The US should encourage China to move toward a freer system, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday, warning of inevitable tensions between its repressive political system and the demands of a modern economy.
"They obviously are moving from a continent power to a regional power and have interests in expanding beyond that," Rumsfeld said. "Now where is it all going to end? I don't know."
Rumsfeld was asked at a luncheon for the Los Angeles World Affairs Council about a Chinese general's recent warning that Beijing would resort to nuclear strikes in a conflict with the US over Taiwan.
Relations between the US, China and Taiwan have been "relatively clear and relatively well understood and relatively stable for a good many years now," Rumsfeld said.
The essence of it, as spelled out in the Taiwan Relations Act, was that any resolution of the Taiwan dispute must be carried out peacefully, he said.
But Rumsfeld went on to warn that if China wishes to maintain a growing economy "you're going to have to conduct yourself in a way that doesn't make you a pariah nation, a state that people don't want to be involved with."
"Because money is a coward. Money does not want to go to a place that is inhospitable to investment and to returns," he said.
"On the other hand, they've got a communist political system that is not open," he said.
"Now as you go down this road there is going to be a tension," between a closed political system and the demands for openness of a modern economy, he said.
"So the question is which is going to give?" he said.
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