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SurvivalGlobal Politics and Strategy

ISSN: 0039-6338 (Print) 1468-2699 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsur20

China and the ‘Pivot’

Lanxin Xiang

To cite this article: Lanxin Xiang (2012) China and the ‘Pivot’, Survival, 54:5, 113-128, DOI:10.1080/00396338.2012.728349

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2012.728349

Published online: 01 Oct 2012.

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The Obama administration seems to have toned down its rhetoric on Asia-Pacific security, abandoning the fancy but problematic phrase ‘pivot towards Asia’ and replacing it with the more prosaic ‘rebalancing’. This does not mean the content of US policy is very different. On the contrary, the Obama administration continues its military build-up in the region, aiming at a military posture that can only be described as ‘absolute superiority’. Over the past two years, Washington has put together a comprehensive ‘con-tainment’ package in Asia that includes a new military doctrine of air–sea battle; launched a game-changing economic project called the Trans-Pacific Partnership; initiated the ‘rotation’ of US marines in Australia; and sta-tioned coastal battleships in Singapore. More alarmingly, the United States is making clear attempts to re-establish a naval presence in Subic Bay in the Philippines, and in the coveted Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. Both were key US naval bases during the Cold War.

Trust deficitWhile the Obama administration blames China for the current state of affairs, especially Beijing’s sudden ‘assertiveness’ after the president’s visit to China in November 2009,1 Chinese leaders worry that they could be facing a new cold war. For years, mainstream Chinese and American analysts refused to see this coming, preferring to bury their heads in sand. Until the emergence

China and the ‘Pivot’

Lanxin Xiang

Lanxin Xiang is Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He is a Contributing Editor to Survival.

Survival | vol. 54 no. 5 | October–November 2012 | pp. 113–128 DOI 10.1080/00396338.2012.728349

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114 | Lanxin Xiang

of the ‘pivot’ formulation, the most provocative expression used to refer to the containment of China was ‘hedging’, reflecting some flexibility and ambiguity. No one talks about hedging now. Unsurprisingly, the hawks in the Chinese military have the full attention of the leadership, and have received a funding boost. There is even a demand from the military to re-enter the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee in the coming 18th Party Congress, from which it has been absent since the 15th Congress in 1997, when the party decided to push for the professionalisation of the military to reduce its political power. Not too long ago, the Beijing elite were still debating whether or not Deng Xiaoping’s famed policy dictum ‘hide

one’s capabilities and bide one’s time’ (taoguang yanghui) – the opposite of ‘assertiveness’ – should still be observed; the majority consensus was an emphatic ‘yes’. Now, the US ‘pivot’ has prompted President Hu Jintao, speaking at a recent conference of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, to publicly call on the military to ‘speed up naval transformation, deepen and widen the efforts to prepare

for future military struggle and solidly push for modernization’.2 More significantly, Vice-President and presidential heir apparent Xi

Jinping, when visiting the United States earlier this year, dispensed with the usual vague language of ‘strengthening strategic trust’ with Washington, instead raising the possibility that the strategic differences between the two countries might be irreconcilable. The previous official approach was to ‘smooth over any differences’ (mi he fenqi), a tactical move; the new catch-phrase is to ‘control and manage the differences’ (guan kong fenqi), a major shift to a strategic perspective.3 This is no ordinary change of tone; it is viewed as a timely response to the policy pursued by the Americans. The days of strategic ambiguity on both sides have apparently ended, and it is probable that the new leadership under Xi will attempt to build what it con-siders a more realistic framework for the relationship.

The ‘control and manage’ approach may imply, firstly, a realisation that conflict with the United States can no longer be avoided within the current framework of engagement; the so-called Strategic and Economic Dialogue has contributed little to building mutual trust despite the fact that Hu and

No one talks about hedging now

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Obama have met at a record 12 summit meetings in less than four years. Secondly, the new approach may suggest that China’s focus will now shift towards maintaining a true strategic balance, as if during a cold-war stale-mate, for the single purpose of avoiding a full-fledged confrontation.

