CHAPTER 18
The New Millennium
THE END OF the Jiang Zemin presidency marked a
turning point in Sino-American relations. Jiang was the last
President with whom the principal subject of the Sino-American
dialogue was the relationship itself. After that, both sides merged
if not their convictions then their practice into a pattern of
cooperative coexistence. China and the United States no longer had
a common adversary, but neither had they yet developed a joint
concept of world order. Jiang’s mellow reflections in the long
conversation with him, described in the last chapter, illustrated
the new reality: the United States and China perceived that they
needed each other because both were too large to be dominated, too
special to be transformed, and too necessary to each other to be
able to afford isolation. Beyond that, were common purposes
attainable? And to what end?
The millennium was
the symbolic beginning of that new relationship. A new generation
of leaders had come into office in China and the United States: on
the Chinese side, a “fourth generation” headed by President Hu
Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao; on the American side,
administrations led by Presidents George W. Bush and, beginning in
2009, Barack Obama. Both sides had an ambivalent attitude toward
the turmoil of the decades that preceded them.
Hu and Wen brought an
unprecedented perspective to the task of managing China’s
development and defining its world role. They represented the first
generation of top officials without personal experience of the
revolution, the first leaders in the Communist period to take
office through constitutional processes—and the first to assume
positions of national responsibility in a China unambiguously
emerging as a great power.
Both men had direct
experience of their country’s fragility and its complex domestic
challenges. As young cadres during the 1960s, Hu and Wen were among
the last students to receive formal higher education before the
chaos of the Cultural Revolution closed the universities. Educated
at Qinghua University in Beijing—a hub of Red Guard activity—Hu
stayed at the university as a political counselor and research
assistant, able to observe the chaos of the warring factions and,
on occasion, becoming their target as allegedly “too
individualistic.”1 When Mao decided to put an end to Red Guard
depredations by sending the young generation to the countryside, Hu
nevertheless shared their fate. He was dispatched to Gansu
province, one of China’s more desolate and rebellious regions, to
work at a hydraulic power plant. Wen, a recent graduate of the
Beijing Institute of Geology, received a similar assignment, and
was sent to work on mineralogical projects in Gansu, where he would
remain for more than a decade. There in the far northwestern
reaches of their turmoil-stricken country, Hu and Wen undertook a
slow climb up the internal ranks of the Communist Party hierarchy.
Hu rose to the position of secretary of the Communist Youth League
for Gansu province. Wen became the deputy director of the
provincial geological bureau. In an era of upheaval and
revolutionary fervor, both men distinguished themselves by their
steadiness and competency.
For Hu, the next
advancement took place at the Central Party School in Beijing,
where, in 1982, he came to the attention of Hu Yaobang, then
General Secretary of the Party. It led to a rapid promotion to the
position of Party Secretary for Guizhou, in China’s remote
southwest; at forty-three, Hu Jintao was the youngest provincial
Party Secretary in Communist Party history.2 His experience in
Guizhou, a poor province with a substantial number of minorities,
prepared Hu for his next assignment in 1988, as Party Secretary for
the autonomous region of Tibet. Wen, meanwhile, was transferred to
Beijing, where he served in a series of positions of increasing
responsibility in the Communist Party’s Central Committee. He
established himself as a trusted top aide to three successive
Chinese leaders: Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, and, later, Jiang
Zemin.
Both Hu and Wen had
close personal experience with China’s 1989 unrest—Hu in Tibet,
where he arrived in December 1988, just as a major Tibetan uprising
was unfolding; Wen in Beijing, where as deputy to Zhao Ziyang he
was at the General Secretary’s side during his last forlorn
expedition among the students in Tiananmen Square.
Thus by the time they
assumed the top national leadership posts in 2002–2003, Hu and Wen
had gained a distinctive perspective on China’s resurgence. Trained
in its rugged, unstable frontiers and serving at a middle level
during Tiananmen, they were conscious of the complexity of China’s
domestic challenges. Coming to power during a long period of
sustained domestic growth and in the wake of China’s entry into the
international economic order, they assumed the helm of a China
undeniably “arriving” as a world power, with interests in every
corner of the globe.
Deng had called a
truce in the Maoist war on Chinese tradition and allowed the
Chinese to reconnect with their historic strengths. But as other
Chinese leaders occasionally hinted, the Deng era was an attempt to
make up for lost time. There was in this period a sense of special
exertion and a subtext of almost innocent embarrassment at China’s
missteps. Jiang projected unshakable confidence and bonhomie, but
he assumed the helm of a China still recovering from domestic
crisis and endeavoring to regain its international
standing.
It was at the turn of
the century that the efforts of the Deng and Jiang periods were
coming to fruition. Hu and Wen presided over a country that no
longer felt constrained by the sense of apprenticeship to Western
technology and institutions. The China they governed was confident
enough to reject, and even on occasion subtly mock, American
lectures on reform. It was now in a position to conduct its foreign
policy not based on its long-term potential or its ultimate
strategic role but in terms of its actual power.
Power to what end?
Beijing’s initial approach to the new era was largely incremental
and conservative. Jiang and Zhu had negotiated China’s entry into
the World Trade Organization and full participation in the
international economic order. China under Hu and Wen aspired first
of all to normalcy and stability. Its goals, in the official
formulations, were a “harmonious society” and a “harmonious world.”
