Strategic Conflicts-1970s to Present

Unexpected mass demonstrations centered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and other Chinese cities in 1989 represented the most serious challenge to China’s post-Mao leadership. The negative impact of the Tiananmen crackdown on the American approach to China was compounded by the unforeseen and dramatic collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet bloc and other areas, leading to the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. These developments undermined the perceived need for the United States to cooperate pragmatically with China despite its brutal dictatorship on account of a U.S strategic need for international support against the Soviet Union. The soviet collapse also destroyed the strategic focus of American foreign policy during the Cold War. The ability of the U.S. president to use Cold War imperatives to override pluralistic U.S. domestic interests seeking to influence American interest groups focused on China’s authoritarian regime in strongly negative ways, endeavoring to push U.S. policy toward a harder line against China. Taken together, these circumstances generally placed the initiative in U.S-China relations with U.S. leaders and broader forces in the United States. Chinese leaders at first focused on maintaining internal stability as they maneuvered to sustain workable economic relations with the United States and while rebuffing major U.S. initiatives that infringed on Chinese internal political control or territorial and sovereignty issues.
Tiananmen Crackdown

The other conflicts are not as serious as the Tiananmen crackdown, but definitely heavily influenced Sino-American relations responded by strong remonstrance from China. The first turning point came with President Clinton’s advocacy in 1993 and then his withdrawal in 1994 of linkage between Chinese human rights practices and the granting of nondiscriminatory U.S. trade status to China. A second and more serious crisis resulted from Clinton’s decision in 1995 to allow the Taiwan president to visit the United States. In 1999 contentious negotiations over China’s entry into the WTO, Chinese mass demonstrations following the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

A pattern of dualism in U.S.-China relations has arisen as part of the positive equilibrium in this decade. The pattern involves constructive and cooperative engagement on the one hand and contingency planning or hedging on the other. It reflects the mix noted above of converging and completing interests and prevailing leadership suspicions and cooperation. Chinese and U.S. contingency planning and hedging against one another sometimes involves actions like the respective Chinese and U.S military buildups that are separate from and develop in tandem with the respective engagement policies the two leaderships pursue with each other. At the same time, dualism shows as each government has used engagement to build positive and cooperative ties while at the same time seeking to use these ties to build interdependencies and webs of actions that oppose its interests. The policies of engagement pursued by the United States and China toward one another are designed to tie down aggressive, assertive, or other negative policy tendencies of the other power through webs of interdependence in bilateral and multilateral relationships. The recent positive outcome in U.S.-China relations is based on an increasing convergence of these respective engagement policies.

So this is my last post regarding the overview of Sino-American relations from 1900s to present. From next week I will talk about the current issues on Sino-American relationship starting with one of the hottest topics-the valuation of Chinese currency Yuan.