeptical Philippine Senate.
The United States withdrew its forces by , while retaining the mutual defense treaty in form only. Soon thereafter, the Philippines discovered that it faced a new threat from China, which unilaterally constructed rudimentary structures on Mischief Reef in the South China Sea in Beijing had seized the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam in under similar circumstances as the United States withdrew from the country, and China also took control of some features in the Spratly Islands in as the Soviet Union withdrew from Vietnam.
Successive Philippine presidents have been unable to persuade Beijing to withdraw from Mischief Reef. In time, China began to occupy other uninhabited reefs and low-tide elevations that were internationally adjudicated to be in Philippine waters.
China has permitted fishing by Filipinos in areas it previously blocked, and it has ceased interfering with the resupply of a tiny Philippine Marine contingent perched precariously on Second Thomas Shoal. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies have sought to provide some assistance to the Philippines, but they have struggled to offset the tremendous amount of resources that Beijing has promised to furnish.
Japan has committed substantial financing to infrastructure development and other forms of support for Manila.
More U. Given its role as one of five U. Under its present leadership, Manila will not become a fulcrum for U. There is obviously an agenda for the United States to fulfill in terms of sustaining and improving its image among Filipinos. Such outreach will require resources. Working with the term-limited Duterte will be a continuing challenge, and Washington should try to cultivate his potential successors, emphasizing common values, norms, and interests that distinguish the United States from China.
Japan and like-minded partners from the Association of Southeast Asian States ASEAN should be enlisted in this effort given their interest in maintaining a balance of power in the region. A flood of ink has been spilled by government agencies and think tanks since China began using ocean-bottom dredging to convert previously unoccupied features into artificial islands, but effective countermeasures have been elusive.
The United States repeatedly has asserted its right to sail, fly, and operate wherever international law allows, and it will need to continue doing so, as it does in other contested waterways around the world. At one point before he left office, Obama reportedly warned Xi not to attempt landfill or land reclamation at Scarborough Shoal, over which China gained effective control from the Philippines after the United States unsuccessfully sought to mediate the dispute.
Many observers in the region believe that the United States and claimants besides China have essentially lost the contest for the South China Sea.
They assume Beijing will increasingly exercise control as it builds up its military and reconnaissance capabilities there, eventually leading to the declaration of an ADIZ. Clearly, China has a stronger sense in terms of history and security that it needs to control the South China Sea than most other claimants have exhibited or than what U.
Americans are unlikely to want to go to war with China over these remote and valueless features. For example, it would require only modest assistance to upgrade existing facilities on Palawan Island, an uncontested nearby Philippine territory.
Beijing has slowrolled and diluted efforts to conclude a code of conduct for the area. By encouraging a diplomatic process, preferably led by a disinterested nation with experience with similar disputes, the United States could nudge a potentially dangerous flashpoint toward long-term crisis management and perhaps a stronger code of conduct.
Beyond the obvious geostrategic motivations behind the disputes in the South China Sea, differing views on fishing rights and potential energy deposits have fueled tensions too. Norway and Russia have extensive experience in successfully reinvigorating fisheries disputed between small and large powers.
Australia and some Pacific island states have substantial practical experience in managing migratory species in the South Pacific. By involving other relevant countries, the United States can avoid making the countries in the region choose between it and China and instead engender a more cooperative approach that Beijing should not want to avoid. The Trump administration got off to an unheralded positive start in Southeast Asia in in a few instances by acting differently than the Obama administration.
After an unpublished interagency review, the administration broadly concluded that the United States—by adopting strong postures critical of the governments of Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand—was pushing these countries increasingly into the arms of China. The review also acknowledged the benefits of strengthening ties with Singapore.
The practical upshot of the review was that Trump phoned the leaders of each of these governments and proposed meetings to thaw the ice that had built up between them and the United States.
For example, after the military coup in Thailand triggered U. It should certainly be possible to express disapproval of military coups and support for democratic civilian rule without undermining U. Malaysia presents another diplomatic challenge. But his electoral defeat last year and the return to power of Mahathir Mohamad has led to the cancellation of those China-linked projects as well as to some diplomatic distance between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.
For all his flaws, Najib, a former defense minister, opened some doors to the United States early in his term, such as access to Malaysian military airfields. Meanwhile, Mahathir has a record of prickliness about U. Washington will need to gauge the balance Malaysia wishes to strike between the United States and China, so as to promote U. Similar calculations need to factor more into U.