While in Washington, Xi quoted a Chinese pop song: ‘May I ask where the path is? It is where you take your first step.’4 This is the title song for a TV series adapted from a classic Chinese novel about a famous Tang Dynasty (618–971 BCE) monk and his three disciples, who endured enormous hard-ship in exploring new passages to India. Xi was apparently suggesting that Sino-US relations should find a new path, one not limited by the existing bilateral mechanisms of interaction. In any case, it is likely that Xi, in the face of an unambiguous US ‘pivot’, will give top priority to Chinese military preparedness based on the traditional ‘offensive defence doctrine’, a project that has already begun in earnest. From Beijing’s perspective, many sym-bolic acts in Washington clearly point to the emergence of a new cold war. In particular, the Chinese strongly object to the way Americans usually frame the issue of strategic trust in moral terms, blaming China for any mutual distrust because of their own paranoid obsession with China’s internal problems. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s assertion, in a May 2011 interview, that Chinese leaders, by resisting democracy, ‘are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand’, is typical of this view.5 Similarly, an edi-torial that recently ran in the Washington Post purporting to explain ‘why there is a “trust deficit” with China’ could not resist indulging in a human-rights lecture, concluding, ‘What the president ought to do … is explain to the new leader [Xi] why, for the United States, China is untrustworthy: because it continues to imprison courageous people’.6 Even the most hard-ened realists at the Pentagon are obsessed with universalist concepts such as the ‘global commons’; and although US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, when speaking at the recent IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, stressed that he rejected any suggestion that ‘the increased emphasis by the United States on the Asia-Pacific region is some kind of challenge to China’,7 such assurances lack credibility in Beijing. As a Global Times lead editorial quickly chided, Panetta’s ‘denial may not be a 100% lie, but no one in the whole world probably dares to take this statement as truth’.8

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Indeed, there are signs that Washington’s China policy is on the cusp of an ‘NSC-68 Moment’. National Security Council Report 68, issued shortly before the Korean War, was the key US government document that expanded America’s Cold War focus from Europe. The original NSC-68 was quickly vindicated by the Korean War, but it was buttressed by extraordi-nary confidence in two key beliefs: firstly, that communist regimes would eventually launch a military attack, most likely by using ‘proxy powers’ to do the job outside Europe; and secondly, that cost was no object. Not only could the Americans afford to overextend their military around the world, but a large-scale military industry could be expected to stimulate the domestic economy. Today, the mood in Washington is somewhat different. The belief that China will definitely challenge America’s global position persists, but is not firmly grounded, and the cost of resistance has become a serious concern. The irony is, while Americans continue to make constant reference to their desire to ‘improve the strategic trust that we must have between our two countries’, as Panetta stated at the Singapore conference,9 the Chinese side has begun, for the first time, to use the explicit phrase ‘trust deficit’.10 Beijing apparently wants to open a serious discussion of this deficit in realpolitik (but not moral) terms, for if there is no basic strate-gic trust between the two countries, most other areas of potential Sino-US cooperation will become meaningless. Beijing is unlikely to cooperate with Washington on such issues as North Korea, Syria, Iran or Afghanistan if such cooperation could potentially help the United States in a zero-sum game with China.

The perils of pivotsShortly before Obama’s visit to China, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg offered a new conceptual paradigm for the US–China relationship known as ‘strategic reassurance’. As he put it during a speech at the Center for a New American Security on 5 October 2009,

strategic reassurance rests on a core, if tacit, bargain. Just as we and our

allies must make clear that we are prepared to welcome China’s ‘arrival’

... as a prosperous and successful power, China must reassure the rest of

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China and the ‘Pivot’ | 117

the world that its development and growing global role will not come at

the expense of the security and well-being of others.11

The Chinese were intensely interested. Said the People’s Daily:

Steinberg took the words out of our mouth. On China’s core security

concerns, China actually needs strategic reassurance from the US. Ceasing

weapon sales to Taiwan and stopping hostile surveillance activities in

China’s surrounding sea areas are two of them.12

In retrospect, the Steinberg Moment, had it lasted, would have been supe-rior to the current policy. Obama’s ‘pivot’ approach has merely produced a classic vicious cycle, in which each side continuously misreads the other’s strategic mind, offering something the other side does not want (such as a ‘G2’ arrangement or an external guarantee of maritime security in Asia), or asking for something the other side cannot give (such as the drastic appre-ciation of the renminbi or active support for regime changes in the Middle East). From Beijing’s perspective, Washington’s strategy towards Asia has most of the key features of a cold-war strategy: a military posture stressing overwhelming superiority and effective deterrence; an ideological position that seeks to delegitimise China; and a plan of building or reviving a regional diplomatic bloc or bilateral military alliances in China’s neighbourhood. Of course, Washington never admits that this amounts to a containment strat-egy, but if something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck. As Vice-President Xi put it in a Washington Post article shortly before his visit to the United States, ‘At a time when people long for peace, stability and development, to deliberately give prominence to the military security agenda, scale up military deployment and strengthen mili-tary alliances is not really what most countries in the region hope to see’.13

American strategic planners seem to embrace any concept that sym-bolically reflects a game-changing sentiment, such as ‘pivot’, ‘return’ or ‘rebalancing’. At first glance, such attitudes appear to carry with them the risk of destroying the most crucial bilateral relationship in the world. After all, neither side is using so much as veiled language to cover their clashing

