The growing intensity of strategic competition between the United States and China and the attendant election-year pressures on U.S. political candidates to appear “tough” on China have reinvigorated a longstanding debate among U.S. observers: did the United States get China “wrong?” 45 years after the two countries normalized relations, that historical question raises a contemporary corollary: what would it mean for the United States to get China “right?”
Between the early 1970s and the arrival of the Trump administration, Republican and Democratic administrations alike undertook a two-pronged approach to China: work to integrate it into the postwar economic order, on the one hand, and strengthen U.S. ties with key Asian allies and partners such as Japan, on the other.
It is tempting to conclude that the present state of U.S.-China relations invalidates the logic that animated those efforts. China has emerged as America’s foremost geopolitical challenger, after all, and U.S. policymakers across the ideological spectrum believe that those past decades of “engage but hedge” enabled the resurgence of a rival that intends to overtake Washington as the world’s preeminent power.
It would be misguided, however, to render that judgment.
First, the relationship has not proceeded on a linear path to greater hostility; instead, it has undergone many oscillations as America’s domestic politics, China’s domestic politics, and the international order have evolved. During the Cold War, for example, closer ties between Washington and Beijing helped pave the way for a détente with Moscow. The current condition of U.S.-China relations was no more preordained than its trajectory henceforth has been cast. While China’s growing authoritarianism at home and coerciveness abroad under President Xi Jinping warranted a recalibration of U.S. policy, the United States should not discount the possibility — however remote it may seem right now — that his successors might take a different course, thereby giving Washington greater policy flexibility than it believes that it now possesses.
Second, the two counterfactual approaches that the United States may have adopted — containment and passivity — would each have entailed significant risks.
Given the extent of China’s isolation and impoverishment at the time of the Nixon administration’s opening, a U.S. decision to pursue containment may have slowed its resurgence. But that choice would have undercut a central plank of America’s Cold War strategy: driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing. In addition, it would likely have won little, if any, support from U.S. allies and partners (even now, with China second only to the United States in terms of comprehensive national power, Washington appreciates how difficult it will be to assemble a coalition whose members contest Beijing with equal urgency). Perhaps most importantly, it would have created the possibility that, when China did emerge from under U.S. pressure, it would not have been a complex competitor with a stake in preserving core aspects of the postwar order, but an unalloyed antagonist with a determination to dismantle that system.
If, some observers might rejoin, the United States had deemed containment inadvisable, it could at least have been less supportive of China’s emergence out of pariah status. But sustained diplomacy between the two countries has produced a range of connections — deep economic interdependence, formal and informal dialogues between government officials on numerous issues, and educational and cultural exchanges — that still serve as guardrails for the world’s most consequential relationship. That diplomacy continues to produce dividends, even if modest, as seen with China’s initial steps to crack down on the flow of fentanyl precursors into the United States. And it will remain indispensable to managing the familiar litany of transnational challenges, including climate change, pandemic disease, and macroeconomic instability.
The better, if less glamorous, option would be to work towards a modus vivendi, one that enables the two countries to engage in vigorous competition without leading themselves — and the rest of the world — into such a tragedy.
Granted, connectivity between the United States and China has hardly been a panacea for bilateral relations. Indeed, both countries are increasingly looking to de-risk from one another; Washington believes that interdependence enables Beijing to fuel its military modernization with U.S.-supplied inputs, while Beijing believes that interdependence enables Washington to stymie the technological development of its principal challenger. But it is an analytical leap too far to conclude that, because connectivity is problematic, it has had no — and will no longer be capable of producing — salutary effects.
A third reason to interrogate the conclusion that the United States (at least until recently) fundamentally erred in its China policy is because it concurrently overstates Washington’s agency and discounts Beijing’s: it implies that an alternative U.S. approach could have prevented the emergence of a competitive challenge from a country of continental proportions with a vast population — China was already home to over a fifth of humanity by the middle of the 20th century — that had endured millennia of internal turbulence and external predation.
Bearing in mind the limits to its influence will be essential if the United States is to sustain a prudent China policy: Washington would isolate itself were it to undertake to “win” its strategic competition with Beijing. Many U.S. allies and partners in Europe and (especially) Asia have apprehensions over China’s growing power and the geopolitical ambitions that it could enable. All of them, however, fear the human, military, and economic costs that could result from an uncontrolled escalation of tensions between the world’s two foremost powers. Addressing the Aspen Security Forum in July, Singaporean Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen likely spoke for many other government officials around the world when he stated that the trajectory of U.S.-China relations “will decide the fates of all our nations for this decade and the next.”
Observers who believe that Washington can indeed prevail over Beijing, whatever their understanding of victory may be, note Beijing’s significant long-term challenges. Its rate of growth is slowing, its demographic decline is accelerating, and its currency faces a daunting path to rivaling the dollar. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA), meanwhile, confronts an increasingly dense mesh of bilateral, trilateral, and quadrilateral security arrangements between the United States and its Asian allies and partners. And China’s deepening alignment with Russia, Iran, and North Korea is inducing greater strategic convergence among advanced industrial democracies.
But China still has ample capacity to expand its influence. The International Monetary Fund projects that its gross domestic product will go from being about 64 percent as large as that of the United States to about 71 percent by 2029. China is the world’s largest exporter. It occupies a dominant role in many supply chains, including those that will undergird the world’s clean energy transition. Its naval modernization and nuclear buildup are continuing apace, and the PLA is learning from Russia’s struggles in Ukraine. And China is increasing its influence across the developing world by boosting its diplomatic presence, making large-scale infrastructure investments, and leveraging dissatisfaction with the current international order to gain traction for its nascent vision (rooted in its global development, security, and civilization initiatives).
It is appropriate, of course — indeed, imperative — to litigate the China policy that the United States has pursued in recent decades. But observers who argue that the United States got China “wrong” exaggerate the likelihood that Washington could have headed off a competitive challenge from Beijing by bearing down harder. And misguided history becomes further problematic when policymakers apply it to reach weighty decisions.
The next U.S. administration has an important choice to make about how to approach China. Attempting to pursue an illusory victory would risk an avoidable catastrophe. The better, if less glamorous, option would be to work towards a modus vivendi, one that enables the two countries to engage in vigorous competition without leading themselves — and the rest of the world — into such a tragedy.
Ali Wyne is the senior research and advocacy advisor for U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group.