Each country has its own considerations. Vietnam is quintessentially caught between its millennia-old tradition of independence from China and its equally venerable history of managing disputes with Beijing so as to avoid disastrous conflict. The Vietnamese probably can teach U. With this in mind, Washington will want to avoid excessive expectations of its growing military relations with Hanoi. By the same token, Laos and Cambodia are traditionally more preoccupied with interference on the part of their large neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam, and thus look primarily to China as a counterweight to these countries.
History does not suggest that the United States will pay much attention to these two countries except when it views them as a threat, as it did during the long Indochina Wars.
Myanmar or Burma fits uneasily into this category, but it shares the awkward status of needing China and resisting its interference, a dynamic that creates limited diplomatic opportunities for the United States and its partners, such as Japan. The United States is not very active in this competition, but it should be. ASEAN remains a valuable regional convener on a host of security-related issues, giving nations sympathetic to the United States, like Singapore and Indonesia, opportunities to counterbalance those where Chinese influence has grown recently.
Again, realism must guide U. There will be issues, such as the territorial delimitation of the South China Sea, on which China will not permit countries that are under its economic and political sway, like Cambodia and Laos, to forge a consensus with those skeptical about Chinese power plays. But meetings where an ASEAN consensus does not appear possible can still be used to highlight objectionable activities and press back on Chinese overstepping.
Taiwan exhibits an especially challenging combination of strengths and weaknesses for U. This is in large part because of U. Taiwan remains the most dangerous potential flashpoint in U. Amid the regional power shift between the United States and China, observers have tried to explore alternatives to conflict or surrender, so far unsuccessfully. Chinese self-confidence and even arrogance deride the staunch resistance of 23 million Taiwanese to the carrots and the growing number of sticks China is deploying.
Beijing is pressing to isolate Taiwan diplomatically and to overawe it militarily and economically. These concessions were counterbalanced by U. The United States has for years walked a fine line between providing Taiwan with enough defense articles and services to protect itself and deter possible attacks and undertaking defense cooperation so overt and formal as to prompt China to abandon restraint and act to reunify the island with the mainland.
That fine line is not always clear, nor is it immutable, and it is subject to debate today. Normally, Congress is the most full-throated advocate in the U. Recently, it passed bills urging an increase in the level of interactions between U. In addition, Congress urged the administration to consider naval and air force port calls to the island, which previously have been avoided.
First, they should remind themselves that Taiwan is a very defensible island. Second, in the presumed absence of a political settlement with China, Taiwan is going to have to increase spending and do more to prepare to defend itself. Taipei cannot simply rely on Washington to rush to its rescue. In a hypothetical conflict, U. China has weaknesses, but over the past forty years Beijing has displayed surprising resilience. The stakes on this issue are very high. An earlier tendency by the U. Fourth, there may be no better option for the United States with respect to Taiwan than buying time to forestall a conflict.
This will seem a deeply unsatisfactory prospect to Americans who like neatly delivered solutions. That is what neighbors with different interests but unchanging geographic constraints need to do. The direction in which China is headed offers no political appeal to the people of Taiwan, who enjoy civil rights, political freedoms, and effective national autonomy. Something has to give as China tries to be open and closed simultaneously.
That is preferably a matter for the people of China to decide for themselves over time, not under the counterproductive pressure of outside parties. This strategy offers at least a hope that Taiwan and mainland China can work out their differences if and when the gap between their political systems narrows.
When U. Beyond the aforementioned countries, Russia and India also should be major players in any future efforts to balance China. Unlike many of the countries previously discussed, Moscow and New Delhi obviously have not been part of the U. They each have proud independent traditions and their share of historical grievances. These two countries will act primarily according to their own calculated interests.
The key for the United States will be how their interests can align. Under current circumstances, India is a far more promising partner than Russia. Successive administrations since that of former president Bill Clinton have sought greater levels of security, economic, and political cooperation with New Delhi.
Despite these aligned interests between India and the United States, interviews with distinguished Indian statesmen in May revealed a striking combination of wariness about Chinese ambitions to dominate the Asia Pacific and concern about U.
These Indian thinkers believe the United States has more to gain from a different approach to China than that taken by the Trump administration. They advocate simultaneous U. The net takeaway of these interviews was that India would welcome a more proactive policy and greater investment from the United States in the region.
