Getting China Right

Disagreements over how history might have unfolded if different decisions had been taken are ultimately impossible to resolve.Following excerpts adapted from Getting China Wrong by Aaron L.

Friedberg published by John Wiley and Sonsby Aaron L. FriedbergThe West's strategy of engagement with China has failed.

More than three decades of trade and investment with the advanced democracies have left that country far richer and stronger than it would otherwise have been. But growth and development have not caused China's rulers to relax their grip on political power, abandon their mercantilist economic policies, or accept the rules and norms of the existing international system.

To the contrary: China today is more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad, and more obviously intent on establishing itself as the world's preponderant power than at any time since the death of Chairman Mao. What went wrong? Put simply, the democracies underestimated the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party.

For far too long, the United States and its allies failed to take seriously the Party's unwavering determination to crush opposition, build national power, and fulfill its ideological and geopolitical ambitions. In this timely and powerfully argued study, Aaron Friedberg identifies the assumptions underpinning engagement, describes the counterstrategy that China's Communist Party rulers devised in order to exploit the West's openness while defeating its plans, and explains what the democracies must do now if they wish to preserve their prosperity, protect their security, and defend their common values.

Contrary to the expectations of its architects and supporters, the policy of engagement did not induce the CCP regime to liberalize either politically or economically, nor did it result in China becoming a status quo power and a "responsible stakeholder" in the existing international order. Instead, over the course of the last three decades, Beijing has grown more repressive and militantly nationalistic at home, more aggressive and revisionist in its external behavior, and more committed to mercantilist, market-distorting economic practices.

Before turning to the question of how the United States and the other advanced industrial democracies should adjust their policies for dealing with China in light of these realities, this chapter will begin by addressing three final questions about the past: Is it, in fact, fair to say that engagement was a failure? To what extent can recent developments in China's behavior be attributed to the idiosyncratic decisions of a single leader, as opposed to the functioning of the CCP system as a whole? And, whatever the cause, why did it take so long for Western observers and policy-makers to acknowledge what was happening and begin to respond?The...