Is China The Enemy?

The global relationship hijacking the most spare mental capacity of world leaders, particularly from the standpoint of international trade and security is that of China and the US. There is understandable tension between the two powers and their leaders. Figuring out how to defuse that tension and turn it to productive ends occupies the lives of not a few individuals.

In a compelling piece, Neil Weinberg, writing in Forbes, addresses this issue head-on, but in a thought-provoking manner: he takes an article written in 1991 by James Fallows about the US and...Japan, substitutes China and shows us that we have seen such issues before and successfully addressed them. For those forced to contemplate the world as it is as well as how it may be, this essay focuses attention on the salient concerns.


"Egypt has grabbed the world’s attention in recent days and pushed last month’s visit to the U.S. by Chinese President Hu Jintao off the front pages. It shall return.

The Sino-U.S. relationship is the world’s most important and, arguably, among its most complex and contentious. Just this morning the Wall Street Journal ran a story titled U.S. Firms, China Are Locked In Major War Over Technology.

In fact, it’s practically impossible to think of a major U.S. tech company—from Google to General Electric to Microsoft and Intel—that hasn’t been involved in a spat with China. Usually they involve the rising Asian giant either refusing to protect their intellectual property or insisting the U.S. firms hand it over to a local partner (aka, future rival) in order to gain market access.

To hear many commentators tell it, the rise of China presents the U.S. with a totally unprecedented array of challenges—from the military to unfair trade practices, intellectual property theft and currency manipulation.

Actually, neither these challenges or the sense of foreboding with which they’re being portrayed is new. The following was excerpted from a commentary titled “Is Japan the Enemy” written by James Fallows and originally appearing in the May 30, 1991 issue of The New York Review of Books. In the version below, the term “Japan” has been replaced with “China” and the name of Japan’s former prime minister replaced with that of President Hu Jintao.

After discussing their problems for ninety minutes, during which they also ate, the two leaders [Obama and Hu] declared that prospects looked bright. President Hu said, as Chinese officials traditionally do, that China’s only difficulty was the “perception gap,” which meant that “sometimes China’s efforts have not been understood and appreciated.”

China is tormented by…worries about material dependency… China’s economic success, after all, would seem to have given it more and more control over its trading partners around the world. Korea needs Chinese components to produce its own exports, from semiconductors to automobiles. The U.S. government needs Chinese investors at its Treasury-bill auctions. Poor countries around the world need foreign aid from China.

If we are looking for plausible causes of combat between China and America, they are not to be found in future Pearl Harbors—that is, in head on collisions of national interest. If they were to arise anywhere, they would probably come from disputes like those in the three years before Pearl Harbor: struggles over influence and prerogatives in third countries… It’s not hard to imagine China deciding to trade with or prop up a government the United States is attempting to bring down.

The recurrent pattern in China’s modern history…is an effort to avoid imminent subjugation by the West… China resented the Asian order that Britain, France, and the United States had constructed for their own benefit. .. All of these views are perfectly logical, yet they suggest that something more than “mutual understanding” will be required to reconcile American and Chinese interests.

One basic tenet of Anglo-American economics is that the government shouldn’t try to guide the economy, because bureaucrats will always be worse than the market at deciding how resources should be used. Economists in China, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have little to say about this theory, because many people in those countries assume that bureaucrats can make better choices than the market does. China has an energy policy made by bureaucrats, they would say; America, one from the market. Draw your own conclusions.

If any nation is pushed toward a martial policy by economic developments in Asia, it would seem to be the United States, not China. As the rest of Asia looks to China as the source of money and technology, America’s comparative advantages boil down to four: the possibility of immigration, the supply of movies and other pop culture, the continued strength of American universities, and the presence of the Seventh Fleet. If it seriously reduced its military presence in Asia the US would lose one of its principle sources of influence.

The United States must therefore project an image of strength vis-a-vis China in order to sustain the political leverage necessary to convince its ally to cooperate. If China perceives an American decline—and many policymakers already see that happening—it will be extremely difficult to secure Chinese cooperation.