Its domestic agenda centered on continued economic development, and
the preservation of social harmony within a vast population
experiencing both unprecedented prosperity and unaccustomed levels
of inequality. Its foreign policy avoided dramatic moves, and its
chief policymakers responded circumspectly to appeals from abroad
for China to play a more visible international leadership role.
China’s foreign policy aimed primarily for a peaceful international
environment (including good relations with the United States) and
access to raw materials to ensure continued economic growth. And it
retained a special interest in the developing world—a legacy of
Mao’s Three Worlds theory—even as it moved into the rank of
economic superpower.
As Mao had feared,
the Chinese DNA had reasserted itself. Confronting the new
challenges of the twenty-first century, and in a world where
Leninism had collapsed, Hu and Wen turned to traditional wisdom.
They described their reform aspirations not in terms of the utopian
visions of Mao’s continuous revolution, but by the goal of building
a “xiaokang” (“moderately well-off”)
society—a term with distinctly Confucian connotations.3 They oversaw a
revival of the study of Confucius in Chinese schools and a
celebration of his legacy in popular culture. And they enlisted
Confucius as a source of Chinese soft power on the world stage—in
the official “Confucius Institutes” established in cities
worldwide, and in the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, which
featured a contingent of traditional Confucian scholars. In a
dramatic symbolic move, in January 2011, China marked the
rehabilitation of the ancient moral philosopher by installing a
statue of Confucius at the center of the Chinese capital, Tiananmen
Square, within sight of Mao’s mausoleum—the only other personality
so honored.4
The new American
administration signified a comparable change of generations. Both
Hu and Bush were the first Presidents who had been bystanders at
their nations’ traumatic experiences of the 1960s: for China, the
Cultural Revolution; for the United States, the Vietnam War. Hu
drew the conclusion that social harmony should be a guideline of
his presidency. Bush came into office in the aftermath of the
collapse of the Soviet Union amidst an American triumphalism that
believed America capable of reshaping the world in its image. The
younger Bush did not hesitate to conduct foreign policy under the
banner of America’s deepest values. He spoke passionately about
individual liberties and religious freedom, including on his visits
to China.
Bush’s freedom agenda
projected what seemed improbably fast evolutions for non-Western
societies. Nevertheless, in the practice of his diplomacy, Bush
overcame the historic ambivalence between America’s missionary and
pragmatic approaches. He did so not through a theoretical construct
but by means of a sensible balance of strategic priorities. He left
no doubt about America’s commitment to democratic institutions and
human rights. At the same time, he paid attention to the national
security element without which moral purpose operates in a vacuum.
Though criticized in the American debate for his alleged espousal
of unilateralism, Bush, in dealing with China, Japan, and India
simultaneously—countries that based their policy on national
interest calculations—managed to improve relations with each—a
model for a constructive Asian policy for the United States. In
Bush’s presidency, U.S.-China relations were the matter-of-fact
dealings of two major powers. Neither side supposed the other
shared all of its aims. On some issues, like domestic governance,
their goals were not compatible. Still, they found their interests
intersecting in enough areas to confirm the emerging sense of
partnership.
Washington and
Beijing inched closer to each other’s positions on Taiwan in 2003,
after Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian proposed a referendum on
applying for U.N. representation under the name “Taiwan.” Since
such a move would have been a violation of American undertakings in
the three communiqués, Bush administration officials conveyed their
opposition to Taipei. During Wen Jiabao’s December 2003 visit to
Washington, Bush reaffirmed the three communiqués and added that
Washington “opposes any unilateral decision by China or Taiwan to
change the status quo”; he suggested that a referendum raising
Taiwan’s political status would not find support in the United
States. Wen responded with a notably forthcoming formulation on the
desirability of peaceful reunification: “Our fundamental policy on
the settlement of the question of Taiwan is peaceful reunification,
and one country–two systems. We would do our utmost with utmost
sincerity to bring about national unity and peaceful reunification
through peaceful means.”5
One of the reasons
for renewed cooperation was the attacks of September 11, which
redirected America’s primary strategic focus away from East Asia to
the Middle East and Southwest Asia, with wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and a program to combat terrorist networks. China, no
longer a revolutionary challenger of the international order and
concerned about the impact of global terrorism within its own
minority regions, especially Xinjiang, was quick to condemn the
9/11 attacks and offer intelligence and diplomatic support. In the
lead-up to the Iraq war, it was notably less confrontational
against the United States in the United Nations than some of
America’s European allies were.
On a perhaps more
fundamental level, however, the period began a process of
divergence in Chinese and American assessments of how to deal with
terrorism. China remained an agnostic bystander to the American
projection of power across the Muslim world and above all to the
Bush administration’s proclamation of ambitious goals of democratic
transformation. Beijing retained its characteristic willingness to
adjust to changes in alignments of power and in the composition of
foreign governments without passing a moral judgment. Its main
concerns were continued access to oil from the Middle East and
(after the fall of the Taliban) protection of Chinese investments
in Afghanistan’s mineral resources. With these interests generally
fulfilled, China did not contest American efforts in Iraq and
Afghanistan (and may well have welcomed them in part because they
represented a diversion of American military capabilities from East
Asia).
The range of
interaction between China and the United States signified the
reestablishment of a central role for China in regional and world
affairs. China’s quest for equal partnership was no longer the
outsized claim of a vulnerable country; it was increasingly a
reality backed by financial and economic capacities. At the same
time, impelled by new security challenges and changing economic
realities, and not least a new alignment of relative political and
economic influence between them, both countries were engaged in
searching debates about their domestic purposes, their world
roles—and ultimately their relation to each other.