How to Define Strategic Opportunity
In the pursuit of
dealing with a growing list of issues, Beijing and Washington
during the 2000s searched for an overall framework to define their
relationship. The effort was symbolized by the inauguration of the
U.S.-China Senior Dialogue and the U.S.-China Strategic Economic
Dialogue (now merged into one Strategic and Economic Dialogue)
during George W. Bush’s second term. This was in part an attempt to
revitalize the spirit of candid exchange on conceptual issues that
prevailed between Washington and Beijing during the 1970s, as
described in earlier chapters.
In China, the search
for an organizing principle for the era took the form of a
government-endorsed analysis that the first twenty years of the
twenty-first century represented a distinct “strategic opportunity
period” for China. The concept reflected both a recognition of
China’s progress and potential for strategic gains,
and—paradoxically—an apprehension about its continuing
vulnerabilities. Hu Jintao gave voice to this theory at a November
2003 meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee’s Political
Bureau, where he suggested that a unique convergence of domestic
and international trends put China in the position to advance its
development by “leaps and bounds.” Opportunity was linked to
danger, according to Hu Jintao; like other rising powers before it,
if China “lost the opportunity” presented, “it might become a
straggler.”7
Wen affirmed the same
assessment in a 2007 article, in which he warned that
“[o]pportunities are rare and fleeting,” and recalled that China
had missed an earlier opportunity period because of “major
mistakes, especially the ten-year catastrophe of the ‘great
cultural revolution.’” The first fifth of the new century was an
opportunity period “which we must tightly grasp and in which we can
get much accomplished.” Making good use of this window, Wen
assessed, would be “of extreme importance and significance” for
China’s development goals.8
What did China have
the strategic opportunity to accomplish? To the extent the Chinese
debate on this question can be said to have had a formal beginning,
it may be found in a series of special lectures and study sessions
convened by Chinese academics and the country’s top leadership
between 2003 and 2006. The program concerned the rise and fall of
great powers in history: the means of their rise; the causes of
their frequent wars; and whether, and how, a modern great power
might rise without recourse to military conflict with the dominant
actors in the international system. These lectures were
subsequently elaborated into The Rise of Great
Powers, a twelve-part film series aired on Chinese national
television in 2006 and watched by hundreds of millions of viewers.
As the scholar David Shambaugh has noted, this may have been a
uniquely philosophical moment in the history of great power
politics: “Few, if any, other major or aspiring powers engage in
such self-reflective discourse.”9
What lessons could
China draw from these historical precedents? In one of the first
and most comprehensive attempts at an answer, Beijing sought to
allay foreign apprehensions over its growing power by articulating
the proposition of China’s “peaceful rise.” A 2005 Foreign Affairs article by the influential Chinese
policy figure Zheng Bijian served as a quasi-official policy
statement. Zheng offered the assurance that China had adopted a
“strategy . . . to transcend the traditional ways for great powers
to emerge.” China sought a “new international political and
economic order,” but it was “one that can be achieved through
incremental reforms and the democratization of international
relations.” China, Zheng wrote, would “not follow the path of
Germany leading up to World War I or those of Germany and Japan
leading up to World War II, when these countries violently
plundered resources and pursued hegemony. Neither will China follow
the path of the great powers vying for global domination during the
Cold War.”10
Washington’s response
was to articulate the concept of China as a “responsible
stakeholder” in the international system, abiding by its norms and
limits and shouldering additional responsibilities in line with its
rising capabilities. In a 2005 speech at the National Committee on
United States–China Relations, Robert Zoellick, then Deputy
Secretary of State, put forward this American response to Zheng’s
article. While Chinese leaders may have hesitated to grant the
implication that they had ever been an “irresponsible” stakeholder,
Zoellick’s speech amounted to an invitation to China to become a
privileged member, and shaper, of the international
system.
Almost concurrently,
Hu Jintao delivered a speech at the United Nations General
Assembly, entitled “Build Towards a Harmonious World of Lasting
Peace and Common Prosperity,” on the same theme as Zheng Bijian’s
article. Hu reaffirmed the importance of the United Nations system
as a framework for international security and development and
outlined “what China stands for.” While reiterating that China
favored the trend toward democratization of world affairs—in
practice, of course, a relative diminution of American power in the
direction of a multipolar world—Hu insisted that China would pursue
its goals peacefully and within the framework of the U.N.
system:
China will, as always, abide by the purposes and principles of the U.N. charter, actively participate in international affairs and fulfill its international obligations, and work with other countries in building towards a new international political and economic order that is fair and rational. The Chinese nation loves peace. China’s development, instead of hurting or threatening anyone, can only serve peace, stability, and common prosperity in the world.11
The “peaceful rise”
and “harmonious world” theories evoked the principles of the
classical era that had secured China’s greatness: gradualist ;
harmonizing with trends and eschewing open conflict; organized as
much around moral claims to a harmonious world order as actual
physical or territorial domination. They also described a route to
great power status plausibly attractive to a generation of
leadership that had come of age during the social collapse of the
Cultural Revolution, that knew its legitimacy now depended in part
on delivering China’s people a measure of wealth and comfort and a
respite from the previous century’s upheavals and privations.
