Contrasting Visions: US, China and World Order

CIAO DATE: 2/00

Contrasting Visions: US, China and World Order

November 18, 1999, Hong Kong

Speeches and Transcripts: 1999

It has been an excellent week to learn a lot about this very vibrant and dynamic city here on the edge of China. I recognized two days ago when I was preparing for my talk that given the WTO accession and of course given the overwhelming interest which this city has in issues of economic vibrancy, growth, business opportunity and so forth, that the remarks I might make today may not be very welcome.

Coming from Washington, first of all, which everyone knows is an odd enough place as it is, but second of all coming from a Washington in which the environment overall I should say for US-China relations is rather poisoned. It is not a particularly fun place to be at the moment if you are in favor of a stable relationship with China in many respects. That given, these points - my remarks to you today - might seem a bit gloomy, but I think it is useful and questions we had around the lunch table reinforced this for me.

People ask, how can this be? If you just look at the reality of China and what it represents, and certainly the way you look at China from this vantage point, how can one not see that there is opportunity there, not threats or problems. And while I sympathize and share that view, I think it is useful for us to think a little bit more deeply, at least to try to help understand just a little bit better where some of the pessimism and problems of the US-China relationship may be coming from at least in Washington. And we can debate whether or not these perceptions are fair or poorly conceived. But I can assure you that these perceptions exist, and that they exist in important quarters, not simply representative of the lunatic fringe of any particular party.

What I’d like to try to do today in just about twenty minutes is to try to speak a little bit about what I like to call contrasting visions; that is to say the fundamentally different ways that the United States and China look upon the world. And I’ll make the argument that why in certain tactical ways, where we tend to focus most of our attention - like the Belgrade bombing, or Lee Teng Hui’s “state to state” statement, or even the most recent breakthrough on the WTO, and these sorts of tactical ways - this is where we dwell a great deal in trying to understand the US-China relationship. But I think that misses some very important fundamental issues, and that much of the relationship has been defined over the years of dealing with what I might call micro-issues, issues which are really symptomatic of much deeper problems, manifestations of much deeper problems in the relationship. And, until we are able to address some of the more fundamental issues in the relationship, we are unlikely I can say to have significant improvement or stabilization in the relationship ahead.

Let me just take the Belgrade bombing as one example. What an enormous amount of media attention, rightly so, was devoted to that and to the subsequent reaction by Chinese demonstrators in Beijing and other cities. For me, as important as this issue is and will be, in fact it was - the reason it was so intense, the reasons the issues were so dramatic - is because they were representative of much deeper issues and differences which the two sides have about one another. For China, that single event of bombing of the embassy crystallized, in a dramatic and tragic moment, all that China has been saying about the United States for the past two or three years: that it is increasingly unilateralist; that it is increasingly hegemonic; that it is increasingly willing to use its enormous military and technological advantage to its benefit, to its singular benefit; that it is willing to dismiss China’s concerns and work outside of multilateral structures in order to achieve American ends. Now, we can argue about whether that is true or not. I think that Chinese perspectives are largely wrong on many of those issues, but I believe that exists and that helps explain why, as we talked at the lunch table today, the rather thin veneer, as Allen Choate put it, of this relationship was easily broken and dramatically played itself out on the streets of Beijing. In other words, there are much deeper issues we need to think about before we can put our relationship on a more stable footing.

I don’t want to go into a lot of nitty gritty detail, but let me just lay out what I think are some of the fundamental differences that our two countries have, about the way the world should be ordered for example. Being a foreign policy specialist I don’t think I will get into differences of economic viewpoint, where I think we have the most hope of establishing a relationship, but let’s look at some of the ways in the security realm that the two countries look at the way the world should be ordered. For example, China understands the United States to be a hegemon. I use that in international relations jargon - in other words, the most dominant power in the international system and preferring the status quo. Hegemons prefer the status quo. In other words, the world runs basically because of them; and they are able to maintain the world pretty much how it is. China, I see as a revisionist power; China wishes to try to change the way the world system looks at the moment. It is a rising power. It is a power that did not make the rules, and is seeking to change them.

We have of course the problem of developed versus developing countries between the United States and China, which I think expresses itself in various ways of fundamental difference. Of course we have the difference between the way our two countries look at the relationship between state and citizen. We have the Chinese view, which I think we can largely define as the “rule of man”. Whereas we like to believe in the West that we run by the “rule of law”. Now that may be changing in China, and I think that it is an encouraging development that it does. But this is a fundamental difference in the way we look at how our states should operate in the international system. Generally then, I think what we are talking about is in China a continuing uncertainty about its role in the world and accepting the rules of the game, especially when the rules of the game have been designed to benefit the system hegemon, the United States.

