林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

Isolating China Doesn’t Work

John Pomfret 

The New York Times, FED 06, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/opinion/isolating-china-doesnt-work.html?_r=0

accessed Feb 07, 2017

● 作者為原美聯社駐北京記者

● 30萬中國留學生在美國留學

● 中國投資在美國有1,000億美元

● “川普叫囂，襯托出習近平像政治家。”

林中斌 2017.2.13

The United States and China have been inextricably linked since the birth of America. The first fortunes made in the United States came thanks to the tea trade with China. The profits made in Canton and reinvested in America transformed the young republic into the 19th century’s factory of the world. For its part, 19th-century China turned to the United States as the first country to educate its young in a desperate effort to counter the West. In the present day, the United States, with its open wallets, open universities and open society, has been by far the most important foreign enabler of China’s rise.

Throughout the course of this shared history, Americans have generally held that a strong China was in their interests. But now that China is strong, many Americans are not so sure. For the last decade and a half, neither side has figured out how much of the other it wants and how much of the other it hates.

No matter who became United States president in 2017, a reckoning was due. China’s rise has been too rapid. Along the way, Beijing has gamed the international system created by the United States to increase its growth at the expense of others, engaged in widespread industrial espionage as a shortcut to innovation, repressed free speech at home and bolstered governments abroad such as North Korea that threaten their neighbors and the United States.

Regardless of political party, the majority of those in Washington who make China policy have united around the view that Beijing has, in the words of one adviser to President Trump, “played the United States for a sucker for far too long.”

But the complexity and depth of the relationship makes reconfiguring it fraught with risks. China is now a major world power, and its economy is tightly interwoven with America’s. More than 300,000 Chinese students attend American universities. Chinese firms have invested upward of $100 billion in the United States. Apple sells more iPhones in China than in the United States, and 150,000 Boeing employees rely on its China sales for their jobs.

In the last few weeks, both President Xi Jinping and Mr. Trump have set out to show the world how different they are. On Jan. 17 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Xi defended globalization and equated protectionism with “locking oneself in a dark room.” Mr. Trump’s retort came on Jan. 20 with a fiery inauguration speech promising that in all ways he would put America first. As one of his first acts as president, Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact grouping 12 nations along the Pacific Rim, excluding China. Mr. Xi, seeking to capitalize on the folly of Mr. Trump’s move, then invited those Asian neighbors abandoned by America to join a Chinese-led regional economic partnership.

There is a rich irony in both approaches. At Davos, Mr. Xi portrayed himself as the un-Trump, the last defender of globalization. It was a cynical move: China’s embrace of globalization can roughly be defined as having foreigners buy as much Chinese stuff as possible and demanding that foreign firms share their technological secrets with Chinese partners so that a Chinese competitor can learn to make a product at a lower price.

For his part, Mr. Trump seems to be channeling more Mao Zedong than Andrew Jackson. Mao used the passions whipped up by China’s fight with America during the Korean War as a way to bring his Communist revolution to the point of no return, to make China the un-America. A Chinese Communist Party directive in 1951 ordered that the admiration for the United States that coursed through Chinese society must be redirected into “hate the U.S. imperialists,” with the goal of “encouraging national self-confidence and self-respect” — forever joining the yin of hating America with the yang of loving China.

The Chinese Maoist thinker Zhang Hongliang said in a recent blog post that Mr. Trump’s commitment to put America first reminds him of Mao’s famed 1949 speech that the “Chinese people have stood up.” In Mr. Trump’s vow to battle Washington’s elite, Mr. Zhang sees Mao’s promise to obliterate capitalist overlords and establish a “people’s government.” And in Mr. Trump’s maddening unpredictability there are echoes of one of Mao’s famous quotes: “There is chaos under heaven, the situation is excellent.”

Mr. Trump has returned to a more negative view of the Middle Kingdom that has shadowed America’s policy of benevolent solicitude since the two countries began interacting in 1784.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump’s accusations that China was “raping” the United States over trade recalled the railings of Denis Kearney, the firebrand founder of the Workingmen’s Party in 1880s California who at the end of each rally would lead the crowd in a chant, “The Chinese must go!” Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Kearney masterfully merged a hatred of the robber barons — the elites of the day — with a fear of China.

The Workingmen’s Party used its heft to lobby Washington to bar Chinese people from America’s shores. This coalesced in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which, in its prohibition of Chinese laborers’ traveling to America, was the first time Americans targeted a specific immigrant group for exclusion from the United States. Sound familiar?

Mr. Trump’s tactics mark an end to the strategy pursued for decades by American leaders who held that an open America would create a more open China. In this, he is ignoring the main lesson of the two countries’ shared history: Isolating China doesn’t work.

It took 61 years for the United States to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it did an enormous amount of hurt. It persuaded the Chinese to favor Communism over capitalism and kept the Chinese community in America isolated, small and scared.

Ignoring China in the 1950s did a similar disservice. Indeed, Mao was clearly petrified of closer ties with America, telling the Soviet ambassador in January 1955 that a lack of relations with the United States “gives us the chance to more freely educate our people in the anti-American spirit.”

Starting a trade war with China or gearing up for a military conflict in the South China Sea will do very much the same. It will push China into a defensive crouch, validate its paranoia and allow it to nurture its anti-American fears. It will also provide Mr. Xi with the opportunity to profit from Mr. Trump’s missteps, to appear statesmanlike when Mr. Trump appears bellicose, to bully Taiwan and to make China’s repressive system of government seem more attractive.

Far better for Mr. Trump to use his maddening unpredictability and all the leverage available to an American president to dare China to open its society further and to become a responsible world leader. The long history that binds China and the United States should strengthen the relationship, not doom it to failure.