The United States has repeatedly misread and mishandled relations with China, resulting in a more confident and aggressive Asian superpower challenging for more control of global affairs, according to a Princeton University professor and longtime China analyst.
Aaron Friedberg, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, discussed U.S. missteps and the long-term consequences during a discussion with Bonnie Lin for the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ ChinaPower podcast.
Lin is the moderator and director of the China Power Project and senior fellow for Asian Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Friedberg has taught at Princeton since 1987, and serves as co-director of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs’ Center for International Security Studies. From 2003-05 he served as a deputy assistant for national security affairs in the Office of the Vice President. In 2006 he was named to the secretary of state's advisory committee on democracy promotion.
Friedberg’s most recent book, “Getting China Wrong” explores the origins of engagement and presents new approaches for Western policy towards China.
“Engagement with China in the 1990s was rooted in optimism as the Cold War came to a close. Western power shifted attention and strategic planning towards the Asia-Pacific,” Lin said in an introduction. “Western leaders believed that expanded investment and trade with China would bear economic benefits for both the United States, China and the West, and that engagement would expose China to a liberal democratic order. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party remains in power in China. And under Xi Jinping, China has doubled down on the strength of its authoritarian system.”
Friedberg opened with a brief history lesson.
“I think there were two variants of engagement," he said. "The first one dates to the beginning of relations between the United States and the People's Republic. The Nixon-Kissinger opening, and then the formalization of relations in 1979. That really runs from about 20 years, from 1969 or so to 1989. And the principal goal there was to build up China as a counterweight to Soviet power.
“The second very of engagement comes into view in the period in the early 1990," he added. It's really the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, and then it's followed in rapid succession by the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. That really eliminated almost overnight the strategic rationale for the previous form of engagement. Soviet Union wasn't there anymore."
He said Tiananmen, in particular, made it much harder to ignore the character of China's domestic regime.
“Rationales emerged in the early 1990s that supported a policy of engagement, economic engagement, but also across all domains educational, scientific, cultural and so on,” Friedberg said. “And that policy really had three objectives. The first was to draw China into the existing international system even more fully than it already had been.
“As people in the Bush administration later described it, that China would become a responsible stakeholder in the existing order," he said “The second was to encourage China to move further down the path towards economic liberalization. And the third goal was to promote political liberalization. And American political leaders talked about this more or less openly at different periods."
Lin asked what China sought from this engagement, and how did it gain from it?
“Once Mao is gone from the scene and Deng Xiaoping has emerged as China's leader, the approach of the CCP regime to engagement was wary but flexible,” Friedberg said. “Deng famously said that when you open the windows, you get fresh air, but also flies. And he was referring there to the dangerous ideas of liberal democracy that he knew would accompany greater trade and investment.
“But he believed and his successors believed the benefits of engagement were potentially enormous, that China could have access to capital technology, knowledge, that it would be able to sell its products into Western markets in ways that had never done before, and that this would drive China's economic development,” the professor added.
Deng and his successors had no intention to surrender their grip on China, he said. They were focused on three goals.
“The first and most important was, no matter what, preserve the CPC's monopoly of power. Second, build up all the elements of China's so-called comprehensive national power and economic strength, first and foremost, but also technological capabilities, military capabilities and so on,” Friedberg said. “And then third, to advance carefully to what were always the leadership's long-term strategic objectives."
Frieberg said it is apparent the United States’ plans and intentions to guide China in a new direction failed.
“I think there's a recognition that China is a revisionist power. It wants to change important elements of the existing international system. It wasn't successful in that regard,” Friedberg said. “Did China move progressively down the path toward a full market-driven liberal economic system? No, clearly not. In fact, in the last 10 or 15 years, it's really in many ways shifted back toward a much heavier reliance on state directed, market distorting, mercantilist economic policies."
Lin wondered if matters might have been worse without U.S. engagement with China. Friedberg said the decisions that were made were incorrect choices.
“I think this is kind of a straw man, frankly, because it makes it seem that there was no choice between the policies we did pursue, which produced the results that we see now, which I think most people would agree are, if not entirely negative, have important negative elements to them," he said. "And on the other hand, some kind of unspecified total Cold War containment policy that was not realistic. It was not on the cards."
Friedberg said the United States was slow to recognize it was stumbling in its dealings with China. By the time Jinping came to power, “it should have been painfully obvious what was happening,” he said.
But there were clear warning signs well before that time.
“There was a period in which people in the West saw things happening and misunderstood them or interpreted them as evidence that China was evolving in this direction that we had hoped,” Friedberg said. “But that was not what was happening. And it should have been clear pretty quickly that that was the case.”
China has become open about its ambitions to challenge the territorial status quo, Friedberg said.
“That's true with regard to Taiwan but that's not something new." he said. "But also the active pursuit of China's long-standing claims to be able to have the right to dominate water and the resources and the land features of the South China Sea,” he said. “That's been a major feature of Chinese policy in the last eight or nine years."
Friedberg said it’s important to realize that both China and Russia believe they are threatened by the preponderance of U.S. power. Chinese leaders seem concerned about short-term consequences, but feel confident of the future.
But Friedberg noted that China remains vulnerable on the economic front, and is aware of that.
“They're still heavily dependent on Western technology. They still have a need and a desire for Western capital," he said. "They still export a large portion of their total production to the United States and other democratic countries. And that means that we have leverage over them, and I think they're working hard to try to reduce that. They have this notion of the 20-year period of strategic opportunity.”
The West is still far too dependent on China for a variety of materials and products, he said, which was made clear during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think that was one thing that really woke people up to this," he said. "There have been a series of shocks. One was that recognition that we didn't initially have factories that could manufacture masks and we had to import all of these things from one place. Who knew that? And also, of course, recognizing that you're reliant on a country that may be hostile and may try to extract benefits.
“I think we need to engage in that more directly than we have," he added. We have to both have confidence in and demonstrate the superiority of our liberal democratic institutions. We can't be on the back foot about that.”
Lin asked for his assessment on how the Biden administration was dealing with China.
“I guess the short answer to that is I think they're pointed in the right direction, but they're not moving fast enough across all of these dimensions. For various reasons they're having difficulty making decisions about economic policy,” Friedberg said. “They're constrained in what they're spending on our military. They haven't found the language, I don't think, for the discursive struggle part of things, but they haven't got it right. But I think the general direction is correct."
Friedberg said it’s important to accept that China and Russia have exploited our openness to their advantage and to our disadvantage.
“We need to we need to be stronger on defense,” he said. “I think of the objective of this in the medium term [is] to defeat and blunt the thrust of the policies that the current CCP regime is now pursuing to demonstrate that they cannot achieve the objectives that they've set for themselves by pursuing the policies that they're currently pursuing. I think if we can do that, we probably are looking toward a period of stalemate in which they are not pushing us back, but they're continuing to try and we are pushing back and the two are balancing out to some degree.”
There is hope for the distant future, Friedberg said, of China becoming more democratic and more liberal.
“It's not within our power to make that happen. It was arrogant of us, I think, to think that we could even in the nice way that we were, tried to do it,” he said. “And we certainly not shouldn't be in the business of trying to subvert the regime or anything like that. But I don't think the objective of the initial policy of engagement was wrong or the hope that China could be encouraged to liberalize was a bad idea. It's just that we didn't have the means to accomplish that."