Let me turn to a couple specifics. There are four issue areas I think we can point to with regard to world order where these two countries differ considerably. These four issue areas, and there are many others, but let’s just take a look at these in the time we have. First, sovereignty and the use of force, fundamental aspects of the way the world should work. Nuclear weapons and deterrence and their role, beneficial or not. Alliances and collective security, as being stabilizing factors in the international system or not. And lastly, non-proliferation.

I think I don’t need to tell this audience Chinese views about sovereignty. I think one of the most fundamental principles, as we all know, are the so-called five principles of peaceful coexistence, which China has put forward as its most basic outlook upon the world. These five principles are at their core all about sovereignty. Number one, mutual respect for territorial integrity, and mutual non-aggression, that’s number two. Three, noninterference in each other’s internal affairs. Equality and mutual benefit. And fifthly, peaceful coexistence. These are five terms that are talking about an inviolability of sovereignty which the Chinese so dearly hold. Now, this is not to say that other countries don’t also have somewhat narrow definitions of sovereignty when it suits their interest, such as the United States. But, I think the difference lies in the fact that China has a common self-perception as a kind of weak and less confident and aggrieved nation. It clings more tightly and desperately to its sovereign prerogatives. Whereas other countries, such as those in the West who have become more confident about their place in the world, more powerful and mutually trusting, have I would say a much looser definition about sovereignty. This is going to increase to the degree that so-called humanitarian interventions or other such approaches to international security become more prominent. This may create difficulties for the way that China and the US view the world.

We can go into more of these things in detail, but we are running relatively brief here. Let’s turn to nuclear weapons and deterrence. There is a funny paradox I think when we consider these issues. On the one hand, we have the United States who holds on to the notion that it can use nuclear weapons first in a crisis and has come to increasingly rely on at the same time more precise conventional forces as a means to project power. Also, the United States has increasingly advocated the development of strategic defenses as a way to deter aggression. Now, on the other hand the Chinese, while they increasingly advocate a “no first use” policy, have increasingly come to rely on nuclear capable missiles as a means to safeguard national interest. And there is limited evidence that they are increasingly seeing the salience of nuclear weapons as a war-fighting tool. This has not been officially stated, but there is increasing evidence of this from their publications. And of course we know that China is undergoing a rather ambitious modernization of its nuclear arsenal, warheads aside, in the development of its solid fuel and mobile ballistic missiles. In other words, at a time while the United States while officially claiming that nuclear weapons have salience, because of our first use doctrine, but in fact downgrading the use of nuclear weapons and turning to defense; the Chinese, on the other hand, while officially claiming that they adhere to a no first use policy, are moving in directions which may belie that position. And, to make it even more complicated, some Chinese military officials I’ve spoken with dismiss US first use policy - they don’t believe us, that we would actually use nuclear weapons first, and I have a hard time imagining a situation where the United States government would myself. But on the other hand, US officials dismiss Chinese no first use. No one in Washington, a serious analyst, believes the Chinese position on no first use. It is not verifiable, etc. So, this really raises a lot of problems in the way our two countries talk to each other on this very important issue.

Efforts underway by the United States government to try to get the Chinese to sit down and talk about even broad based issues - of defining deterrence for example - have failed; at least at the official level. China simply doesn’t want to talk to us about what for them must remain a heavily shrouded and opaque aspect of their military program. But, as such agreements as detargeting our nuclear weapons at each other are symbolically useful, yes, but they may do more harm than good in some ways in that they might downplay very real differences in the way our two countries perceive the possibility of use and doctrine on these weapons of mass destruction.

How about alliances and collective security? Again I don’t think I need to go into detail here. You are all very familiar with the value the United States places on its allied relationships in this region - with Japan, Korea, our relationships with Australia, the Philippines, for example, and others - and how firmly the United States, on an official level, believes that these are indeed the cornerstones of security in this region that have maintained relative peace, allowed for the prosperity of the region to blossom over the past fifty years. On the other hand though, Chinese views have become increasingly strife as to our alliance relationships. For example, they don’t name the United States directly, but when their July 1998 Defense White Paper came out, the most authoritative document I should say on their defense positions, they claimed that expanding military blocks - translation NATO - and strengthened military alliances - translated the US-Japan Defense Guidelines - are factors of “instability in the world today.” And I would presume that this view has only been strengthened in the wake of the NATO led action in Yugoslavia.