But at the same time, until New Delhi sees concrete evidence of a U. Despite the geopolitical tensions of recent years, Russia is also a logical candidate for the United States to court for the purpose of balancing against aggressive Chinese behavior. Beijing and Moscow have a long common border, past antagonism, and lingering suspicions about each other. During interviews in Moscow prior to the inauguration of the Trump administration, Russian officials emphasized the opportunities they see for greater cooperation with Beijing, but every conversation had an undertone of nervousness about Chinese ambitions and revealed hopes of repairing relations with the West.
Today, partisanship in the United States quickly overtakes any effort to coolly discuss the future of U. But not always and not without consultation and often changes to their original program. They opened their markets and moved to establish a liberal international economic regime. This was all very attractive to the rest of us and it created a tremendous reservoir of good will and cemented support for the United States around the world.
Indeed, by thus sheathing its power, America actually enhanced it. With the outbreak of the Cold War, the takeover of mainland China by the Chinese Communist Party, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea, the American purpose became even clearer, more focused, and more urgent.
It was to use American power in the Pacific to contain the spread of communism by the Soviets, Chinese, and North Koreans and to buy time for the rest of Asia to develop economically and politically. It was further to open the American market and to promote free trade policies that would accelerate the economic recovery and rapid growth of the Asia-Pacific economies.
The United States at this time also established extensive foreign aid programs and championed World Bank lending. In particular, during and after the Korean War, the US established a number of bi-lateral security agreements in the region and maintained large military deployments that provided for the continued security of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the rest of the countries in the region.
The American strategy was based on two pillars. The first was that of maintaining superior US military power so that no country in the region could challenge America or its allies by use of force. The second was promotion of economic development that it was believed would lead to the growth of middle classes and the emergence of democratic governments that would remain allied with the United States. Although the Vietnam War strained relations between America and a number of Asia-Pacific countries for a while, this strategy remained largely intact until the collapse of the Soviet Union in Moreover, it proved enormously successful.
The Asia-Pacific economies boomed, beginning with Japan and then continuing with the Asian Tigers and finally with the current rise of China. Many of these countries did evolve into democracies and those that were not fully democratic nevertheless adopted liberal domestic and foreign policies. So, one could say that by , American power in the Asia-Pacific region had largely achieved its original purpose.
The Soviet Union was gone. In China, the communist party was still in charge, but it had decided to drive on the capitalist road and had dramatically increased the day-to-day freedoms of its citizens.
And the rest of East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific was economically well advanced and politically quite democratic and liberal. Before moving to the situation at present it is important to look at some of the aspects of the economic developments over this period. The American adoption of free trade polices was conditioned by its disastrous experience with protectionist policies after World War I and during the Great Depression of the s.
US leaders were convinced that these policies had contributed greatly to the start of World War II and were determined not to repeat them.
Further, they were devoted apostles of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the fathers of modern international economics, and firmly believed that trade is always a win-win proposition.
Indeed, they, along with most western economists, believed that unilateral free trade was an advisable policy. In other words, they thought that the United States should reduce its tariffs and trade barriers even if other countries kept theirs in place. As a result, in the trade negotiating rounds of the s and s, the US made more and deeper cuts in its trade barriers than most other trading nations.
It also allowed the dollar to be overvalued for long periods of time, partly as a kind of foreign aid to countries trying to export to the US market and partly because it was advantageous to US consumers and financiers. Although it was disadvantageous to US manufacturers, they were initially considered so competitive that currency values wouldn't matter. On the domestic side, the US, fearing a return of the unemployment and depression of the s when World War II ended, adopted numerous measures to stimulate domestic demand and encourage consumer spending as the main engine of economic growth.
In Asia the situation and policy attitudes were quite different. This was based on the concept of export led growth. The key elements of Japanese policy were to adopt strong domestic incentives to save.
The capital thus generated would be allocated through the government-controlled banking system to strategic industries with great export potential such as shipbuilding, steel, machinery, etc.
The yen was kept undervalued and the domestic market was protected by a series of both formal and informal measures. Over the years, Japan opened its markets further to foreign penetration, but only very gradually. The Japanese strategy in the context of US free trade policies turned out to be very successful and was imitated first by Korea and Taiwan and then by nearly every country in East and Southeast Asia. Although this strategy proved extremely successful for every country that tried it, it was not without problems.
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