There has been considerable grumbling among many -- perhaps the majority -- of China experts in the US about the direction the administration of President George W. Bush is taking on China policy. To some of them the administration seems to be downgrading the China relationship and their official statements are provocative. I suspect we will hear more of these views aimed at restoring the attitudes of the recent past. I hope they do not succeed. The relationship needed some rebalancing, not only in bilateral terms with China, but also with Taiwan and the cross-strait issue. That seems to be the direction in which the new government is heading, but it is neither downgrading the relationship nor being provocative.
Beijing, and many of the China experts, have been spoiled by the inordinate attention given to the PRC as an emerging superpower. This view of China has been buttressed in the US by references to its great size and rapid rate of growth. The argument has been used as the basis for treating China with great sensitivity, and supporting the gamble that it will succeed in becoming an open, prosperous, reliable power with which we all inevitably must do business in the years ahead.
This has led, in turn, to public condemnation of any action or statement that could cause Beijing any unhappiness. The apparent purpose of this kind of spin has been to protect the relationship, but the degrees of gravity of these warnings have invariably been the same regardless of the action intended.
According to the same experts, however, when the issue is China's potential as a security threat, the focus is not on China as a world player, but rather on its weakness as a military power. Then the same China becomes decades away from being able to challenge our interests. This ambivalence clearly has left members of Congress rather confused. From their perspective, it seems we have the obligation to sustain enormous trade deficits with and provide equally large capital investments to China, to help it become a great power, but not be concerned about its intentions on security matters where we have equally large interests. As a result, Congress voted to form a US-China Security Review Commission. The purpose is to provide an annual report to Congress on the national security implications and impact of the bilateral trade and economic ties between the US and China.
With the recent change in Senate leadership, it was expected that perhaps the new leadership might try to influence the direction the Bush administration was taking on its China policy. The first hearing of the commission last week had three senators -- two Democrats and one Republican -- testify on the interdependence between the economic and national security aspects of the US-China relationship. If there are differences between the two parties in the Senate on this issue, it was not apparent.
Senator Robert Byrd thought it would be a mistake to oversimplify this situation by failing to recognize the interdependence between the economic and national security aspects of the relationship. He wanted the commission to assess the overall effect of the huge annual trade surpluses and the mushrooming infusions of US equity capital to China on the
long-term security interests of the US. The EP-3 incident, he said, should put to rest the view that trade issues can be neatly separated from security issues.
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