"Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors," Richard Nixon famously wrote in 1967.
Nixon's words, appearing in his landmark article in Foreign Affairs, are the basis of a half century of American and Western policy. After the Cold War, the West, led by Washington, sought to integrate the People's Republic of China into the post-war international system.
Is it now in the West's interest for China to succeed or fail? We have no choice: We must make it fail. If Communist China succeeds, it will mean the end of the West.
Nixon's "engagement" approach after the Cold War should have worked. The idea was that China's regime, given a stake in the existing system, would then defend it. This strategy was at the heart of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick's "responsible stakeholder" formulation, announced in 2005. It was in many senses the grandest wager of our time.
By now, however, that bet looks like a mistake history will remember. For as the Communist Party grew stronger, it did not align itself with its Western supporters. On the contrary, it came to believe it could avenge centuries-old grievances and remake the world in its own image. The West's generous approach created the one thing it had hoped to avoid: an aggressive state redrawing its borders by force, attacking liberal values around the world, and undermining institutions at the heart of the international system.
What went wrong? "Past U.S. policy toward China fundamentally underestimated the hostility, ruthlessness, and will to power of the Chinese Communist Party," Scott Harold told me when he was at RAND's Center for Asia Pacific Policy.
Western leaders spent decades convincing themselves that the form of the Chinese government did not matter. Moreover, Western leaders failed to listen to what their Chinese counterparts had been saying. Throughout this century, Xi Jinping has been recycling imperial-era views that the Chinese emperor ruled tianxia—"All Under Heaven"—thereby suggesting the People's Republic of China should now be considered the world's only sovereign state.
Xi's subordinates have been explicitly making that case, and since 2017, they have argued that the moon and Mars should be considered a part of China, even talking about excluding other countries from going to those near heavenly bodies.
"China was the center of its own hierarchical and theoretically universal concept of order," noted Henry Kissinger in World Order. "China considered itself, in a sense, the sole sovereign government of the world." To China, the emperor was a figure of cosmic dimensions, the one and only link "between the human and the divine," explains Kissinger.
Ludicrous? Yes. But China has nonetheless announced its intentions: It will rule the world if it has the means to do so. As Kissinger explained, China's leaders see the world as one, because they have trouble working with others. "In all of China's extravagant history," he wrote in On China, "there was no precedent for how to participate in a global order, whether in concert with—or opposition to—another superpower."
Today, China's imperial views mix with the country's communist system. Hostility toward others, reinforced by the racism of the regime's Han nationalism, means that China cannot co-exist with others in the international system, which since 1648 has recognized the sovereignty of a multitude of states.
Xi Jinping is not an aberration. He exhibits the belligerence of a communist system that idealizes struggle and domination.
He also exhibits the belligerence of a system that is fundamentally insecure. China's regime identifies the world's free societies as existential threats not because of what those societies may say or do but because of who they are. The Communist Party is worried about the inspirational impact on the Chinese people of the values and the forms of governance of the world's democracies, especially those of the United States.
These Chinese views have consequences. The Communist regime believes it has the right to do anything it wants—including spreading disease, stealing intellectual property, proliferating nuclear weapon tech, and breaking apart neighbors.
Other than surrendering sovereignty and submitting to Chinese rule, there is nothing the West can do to accommodate Communist China. China's regime believes it is in a do-or-die struggle with us. Taking the long view, we must win.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China and the just-released China Is Going to War. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