Now, China’s concern may be understandable. They see these military alliances moving in uncomfortable directions that may threaten their security; that these alliances could be turned in ways against them. And yet, the fact remains that we continue to believe, officially, that our alliances are not threatening but are indeed factors for stability in the region. This links I think also to questions of sovereignty when we ask the question of whether or not our alliances ought to be reconfigured in a way that could lend to peace keeping operations in different parts of the world. I think China would be openly opposed to this if it were unilaterally taken outside of UN mandates such as in the case against Yugoslavia.

Finally, let me just take a few more minutes to say a few things about nonproliferation. This has been an issue that has constantly changed the US-China relationship, and while I would say that overall there has been some significant progress, I think it is still a thin veneer which separates open break and open continued apparent cooperation. First of all, it is important for Americans to understand that as an emergent regional power, China simply does not have the same concerns as we do about the proliferation of missiles or nuclear weapons. China is not threatened particularly by these proliferation aspects where the US senses it is: its bases abroad, its alliance relationships, even people talk about attack against the United States. And it wasn’t really until the Indian tests of May 1998 that China has really begun to get religion, so to speak, about the importance of nonproliferation. But I think it is important to realize that they don’t see the issue in the same way we do, and why should they?

Secondly, what the US sees as proliferation and what the Chinese see as proliferation are quite different things. The Chinese do not face a ballistic missile threat as I said before, and taking its own security considerations into account, China points to things like fighter aircraft proliferation in Taiwan as an example of proliferation, something which the United States rejects. China also sees the development of a theatre missile defense as a proliferation problem, something which the United States definitely rejects.

Also China, as a developing country, looks down upon what they see as supply-side cartels, these sort of technology control regimes which try to prevent and limit the spread of potentially sensitive, dubious technology. China is on record widely as denouncing these as supply-side cartels often meant to keep the developing world down. And lastly, there is very good evidence that China sees its agreements bilaterally with the United States on proliferation questions as contingent, not as iron clad. There is very strong evidence from interviews with both Chinese and US negotiators on these questions that the overall atmosphere of the US-China relationship has everything to do with whether or not China is going to be prepared to maintain its nonproliferation commitments such as not selling cruise missiles to Iran, not providing nuclear assistance of even a civil nature to unsafeguarded facilities in Pakistan. Most importantly, of course, is the US relationship with Taiwan, on which China has repeatedly tried to create linkage — between our relationship with Taiwan and their agreement to cut back on what we find to be troublesome exports. As long as this contingent sort of aspect of the agreement remains, I think it is still a thin veneer. We shouldn’t be overly expectant on the question of nonproliferation.

These are just a few of what I see to be very fundamental differences. I am trying to look beneath the headlines. I am trying to look beneath the sort of flurry of activity that often happens between the US and China and tend to consume our energies, and recognize that there are far deeper problems which our two sides need to try to address. I’m not hopeful on this score. Looking ahead over the next 12 to 18 months, I don’t see — other than the WTO agreement, which as you all know has its own embedded issues and problems which could arise — but beyond that I don’t see that the atmosphere between our two countries is in a particularly good place to allow the sort of strategic dialogue and more serious thinking about our relationship that is needed to go forward. I’m happy to talk a little bit more specifically about some of the candidates in Washington and the political mood in Washington, and what I see as a relatively, at best, I would say only a slight stabilization of the relationship over the next 12 months or so.

For the past decade or more, again looking at fundamental problems in the United States, two critical aspects of a more stable relationship with China have been absent, and they will continue to be so. First is what I’ve been describing as reaching an agreement with China about our strategic differences as well as our strategic shared interests, but I think it is more important in some sense to talk about the differences because we have been ignoring them. That’s one thing that has been missing for ten years. Secondly, doing a better job of establishing a domestic consensus in the United States about those understandings of both convergent interest and divergent interest. Without these two pillars I suspect that the United States will remain ambivalent and unable to reach a very clear consensus about what kind of relationship it wants with China. That I think is a very bad development.

As we know, as China grows more important in economic terms, in diplomatic terms, politically, and even in military terms, I don’t think the US foreign policy leadership can wait another ten years before bringing greater stability and domestic consensus to US-China policy. Rather, I think there is a very urgent need that the two sides initiate a more realistic strategic dialogue to try to come to terms with one another on some of the fundamental differences they have. I noted in the Xin Hua editorial on the WTO accession agreement that they used what I think was some very realistic and useful language. Instead of using terms like strategic partnership, they said that the WTO agreement may help lead to a more healthy and stable relationship for the 21st century. That goal certainly has my vote, and I am hopeful that the two sides can do the necessary work to see that achieved. Thank you.

