On China (65 page)

Hu and Wen brought an unprecedented perspective to the task of managing China’s development and defining its world role. They represented the first generation of top officials without personal experience of the revolution, the first leaders in the Communist period to take office through constitutional processes—and the first to assume positions of national responsibility in a China unambiguously emerging as a great power.

Both men had direct experience of their country’s fragility and its complex domestic challenges. As young cadres during the 1960s, Hu and Wen were among the last students to receive formal higher education before the chaos of the Cultural Revolution closed the universities. Educated at Qinghua University in Beijing—a hub of Red Guard activity—Hu stayed at the university as a political counselor and research assistant, able to observe the chaos of the warring factions and, on occasion, becoming their target as allegedly “too individualistic.”
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When Mao decided to put an end to Red Guard depredations by sending the young generation to the countryside, Hu nevertheless shared their fate. He was dispatched to Gansu province, one of China’s more desolate and rebellious regions, to work at a hydraulic power plant. Wen, a recent graduate of the Beijing Institute of Geology, received a similar assignment, and was sent to work on mineralogical projects in Gansu, where he would remain for more than a decade. There in the far northwestern reaches of their turmoil-stricken country, Hu and Wen undertook a slow climb up the internal ranks of the Communist Party hierarchy. Hu rose to the position of secretary of the Communist Youth League for Gansu province. Wen became the deputy director of the provincial geological bureau. In an era of upheaval and revolutionary fervor, both men distinguished themselves by their steadiness and competency.

For Hu, the next advancement took place at the Central Party School in Beijing, where, in 1982, he came to the attention of Hu Yaobang, then General Secretary of the Party. It led to a rapid promotion to the position of Party Secretary for Guizhou, in China’s remote southwest; at forty-three, Hu Jintao was the youngest provincial Party Secretary in Communist Party history.
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His experience in Guizhou, a poor province with a substantial number of minorities, prepared Hu for his next assignment in 1988, as Party Secretary for the autonomous region of Tibet. Wen, meanwhile, was transferred to Beijing, where he served in a series of positions of increasing responsibility in the Communist Party’s Central Committee. He established himself as a trusted top aide to three successive Chinese leaders: Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, and, later, Jiang Zemin.

Both Hu and Wen had close personal experience with China’s 1989 unrest—Hu in Tibet, where he arrived in December 1988, just as a major Tibetan uprising was unfolding; Wen in Beijing, where as deputy to Zhao Ziyang he was at the General Secretary’s side during his last forlorn expedition among the students in Tiananmen Square.

Thus by the time they assumed the top national leadership posts in 2002–2003, Hu and Wen had gained a distinctive perspective on China’s resurgence. Trained in its rugged, unstable frontiers and serving at a middle level during Tiananmen, they were conscious of the complexity of China’s domestic challenges. Coming to power during a long period of sustained domestic growth and in the wake of China’s entry into the international economic order, they assumed the helm of a China undeniably “arriving” as a world power, with interests in every corner of the globe.

Deng had called a truce in the Maoist war on Chinese tradition and allowed the Chinese to reconnect with their historic strengths. But as other Chinese leaders occasionally hinted, the Deng era was an attempt to make up for lost time. There was in this period a sense of special exertion and a subtext of almost innocent embarrassment at China’s missteps. Jiang projected unshakable confidence and bonhomie, but he assumed the helm of a China still recovering from domestic crisis and endeavoring to regain its international standing.

It was at the turn of the century that the efforts of the Deng and Jiang periods were coming to fruition. Hu and Wen presided over a country that no longer felt constrained by the sense of apprenticeship to Western technology and institutions. The China they governed was confident enough to reject, and even on occasion subtly mock, American lectures on reform. It was now in a position to conduct its foreign policy not based on its long-term potential or its ultimate strategic role but in terms of its actual power.

Power to what end? Beijing’s initial approach to the new era was largely incremental and conservative. Jiang and Zhu had negotiated China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and full participation in the international economic order. China under Hu and Wen aspired first of all to normalcy and stability. Its goals, in the official formulations, were a “harmonious society” and a “harmonious world.” Its domestic agenda centered on continued economic development, and the preservation of social harmony within a vast population experiencing both unprecedented prosperity and unaccustomed levels of inequality. Its foreign policy avoided dramatic moves, and its chief policymakers responded circumspectly to appeals from abroad for China to play a more visible international leadership role. China’s foreign policy aimed primarily for a peaceful international environment (including good relations with the United States) and access to raw materials to ensure continued economic growth. And it retained a special interest in the developing world—a legacy of Mao’s Three Worlds theory—even as it moved into the rank of economic superpower.

As Mao had feared, the Chinese DNA had reasserted itself. Confronting the new challenges of the twenty-first century, and in a world where Leninism had collapsed, Hu and Wen turned to traditional wisdom. They described their reform aspirations not in terms of the utopian visions of Mao’s continuous revolution, but by the goal of building a “
xiaokang
” (“moderately well-off”) society—a term with distinctly Confucian connotations.
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They oversaw a revival of the study of Confucius in Chinese schools and a celebration of his legacy in popular culture. And they enlisted Confucius as a source of Chinese soft power on the world stage—in the official “Confucius Institutes” established in cities worldwide, and in the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, which featured a contingent of traditional Confucian scholars. In a dramatic symbolic move, in January 2011, China marked the rehabilitation of the ancient moral philosopher by installing a statue of Confucius at the center of the Chinese capital, Tiananmen Square, within sight of Mao’s mausoleum—the only other personality so honored.
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The new American administration signified a comparable change of generations. Both Hu and Bush were the first Presidents who had been bystanders at their nations’ traumatic experiences of the 1960s: for China, the Cultural Revolution; for the United States, the Vietnam War. Hu drew the conclusion that social harmony should be a guideline of his presidency. Bush came into office in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union amidst an American triumphalism that believed America capable of reshaping the world in its image. The younger Bush did not hesitate to conduct foreign policy under the banner of America’s deepest values. He spoke passionately about individual liberties and religious freedom, including on his visits to China.

