China's Strategic Modernization: The Russian Connection - outfitting People's Liberation Army - Statistical Data Included

Parameters, Winter, 2001 by Michael J. Barron

The United States cannot steer China's course, but, as with Russia, it can exercise an influence. China's strategic thinkers themselves rate the actions of the United States as the most important factor they need to take into account, for better or worse, as they chart their country's future.

Americans, for their part, view China's growing power warily. Comfort can no longer be taken, as it was during the Cold War, from the fact that China's power was an offset to Soviet military power. Now China must be assessed on its own terms. Some Americans have already concluded that China is destined for competition and conflict with the United States. But such a conclusion rashly prejudges the outcome of a process that is only beginning. Fatalism would likely prove a self-fulfilling prophecy. If China is treated like an adversary, it will surely become one.

The United States has, to this point, wisely chosen to reject a policy of fatalism, as well as its accompanying prescription, a strategy of containment that would seek systematically to limit China's power and role. Instead, US policy has recognized the malleability of China's future course and the potential for America to influence it through engagement. For now, the weight of American political opinion appears to support that policy of engagement.

Any program of engagement must recognize the reality that China's rapid rise as an economic, political, and military power inevitably poses challenges to other Pacific powers, and in particular to the United States and Japan and to their security alliance. This alliance, with its concomitant deployment of American troops, has provided the security and stability underlying the remarkable economic growth these past two decades in the Asia-Pacific region. But even as China has profited from this stability, China believes that this alliance and these troops are directed against it and constitute an American policy of containment.

In fact, however, America's policy under its last six Presidents has consistently been one of engagement with China. This policy began with the signing of the Shanghai Communique in 1972 by President Nixon. Since then, it has had its ups and downs: up with the recognition of China in 1979 by President Carter; down with China's suppression of the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989 and the subsequent sanctions by the United States; up with President Clinton's resumption of engagement in 1994; down with China's firing of missiles bracketing Taiwan in 1996 and the deployment of two American carrier battle groups in response; up again more recently with meetings in the United States and China of President Jiang Zemin and President Clinton, and now with President Bush's October 2001 trip to Shanghai.

The question of Taiwan still dominates the bilateral relationship, and miscalculation by either party could easily shatter the fragile stability that reflects this new rapprochement. There is still much US dissatisfaction with China over such issues as human rights, nuclear proliferation, Tibet, and the trade deficit. The fragility of the present improvement in relations is why the United States should seize this moment to lay a more solid foundation by creating understandings and linkages that will provide for greater stability and predictability in the future bilateral relationship.