The stealth normalization of U.S.-China relations

National Interest, The, Fall, 2003 by David M. Lampton

It is not just America that benefits from growing interdependence with China. Domestic employment generation is a paramount concern to Beijing. The combined effects of WTO entry, population expansion, urbanization and dismemberment of the state-dominated economic system require the creation of hundreds of millions of jobs over the next few years in the PRC. For Chinese leaders and citizens alike, it is more than a footnote that U.S. firms are becoming a rapidly growing, though still modest, source of employment in their country. As of 2002, for example, Avon had 20,000 sales representatives in China, while Motorola had 13,000 employees and the Coca-Cola network supported more than 414,000 Chinese jobs. Wal-Mart is China's eighth-largest trade partner.

Large and growing cultural and educational ties reinforce the bilateral relationship considerably. Not only is the number of Americans studying the Chinese language modestly rising (but still inadequate), but large numbers of Chinese are also studying and receiving training in America, not to mention the West more broadly (63,211 in 2001-02). The People's Daily (in its February 3, 2003 online edition) reported, "81 percent of the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and 54 percent of the members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering are returned overseas students." Many of these students become financial and intellectual bridges linking the two societies together. One such example is the American company Asiainfo, founded by Chinese students who were educated in the United States. In 1995, it won a contract to expand China's largest commercial Internet network, and by 1997 "controlled more than 70 percent of China's Internet node servers, with points in all 31 provinces and all autonomous regional capitals and self-governing cities." (3)

Chinese officials and intellectuals frequently and explicitly acknowledge this economic interdependence. It is commonplace at meetings on Sino-American relations convened in the PRC to begin with the host acknowledging that China's economic well-being has become tightly intertwined with American prosperity. The fashion among Chinese intellectuals is to talk about "win-win", rather than "zero-sum", thinking. Important as they are, however, stronger security, economic and cultural foundations are not the whole story. Despite post-9/11 developments, each nation also remains strategically ambivalent about the other.

Mutual Strategic Apprehension and Uneasy Security Cooperation

WHEN THE history of this period is written in ink instead of pencil, it may be that the present will be remembered as the moment when China jettisoned the chip on its collective shoulder, the victim mentality engendered by the "hundred-plus years of humiliation", and threw its lot in with the international system as a maintainer, not a disrupter. Pang Zhongying, the earlier-mentioned Tsinghua University professor, echoed sentiments expressed by President Jiang Zemin in 2001:

   China has parted with the period of humiliating
   history. We have placed the humiliating
   history on one side. We can say the Chinese
   people have stood up for the second time....
   China always feels that it has been humiliated
   and that the world order is very unfair....
   But now we have entered an order and joined
   a world system not initiated by China.