Questions and Answers

Question: The issue of new trade between the two countries and its relation to security is my question. The Chinese have been saying for some time that if the United States would only sell it a broader array of technologies that would lead to a rectification of these trade imbalances that the US complains about so much. Do you think that accession to the WTO is going to change that particular dialogue or rectify that disagreement?

Dr. Gill: Let me say from the outset that I don’t adhere to the views of the Cox report, which I found a deeply flawed and a politically motivated document. But that said, my views are certainly not widely held in the United States, and I think the damage has been done consciously so in the political sense by that document in establishing a deeply rooted suspicion in the minds of the Congress — as well as I would even say the broader American public — about what kind of technology trade we want to have with China. Now, I’m not familiar with all of the details of the WTO organization or the accession agreement, but my understanding is that on questions that can be argued on national security grounds the agreement can’t really interfere with domestic legislation restricting the flow of sensitive technology. So my assumption would be that in spite of this agreement there will remain a very deep well of concern about working with China in providing them any sort of dual use — certainly no military use technology for the foreseeable future — absolutely not — politically impossible — and even in the realm of dual-use such as relatively medium power computers are still restricted from going to China — I think that is going to remain in place. Indeed I think in the next several months, those who oppose the WTO agreement with China, those who wish to keep China out, are likely to raise this red flag that opening the doors to access on both sides has its negative result in that it might provide unnecessarily sensitive technology to China. So I don’t see this issue as going away.

Question: You said you might comment on the views of the American candidates in the race on China. I’d be interested in hearing those.

Dr. Gill: It’s funny in Washington. Everybody likes to talk about this stuff — who’s up, who’s down, and all this. I have to say that I am a relative newcomer to it all, but here’s my take on it. In talking with Chinese friends, I think they are looking forward to getting Clinton out of the White House. They see him as having double crossed them, not delivered on promises, not going to bat for them domestically in the United States, keeping his head down on China policy, with flip flopping - all the things we know about President Clinton. And they are right, I think. In many ways he has let them down, and now in their view he is a lame duck. But I tell them well, don’t ask for too much, because you might get what you ask for. I’m not so sure any of the President’s likely successors are going to be much more predisposed to wanting to re-establish, and really stick their necks out on moving forward significantly in the relationship with China. Al Gore has had a number of very unpleasant experiences in his dealings with the Chinese — both in his meetings with Li Peng for example and during his trip — I think it was about two years ago when he traveled to China. Of course he’s also dogged — wrongly or rightly — on this sort of campaign finance stuff which he’s going to get tarred with once he is nominated — if he is nominated. So, he’s going to be keeping his head low. I can’t see him rushing into any sort of new relationship with China if he becomes president. Similarly, George Bush — it’s hard to know exactly because he doesn’t say a whole lot about foreign policy — but apparently he is going to make another speech later this week, I think Friday, so maybe there will be more there on China. But the words he has used on China so far have not been all that encouraging: tough engagement — he’s used that phrase. He said strategic competitor — he’s used that phrase in referring to China. And when you look at his advisors you also get a sense that there are no real pro-China people there. Number one of those would be a fellow like Rich Armitage who has traditionally been a Japan firster really when it comes to looking at our relations in East Asia. He was just down in Australia about two or three weeks ago and said some things that really alarmed our friends down in Australia about the need to have-you know you are going to be with us when we go into Taiwan right? So, very scary stuff. So I’m not sure you are going to have much of a friendship there. And then of course if we assume Al Gore is going to be elected for the Democratic Party, then the possible third candidate might be a guy like Pat Buchanan who is no friend of China. He is adamantly against the WTO agreement. He is an America firster, isolationist — that kind of a guy. I was saying at lunch today let’s foresee a scenario where he manages to get nominated for the Reform Party and is able to come up with three to five percent of the vote — let’s just say that he is able to do that. That I would think is going to scare a guy like George Bush to the right. And if China becomes an issue — I don’t think it will be a big foreign policy issue but if it were — it might harden George Bush’s at least campaign positions in the run up — because if he loses those five percent of the vote to Buchanan, it is going to be a real race with Al Gore, so he’s got to try to make sure that that Buchanan constituency doesn’t stray. So I hate to sound so pessimistic, but let’s be realistic. The situation in the United States is not predisposed at the moment politically to seeing real breakthroughs with China.

