CIA Director Michael Hayden says no. “China is a competitor–certainly in the economic realm, and, increasingly, on the geopolitical stage,” he said in a speech delivered yesterday at Kansas State University. “But China is not an inevitable enemy.”
No, it is not. The Chinese state-and its increasingly restive people-all have consequential choices to make. So, in both a technical and practical sense, Beijing is not inevitably anything: friend, enemy, or Stephen Colbert’s clever term, frenemy. We can study the history of other rising powers or even look into China’s past for guidance, but we will of course find no answers about the future.
With regard to that future, Hayden says, “There are good policy choices available to both Washington and Beijing that can keep us on the largely peaceful, constructive path we’ve been on for almost 40 years now.” If we ignore the second part of the sentence–which some might want to debate–it is of course true that both the United States and China will influence the future of their bilateral relationship, which some call the most important in the world. There is, however, an assumption, on this side of the Pacific, that the United States, as the sole superpower, can make China a “responsible stakeholder” in the international community, to borrow the State Department’s hopeful formulation.
Yet China’s future direction is largely out of our hands. China is too large, proud, and brittle for outsiders to have much of a say. Moreover, the leaders in Beijing have difficulty reconciling and controlling the various factions that end up shaping the country’s policy, and so it is wrong for outsiders to believe they can have much of a hand in guiding the Chinese state. Finally, there is the influence of the Chinese people on their nation’s foreign policies, a factor that became evident last month as nationalist Chinese protested in their own country as well as in Asia, Europe, and the United States.
This leads us to perhaps the most important point about Sino-American relations. Because we have only limited influence over Beijing, we cannot base our policy on what we believe Chinese intentions may be. Our touchstone should be Chinese capabilities. Whether Beijing appears to be friend or enemy, we have to recognize that China is one nation far beyond our control. In short, we should not let optimism prevent us from preparing for the worst.
