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发帖数: 2258 | 1 BO’AO, China — The senior leadership of the Chinese government
increasingly views the competition between the United States and China as a
zero-sum game, with China the likely long-range winner if the American
economy and domestic political system continue to stumble, according to an
influential Chinese policy analyst.
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Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Obama spoke at a nuclear summit in Seoul, South Korea, last week
as President Hu Jintao of China listened.
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China views the United States as a declining power, but at the same time
believes that Washington is trying to fight back to undermine, and even
disrupt, the economic and military growth that point to China’s becoming
the world’s most powerful country, according to the analyst, Wang Jisi, the
co-author of “Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust,” a monograph
published this week by the Brookings Institution in Washington and the
Institute for International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.
Mr. Wang, who has an insider’s view of Chinese foreign policy from his
positions on advisory boards of the Chinese Communist Party and the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, contributed an assessment of Chinese policy toward the
United States. Kenneth Lieberthal, the director of the John L. Thornton
Center for China Studies at Brookings, and a former member of the National
Security Council under President Bill Clinton, wrote the appraisal of
Washington’s attitude toward China.
In a joint conclusion, the authors say the level of strategic distrust
between the two countries has become so corrosive that if not corrected the
countries risk becoming open antagonists.
The United States is no longer seen as “that awesome, nor is it trustworthy
, and its example to the world and admonitions to China should therefore be
much discounted,” Mr. Wang writes of the general view of China’s
leadership.
In contrast, China has mounting self-confidence in its own economic and
military strides, particularly the closing power gap since the start of the
Iraq war. In 2003, he argues, America’s gross domestic product was eight
times as large as China’s, but today it is less than three times larger.
The candid writing by Mr. Wang is striking because of his influence and
access, in Washington as well as in Beijing. Mr. Wang, who is dean of Peking
University‘s School of International Studies and a guest professor at the
National Defense University of the People’s Liberation Army, has wide
access to senior American policy makers, making him an unusual repository of
information about the thinking in both countries. Mr. Wang said he did not
seek approval from the Chinese government to write the study, nor did he
consult them about it.
It is fairly rare for a Chinese analyst who is not part of the strident
nationalistic drumbeat to strip away the official talk by both the United
States and China about mutual cooperation.
Both Mr. Wang and Mr. Lieberthal argue that beneath the surface, both
countries see deep dangers and threatening motivations in the policies of
the other.
Mr. Wang writes that the Chinese leadership, backed by the domestic news
media and the education system, believes that China’s turn in the world has
arrived, and that it is the United States that is “on the wrong side of
history.” The period of “keeping a low profile,” a dictum coined by the
Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1989, and continued until now by the
outgoing President Hu Jintao, is over, Mr. Wang warns.
“It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades,
before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world,
” he adds.
China’s financial successes, starting with weathering the 1998 Asian
financial crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis, the execution of
events like the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Shanghai Expo in 2010,
contrast with America’s “alarming” deficit, sluggish economic recovery
and polarized domestic politics, Mr. Wang says.
He does not address head on the far superior strength of the United States
in military weaponry. But he notes that Beijing has developed advanced
rocketry and space technology and sophisticated weapons systems without the
“United States or the U.S.-led world order.”
In the face of China’s strengths, and worries that the United States will
be displaced from its premier position in the world, Washington is engaged
in a host of activities, including stepped up spying by American planes and
ships along China’s borders that anger the Chinese, particularly its
military, Mr. Wang writes.
Promotion of human rights in China by American supported nongovernmental
organizations are viewed as an effort to “Westernize” the country and
directly undermine the Communist Party, a stance the party will not stand
for, he says.
That China is increasingly confident that it will prevail in the long run
against the United States is backed, in part, by Mr. Lieberthal’s appraisal
of American policy toward China.
Mr. Lieberthal cites findings from American intelligence based on internal
discussions among crucial Chinese officials that these officials assume “
very much a zero-sum approach” when discussing issues directly and
indirectly related to United States-China relations.
Because these are privileged communications not intended for public
consumption, American officials interpret them to be “particularly
revealing of China’s ‘real’ objectives,” Mr. Lieberthal writes.
In turn, American law enforcement officials see an alarming increase in
Chinese counterespionage and cyberattacks against the United States that
they have concluded are directed by the Chinese authorities to gather
information of national interest.
At a seminar last week at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where Brookings
finances a study center, Mr. Lieberthal said there was an increasing belief
on both sides that the two countries would be “antagonistic in 15 years.”
That would mean major military expenditures by both countries to deter each
other, and pushing other countries to take sides. “The worst case is that
this could lead to actual armed conflict, although that is by no means a
necessary consequence of mutual antagonism,” Mr. Lieberthal said in an
interview. |
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