Inaudible comment regarding Steve Forbes:

Dr. Gill: Very good point. I guess I should have raised that. I guess I don’t consider him a serious candidate, but nevertheless, he has got a serious platform. He has lots of money. He is saying some very outrageous things. I don’t know if any of you saw, but just for some very pleasant bedtime reading you should pick up the speech he made at the Nixon Center, of all places, about a week ago, maybe five days ago, on China. This was one of the most vicious and venom-spewing speeches that I have heard a leading American politician make about China since the 1950’s — using terms like baby killers, technology pirates, mafioso thugs — you name it — Christian persecutors?The thing is, I laugh too when I hear these things. But he’s serious, and he has got a serious following. And there are people in America who listen to this, and they are not loonies these people. They are serious work-a-day Americans who believe a lot of this stuff, so it is a scary time.

Question: When Jiang Zemin went to Europe recently he got the royal treatment, literally. And he was the first head of state to be invited to the home of the French President. And I talked to people in Beijing at the French Embassy, and they said the preparation was unprecedented. So were they just trying to sell more Airbuses or is there something else going on from a geopolitical point of view?

Dr. Gill: I think the United States is increasingly ‘off the reservation’ as we say, or increasingly at odds with the way the rest of the world is looking at China. One of the most deep impressions I’m going to take away from my experience here in Hong Kong for example — you know, all of these things I’ve just talked about no one is even thinking about in this town. For people here and the rest of the world China is not the animal that I described; it is something quite different. It favors the notion of opportunity and business growth well over any questions of security concern. So what I think is happening is a fundamental divergence not only between the United States and China but a kind of divergence between the way the United States looks at China and the way the rest of the world looks at China. I would add though, that I suspect it is not some sort of French or European led effort. I think the Chinese are also masters of the diplomatic art — recognize very well how useful it can be to work with our allies, try to develop friendly relationships with our allies, as a way to benefit China’s position in international affairs. And I think that is precisely what the European tour was really all about from the Chinese point of view. So, I quite agree with you. There are these developments taking place, and I think the United States in many ways is taking the wrong path.

Question: Just a general question about increasing suspicion in the US about China. Who is leading who? Do you think the general population is scared and the politicians are reacting, or it’s Washington talk that the general population is picking up?

Dr. Gill: Well I think it is the latter. Especially in the past year, because so much of what leads to this negative assessment of China has been generated in Washington — the Cox report being the most important I would say of all of that. But also the current effort to pass something called the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, which is sponsored by Senator Helms. This is also seen as a sort of Washington driven effort to demonize China in favor of strengthened political and military commitment to Taiwan. Perhaps to the degree that it is coming from the grassroots I would suppose that some of the images that the common American has of China are not all that favorable. So I don’t want to lay the blame completely at the foot of Washington. The typical American who doesn’t think at all much beyond the borders of the United States really — when you think about China you think about Tiananmen; you think about trashing the American Embassy; you think about missile tests; the Cox Committee Report — all those sorts of things. So in a sense China needs as good a PR organization as Taiwan has in Washington. That wouldn’t hurt.

Question: This is a two part question. When one speaks to a lot of the China experts or China experts within China, a lot of the government officials, people in the Foreign Ministry and so on, oftentimes what they say about changing US perceptions is they simply say that people from America should just come spend a little bit of time in China and see for themselves that this is not the country that is demonized in Washington. But the problem with that approach is that those people like Jesse Helms simply aren’t going to come — perhaps some of his staffers have come — but a lot of people who are anti-China in the United States are not going to bother coming to China to see for themselves. What do you think China can do to improve its image in Washington and also the United States in general? That is, if it does not hire a PR firm. The second part of that question is a lot of people in Washington-it seems as if there is a fundamental gap between the policy of the China experts and a lot of the other anti-China people from the think tanks from the right wing and so on — and it seems that there is a fundamental suspicion that the China experts probably are a little too involved in their own little China studies, and that they simply are unable to see the big picture and they are far too mesmerized by this giant in the Far East. And the other group of people who speak on behalf of China all the time is the business community, and they also have a limited amount of credibility, and I wonder what you see as a way for different groups in the United States to improve the image of China? How can the China experts improve their credibility, or are there other groups that people in the US can rely on to get the real picture about China?

