Opinion | What ‘Engagers’ Got Right About China
Having been in the general vicinity of the creation, I don’t recognize today’s straw-man version of 1990s engagement with China. This newspaper in the ’90s favored trade but also emphasized military preparedness and deterrence in defense of Taiwan. An editorial demanded that Bill Clinton deploy the Seventh Fleet to ward off one of Beijing’s early missile intimidation exercises around the island.
Then as now, any thinking person also saw that Western hopes for China’s evolution were at odds with the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, promising only conflict in the future. A couple of decades later this column saw the cyber threat from China but also saw the Obama-prompted attack on Huawei as less a solution than a throwing away of leverage. Ditto TikTok today: The Chinese spying, propaganda and cyberwarfare threat will remain. The commercial success of TikTok in the U.S. gives Beijing something to lose.
Xi Jinping already has sought to weaken China’s entrepreneurial class because he sees it as a threat to party rule. From a long view, we shouldn’t be helping him.
What most of us underestimated in the early ’90s was the pig-moving-through-the-python effect.
Though technology also played a role, 100 million Chinese shifting from peasant agriculture to factory work was a tsunami through the global division of labor, hurting many U.S. factory towns. A vast and overnight accretion of wealth in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party apparat was another unappreciated outcome. China scholar Perry Link corrected many a careless statement when he said the Communist Party didn’t make China rich, the Chinese people made the party rich. The result was resources out the wazoo for the party to invest in domestic surveillance and stirring up regional conflicts to justify continued CCP dominance of society.
The size and suddenness of China’s rise is a phenomenon all its own. No obvious parallel comes to mind. The Maoist catastrophes of the 1960s and ’70s start to appear in a new light. They look like China directing inward a propensity for chaos that it now directs outward.
Only the most grievous example so far is Covid. With China’s rapid urbanization and enrichment on top of age-old cultural and culinary attachments, the world has never seen anything like China’s thousands of live-animal markets, and the extent and scale of the trade networks supporting them across of much of Asia.
China was already a source of much of the world’s flu. In the Covid explosion, the possible role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology only builds on the point. Next up, China has 150 nuclear power plants on the drawing board. The world assumes world-class engineering and oversight. It assumes reasonable control of corruption. Is it crazy to do so? If an AI Chernobyl lies in the world’s future, it also seems more likely to come from China than Silicon Valley.
This week the world is agog over a forced merger of Japan’s Honda and Nissan, once world-beating auto manufacturers. Don’t misinterpret explanations of a Chinese catalyst. Both companies invested in China’s domestic electric-vehicle market on the usual bait-and-switch terms. Now they are paying the usual price. But the U.S. has also sold itself a bill of goods on electric vehicles. EVs are not a “strategic” technology. They aren’t a fix for climate change. They are strategic only for China, to replace imported oil with domestic coal as security against a U.S. naval blockade.
Lesson: Lurching into actions harmful to ourselves turns out to be another unforeseen China-related risk. A trillion-dollar cleanup job now lies ahead to deal with the Biden administration’s attempt to force EVs on Detroit, thanks partly to rent-seekers masquerading as China hawks.
I hope Donald Trump, whose rhetoric can be disconcerting, is paying attention. U.S. global leadership in technology is built on openness to the world—at least openness to like-minded, Western-oriented economies. Even so, when the decouplers are done, our interdependence with China will still be orders of magnitude greater than any with the Soviet Union and usefully so. Not least it gives us a window on how Mr. Xi’s increasingly totalitarian and apocalyptic geopolitical fantasies are playing among Chinese elites, plus a chance to counter them.
U.S. technology controls were modestly successful in the ’70s and ’80s against a Soviet system that was little capable of internal, private innovation. The jury is out on China but one lesson shouldn’t be lost in the shuffle: Economic protectionism is no substitute for investing in sufficient military force and America’s alliances to raise the cost of Chinese aggression beyond what its leaders will think worth paying. In this one regard the coming year already is shaping up to be more dangerous than it needed to be.
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Appeared in the December 28, 2024, print edition as 'What ‘Engagers’ Got Right About China'.
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