Bush’s freedom agenda projected what seemed improbably fast evolutions for non-Western societies. Nevertheless, in the practice of his diplomacy, Bush overcame the historic ambivalence between America’s missionary and pragmatic approaches. He did so not through a theoretical construct but by means of a sensible balance of strategic priorities. He left no doubt about America’s commitment to democratic institutions and human rights. At the same time, he paid attention to the national security element without which moral purpose operates in a vacuum. Though criticized in the American debate for his alleged espousal of unilateralism, Bush, in dealing with China, Japan, and India simultaneously—countries that based their policy on national interest calculations—managed to improve relations with each—a model for a constructive Asian policy for the United States. In Bush’s presidency, U.S.-China relations were the matter-of-fact dealings of two major powers. Neither side supposed the other shared all of its aims. On some issues, like domestic governance, their goals were not compatible. Still, they found their interests intersecting in enough areas to confirm the emerging sense of partnership.

Washington and Beijing inched closer to each other’s positions on Taiwan in 2003, after Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian proposed a referendum on applying for U.N. representation under the name “Taiwan.” Since such a move would have been a violation of American undertakings in the three communiqués, Bush administration officials conveyed their opposition to Taipei. During Wen Jiabao’s December 2003 visit to Washington, Bush reaffirmed the three communiqués and added that Washington “opposes any unilateral decision by China or Taiwan to change the status quo”; he suggested that a referendum raising Taiwan’s political status would not find support in the United States. Wen responded with a notably forthcoming formulation on the desirability of peaceful reunification: “Our fundamental policy on the settlement of the question of Taiwan is peaceful reunification, and one country–two systems. We would do our utmost with utmost sincerity to bring about national unity and peaceful reunification through peaceful means.”
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One of the reasons for renewed cooperation was the attacks of September 11, which redirected America’s primary strategic focus away from East Asia to the Middle East and Southwest Asia, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a program to combat terrorist networks. China, no longer a revolutionary challenger of the international order and concerned about the impact of global terrorism within its own minority regions, especially Xinjiang, was quick to condemn the 9/11 attacks and offer intelligence and diplomatic support. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, it was notably less confrontational against the United States in the United Nations than some of America’s European allies were.

On a perhaps more fundamental level, however, the period began a process of divergence in Chinese and American assessments of how to deal with terrorism. China remained an agnostic bystander to the American projection of power across the Muslim world and above all to the Bush administration’s proclamation of ambitious goals of democratic transformation. Beijing retained its characteristic willingness to adjust to changes in alignments of power and in the composition of foreign governments without passing a moral judgment. Its main concerns were continued access to oil from the Middle East and (after the fall of the Taliban) protection of Chinese investments in Afghanistan’s mineral resources. With these interests generally fulfilled, China did not contest American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan (and may well have welcomed them in part because they represented a diversion of American military capabilities from East Asia).

The range of interaction between China and the United States signified the reestablishment of a central role for China in regional and world affairs. China’s quest for equal partnership was no longer the outsized claim of a vulnerable country; it was increasingly a reality backed by financial and economic capacities. At the same time, impelled by new security challenges and changing economic realities, and not least a new alignment of relative political and economic influence between them, both countries were engaged in searching debates about their domestic purposes, their world roles—and ultimately their relation to each other.

As the new century progressed, two trends emerged, in some respects working against each other. On many issues, Sino-American relations evolved in a largely cooperative manner. At the same time, differences rooted in history and geopolitical orientation began to be apparent. Economic issues and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are good examples.

Economic Issues:
When China was a minor player in the world economy, the exchange rate for its currency was not an issue; even during the 1980s and 1990s, it would have seemed improbable that the value of the yuan would become a daily point of dispute in American political debate and media analysis. But China’s economic rise and growing U.S.-China economic interdependence turned the once arcane issue into a daily controversy, with American frustrations—and Chinese suspicions about American intentions—expressed in increasingly insistent language.

The fundamental difference arises over the concept underlying the two sides’ respective currency policies. In the American view, the low value of the yuan (also known as the renminbi) is treated as currency manipulation favoring Chinese companies and, by extension, harming American companies operating in the same general industries. An undervalued yuan is said to contribute to the loss of American jobs—a point of serious political and emotional consequence in an age of incipient American austerity. In the Chinese view, the pursuit of a currency policy that favors domestic manufacturers is not an economic policy so much as an expression of China’s need for political stability. Thus in explaining to an American audience in September 2010 why China would not drastically revalue its currency, Wen Jiabao used social, not financial, arguments: “You don’t know how many Chinese companies would go bankrupt. There would be major disturbances. Only the Chinese premier has such pressure on his shoulders. This is the reality.”
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The United States treats economic issues from the point of view of the requirements of global growth. China considers the political implications, both domestic and international. When America urges China to consume more and export less, it puts forward an economic maxim. But for China, a shrinking export sector means a perhaps significant increase in unemployment with political consequences. Ironically, from the long-range point of view, were China to adopt the American conventional wisdom, it might reduce its incentives for ties with America because it would be less dependent on exports and foster the development of an Asian bloc because it would imply enhanced economic ties with neighboring countries.