Dr. Gill: Well, what can China do? My favorite joke in answer to that question is change the name of the ruling party — that would go a long way. Then we could start thinking about interesting acronyms that they can come up with instead of CCP, but that is another parlor game. What’s interesting about you saying that you should come to China and see for yourselves — yeah, under a well orchestrated and choreographed visit you cannot come away from China and not be enormously impressed — especially if you do it over the course of time and see what amazing changes have unfolded there. But paradoxically, people who have stayed there longer are able to take a peek under the veneer and recognize that there are some real problems in that country and that there is a lot of truth to some of the things that people say about the way the political system works; about the way the place is corrupt, and other problems. I mean is it so strange that one constituency that tends to stay there a long time, the media, press, are almost to a man and woman negative about their experiences in China? That would be one thing they could take a huge step forward is start treating foreign journalists with a little respect in China. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen, but they would go a long way if they just began treating journalists a little more decently in China. You can’t tell me that all the journalists are conspiring to negatively portray the Chinese system. They’re seeing things objectively, most of them I think, and it’s not helped when the Chinese government itself tries to suppress that. So that would be one step. I think there are people in our political system that simply aren’t going to change. I think they should try to give up on changing the minds of the Jesse Helmses and instead work on changing the middle. And there are reasonable people as long as it’s believed that it’s politically safe to stick your head out and say good things and try to build a stable relationship with China. I think it can be done. It requires leadership though — mostly coming out of the White House — and unfortunately that has been missing on China policy.

The second question is very very interesting. And I would agree with you that people like myself and others in Washington in this somewhat poisoned mood are often seen as — I often use the term — ‘sinopologist’. It is the old story that you are ‘going native’. The old criticism of the State Department, for example — my apologies to those of you here — because you work in the country; you speak the language; you know the culture; you are automatically going to be sympathetic to them. So, I think there is a good bit of that, and that probably does undermine the credibility of some experts in the minds of some. But I would say that overall, the expertise in Washington and elsewhere in the United States is tapped quite a bit I think by the administration in an effort to try to understand China. But in the near term it is going to be the business constituency which is the most cohesive; it’s the constituency that’s always favored a better relationship with China; they have been unwavering in their support for improved relations. All the other constituencies: human rights, security specialists, Taiwan lobbies are deeply divided and unable to come together and expand the middle. So my money is with the business community in trying to see that the relationship moves forward.

Question: So, when do we declare officially a new cold war?

Dr. Gill: Let’s see’You know the people who probably have already declared it represent fortunately a small minority numerically speaking, but who are able to cast things in black and white which resonate and are easily accepted by many in the United States. But I think even for them I don’t think that there is a desire to try to move into the sort of relationship which we had even with the Soviet Union. I think even with them you can reason that we are not talking about a struggle for global ideological dominance. We are not talking about fighting with our proxies throughout different parts of the world. And I would even say that we are not really being held hostage by sort of mutually assured destruction when you talk about China. The differences are vast between our relationship with China and our former relationship with the Soviet Union. So, I think that while you are going to hear these voices, and probably in the next year you are going to hear them more, I remain hopeful that once we can get through this next year and get a new person in the White House with a greater degree of commitment to stabilizing the relationship that we don’t have to worry about the declaration of a cold war.

Question: (inaudible) evidence of George Bush Jr. on television during the quiz is indicative of the low degree of priority of foreign affairs in the candidates’ minds and his neat translation of the isolationist tendencies in the states. On the other hand if we see positively we can hope for a positive improvement in US-Chinese relationships in case he gets elected that he might confuse Li Peng and Lee Teng Hui.

Dr. Gill: Well, as all of you know, the paradox of the United States is that it has achieved this enormous international power and influence, and yet I think remains an abidingly insular, somewhat inward-looking country by tradition. And this is reflected not only in the remarks by George Bush but also in the overall lack of salience of foreign policy issues in the American mindframe generally. And during the election I would assume China is not going to play a major role in the election politicking. It will pop up from time to time. It will be an issue here and there, but I think by and large it won’t be. Instead, as almost always in peacetime, domestic questions are going to be at the fore. Because the economy is doing so well it is going to be non-economic domestic questions, you know, ways of leveraging off the prosperity in order to improve the social welfare situation in the United States. So I think you are quite right. China won’t play a major role. But still because problems are going to occur from time to time in the relationship people are going to notice that. And unfortunately until we are able to get at some of the deeper problems which I was trying to elaborate, the relationship is going to continue to go like this. It remains very much — to use the phrase of a former Brookings colleague, Harry Harding — a fragile relationship.