Bush’s China Policy Will Outlive Presidency

The Bushes are heading for Beijing. By the busload. Visiting the Chinese capital last week, I was told that President Hu Jintao hopes to greet three generations of America’s first family at the opening ceremony for the Olympics. That must be some kind of record – and a nightmare for the secret service.

They are fond of George W. Bush in China. There are not many capitals around the world where foreign policy practitioners say hand on heart that they will miss the US president. Beijing is an important exception. Sino-American relations, I heard several times during my trip, have been consistently steadier than at any time since the door to dialogue was opened by the ping-pong diplomacy of the early 1970s.

The Chinese, of course, still have plenty of differences with the US, and vice versa. But Mr Bush is credited with delivering the thing that matters most in Beijing: an essentially stable process of engagement.

It might have been otherwise. Before the 2000 election Mr Bush decried the so-called strategic partnership with Beijing promoted by the Clinton administration. Instead, he would treat China as a “competitor”. A collision between a Chinese interceptor and a US reconnaissance aircraft over the island of Hainan in the early months of the Bush presidency looked likely to confirm him on that course. But the attacks of September 11 2001 changed all the calculations. The US had enemies enough. In east Asia, at least, Mr Bush’s foreign policy would embrace the hard-headed realism of his father, George H.W. Bush.

Not everyone, of course, thinks being pals with the Chinese regime is something to be worn as a badge of honour. Powerful voices on the right of US politics want a tougher stance against China’s military spending. Some realist scholars see a clash as inevitable as China challenges US primacy. On the left, Beijing’s repression in Tibet and its support for pariah regimes in places such as Sudan and Burma prompt charges of appeasement.

So supporters of John McCain, the Republican candidate for the presidency, say he would be more robust in defending US security interests in the region; those of Barack Obama, the Democratic contender, that he would give sharper focus to human rights.

From a strategic perspective, though, and amid the wreckage of Mr Bush’s foreign policy elsewhere, the sustained stability has been reassuring. Sino-American ties are likely to be the most important, and potentially combustible, component of international relations for the next several decades.

At its crudest, the question is whether China’s re-emergence after two centuries in the geopolitical twilight can be managed without a conflict with today’s sole superpower. History is not comforting. The cautionary precedent frequently cited is that of Germany’s rise at the end of the 19th century.

On a slightly subtler level, the condition of the relationship between Beijing and Washington will be pivotal to the nature of the global order. Competition would herald a revival of great power rivalries, a return to a world of balancing, hedging and competing alliances. Co-operation could pave the way for an overhaul of the existing multilateral system to accommodate China and other rising powers.

The geopolitical case for engagement is reinforced by the economics. The US is China’s market place; China is America’s largest creditor. There is no clearer expression of the interdependence that comes with globalisation.

The big doubts are about China’s intentions: does it want to be a responsible stakeholder in the system, or is it playing for time until it can confront the US on its own terms? We do not know the answer, and the US, quite sensibly, is combining a policy of engagement with one of hedging.

My sense is that Chinese policymakers have not made up their minds. The western instinct is to assume that Beijing has worked out precisely how the world will look in 10, 15 even 50 years hence. If that is the case, it is a plan well hidden.

During my visit I sat in on a seminar co-sponsored by the US National Intelligence Council, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations. The purpose was to peer into the future ahead of the publication early next year of the NIC’s Global Trends in 2025. CICIR, diplomats told me, is the think-tank most closely associated with the Chinese intelligence community. So the simple fact of the seminar, with a high-ranking presence from both sides, spoke to the easy nature of the bilateral relationship.

The hosts certainly seemed fully conscious of China’s new-found power – and unapologetic about its expanding reach in the quest to feed a voracious appetite for resources.

But China’s international presence takes a distant second place to domestic concerns. The mantra of the policymaking elite is the need to safeguard economic growth, social stability and national unity. The neuroses about Taiwan and Tibet merge into a broader anxiety about the cohesion of this vast, multi-ethnic state. Foreign policy matters mostly to the extent that it has an impact – positive or negative – on a fragile domestic order.

With the US, stability now rests on a panoply of institutional dialogues – economic and political – in which differences can be addressed. The system seems to work. Sharp disagreements over China’s exchange rate policy have been managed, although not resolved, within the economic dialogue. The six-party talks with North Korea about Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons on Thursday claimed another, albeit modest, advance towards disarmament. Chinese foreign policy experts see the forum as a possible model for a more permanent east Asian security system.

Nothing is perfect. China is secretive about its military and dismissive of any intrusion into its domestic affairs. It professes support for the international system, but shows great reluctance to accept any constraint on national sovereignty. Taiwan is a permanent source of tension; relations with Japan, much better now than two years ago, always hold the potential for conflict.

But as Mr Bush enjoys the Olympics, he can reflect that here at least is a foreign policy that may outlive his presidency. The case for applying more pressure on China to uphold human rights at home and international law abroad is unanswerable. The best context, though, is engagement.

philip.stephens@ft.com

more columns at www.ft.com/philipstephens

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008