Reflecting an even more measured posture, the phrase “peaceful
rise” was amended in official Chinese pronouncements to “peaceful
development,” on the reported grounds that the notion of a “rise”
was too threatening and triumphalist.
Over the next three
years, through one of the periodic confluences of random events by
which historical tides shift, the worst financial crisis since the
Great Depression coincided with a period of protracted ambiguity
and stalemate in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the aweinspiring
2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and a continued period of robust
Chinese economic growth. The confluence of events caused some of
China’s elites, including portions of the upper echelons of China’s
government, to revisit the assumptions underlying the gradualist
position articulated in 2005 and 2006.
The causes of the
financial crisis and its worst effects were primarily in the United
States and Europe. It led to unprecedented emergency infusions of
Chinese capital to Western countries and companies, and appeals by
Western policymakers for China to change the value of its currency
and increase its domestic consumption to foster the health of the
world economy.
Ever since Deng’s
call to “reform and open up,” China had seen the West as a model of
economic prowess and financial expertise. It was assumed that
whatever the Western countries’ ideological or political
shortcomings, they knew how to manage their economies and the
world’s financial system in a uniquely productive manner. While
China refused to acquire this knowledge at the cost of Western
political tutelage, the implicit assumption among many Chinese
elites was that the West had a kind of knowledge worthy of diligent
study and adaptation.
The collapse of
American and European financial markets in 2007 and 2008—and the
spectacle of Western disarray and miscalculation contrasted with
Chinese success—seriously undermined the mystique of Western
economic prowess. It prompted a new tide of opinion in China—among
the vocal younger generation of students and Internet users and
quite possibly in portions of the political and military
leadership—to the effect that a fundamental shift in the structure
of the international system was taking place.
The symbolic
culmination of this period was the drama of the Beijing Olympics,
which took place just as the economic crisis was beginning to tear
at the West. Not purely a sporting event, the Games were conceived
as an expression of China’s resurgence. The opening ceremony was
symbolic. The lights in the vast stadium were darkened. At exactly
eight minutes after eight o’clock (China time), on the eighth day
of the eighth month of the year, taking advantage of the auspicious
number that had caused that day to be selected for the
opening,12 two thousand drums broke the silence with
one huge sound and continued playing for ten minutes, as if to say:
“We have arrived. We are a fact of life, no longer to be ignored or
trifled with but prepared to contribute our civilization to the
world.” After that, the global audience saw an hour of tableaux on
themes of China’s civilization. China’s period of weakness and
underachievement—one might call it China’s “long nineteenth
century”—was officially drawn to a close. Beijing was once again a
center of the world, its civilization the focus of awe and
admiration.
At a conference of
the World Forum on China Studies held in Shanghai in the aftermath
of the Olympics, Zheng Bijian, the author of the “peaceful rise”
concept, told a Western reporter that China had at last overcome
the legacy of the Opium War and China’s century of struggles with
foreign intrusion, and that it was now engaged in a historic
process of national renewal. The reforms initiated by Deng
Xiaoping, Zheng said, had allowed China to solve the “riddle of the
century,” developing rapidly and lifting millions out of poverty.
As it emerged as a major power, China would rely on the attraction
of its model of development, and relations with other countries
would be “open, non-exclusive and harmonious,” aiming to “mutually
open up the route to world development.”13
The cultivation of
harmony did not preclude the pursuit of strategic advantage. At a
July 2009 conference of Chinese diplomats, Hu Jintao delivered a
major speech assessing the new trends. He affirmed that the first
twenty years of the twenty-first century were still a “strategic
opportunity period” for China; this much, he said, had not changed.
But in the wake of the financial crisis and other seismic shifts,
Hu suggested that the shi was now in
flux. In light of the “complex and deep changes” now underway,
“there have been some new changes in the opportunities and
challenges we are facing.” The opportunities ahead would be
“important”; the challenges would be “severe.” If China guarded
against potential pitfalls and managed its affairs diligently, the
period of upheaval might be turned to its advantage:
Since entering the new century and the new stage, internationally there has been a series of major events of a comprehensive and strategic nature, which have had a significant and far-reaching influence on all aspects of the international political and economic situation. Looking at the world, peace and development are still the main theme of the times, but the competition for comprehensive national power is becoming more intense; the demands of an expanding number of developing countries to participate equally in international affairs are growing stronger by the day; calls to bring about the democratization of international relations are becoming louder; the international financial crisis has caused the current world economic and financial system and the world economic governance structure to receive a major shock; the prospects for global multipolarity have grown clearer; the international situation has produced some new features and trends worthy of extremely close attention.14
With world affairs in
a state of flux, China’s task was to dispassionately analyze and
navigate the new configuration. Out of the crisis, opportunities
might arise. But what were these opportunities?