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views on regional security and global governance. But, as the potential con-sequences of undermining the bilateral relationship become more obvious in the coming years, so will solutions. The truth is, even if the United States succeeds in building a military containment scheme in Asia, Beijing will not allow its national interest to be dictated by outsiders ganging up on China. A comprehensive arms race has already started, and any diplomatic isolation of China will be met with counter-measures. The key issue has indeed become how to ‘control and manage’ a highly militarised security environment in Asia. Without effective management, the situation could progressively worsen, producing the kind of vicious strategic cycle seen between Germany and England in the late nineteenth century or the Soviet Union and the United States during the early stages of the Cold War.

At the same time, ending strategic ambiguity has its merits, precisely because the contours of Sino-US competition in the region will become more predictable. For example, Washington has a penchant for advertis-ing and sensationalising new military weapons or doctrines to deter its rivals and to discourage them from any thought of catching up technologi-cally. But not only could this practice lose its intended effect by triggering a serious arms race on the Chinese side (rather than deterring any moves toward modernisation), it may also let China off the hook for its ‘lack of military transparency’, a customary accusation that Washington and its allies have laid upon Beijing for decades. Instead, Chinese military trans-parency – a key but until now unobtainable US objective – may be achieved by tracing China’s predictable countermeasures vis-à-vis the Pentagon. Washington may find that it has lost the moral high ground, however, as the ‘lack of military transparency’ ball is lobbed back to the US court. As long as Washington does not publicly admit that a cold war is being waged in Asia, Beijing will have less need to avoid the bad publicity of build-ing its aircraft carriers and anti-ship weapons systems, and it will become much easier to justify its continued military modernisation. In other words, China’s strategic confidence may actually increase, and as Chinese military capacity rises, Washington may find it even harder to achieve its strate-gic purpose by shifting the bulk of its military power, especially its naval power, to Asia-Pacific.

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Paradoxically, a US-initiated cold war could help China to alter its strate-gic behaviour and provide a game-changing opportunity for China to swing global public opinion. After all, the Chinese still support mainstream oppo-sition to any international system of hegemony in global politics. And as the magic formula of ‘democracy equals prosperity’ loses credibility and validity, the successful Chinese road to economic development will become more appealing. In addition, American attempts to hinder China’s military modernisation are unlikely to garner much sympathy in the developing world, where they will be seen as a desperate move by the United States to rescue its status as the world’s hegemon and to defend its ‘second to none’ position.

Moreover, the American strategy in Asia may not be sustainable in the long run. During the original Cold War, the Soviets never dared to engage the United States in economic competition, notwithstanding some agitated rhetoric from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the famed 1959 ‘kitchen debate’ with Vice President Richard Nixon. Today, however, ‘the only indispensable superpower’ is also a super-indebted power, and its biggest external creditor happens to be its presumed chief strategic rival. Is it logical and workable to encircle one’s own banker militarily? Or, as many Chinese are starting to wonder, is such a strategy designed to provoke a military incident that will provide an excuse to default on the debt? Like religious wars, cold wars, if they do not turn hot, are primarily about gaining the upper hand in a moral debate. This time, Washington may not win. The hard fact is, the Washington Consensus is moribund, the American Dream is broken and America is, in David Calleo’s expression, in ‘morbid decline’.14

Furthermore, America’s ‘pivot towards Asia’ ultimately depends on its partners, the Asia-Pacific ‘coalition of the willing’. This coalition is in fact divided and fragile, and consists of a group of states whose governments are facing major political troubles at home. From Washington to Tokyo, Manila to Canberra, it is only a collective sense of internal weakness that has created an ad hoc common identity with which to face an uncertain challenge from China. The rest of Asia may not be interested in jumping on

This time Washington may not win

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America’s bandwagon. Asian partners endorse American preponderance in the region mainly for the purpose of maintaining the status quo. They are not really willing to live with American ‘dominance’ in the sense of dictat-ing regional affairs through the imposition of a bipolar competition which will force them to take a side.

China has been able to build a stable network of relationships with its neighbours since the end of the Cold War. Despite recent setbacks and mis-takes, its regional appeal remains strong. China offers a unique example of a country with a non-democratic system that nevertheless has a dynamic economy and a relatively strong state. It has its own problems, of course, but as Washington’s Asian partners understand well, the future of China will be determined by internal factors, such as the problems of economic slowdown, income inequality and official corruption. The Chinese system will not collapse under mere foreign pressure. Ironically, even though China feels somewhat isolated in this absurd cold war, time may still be on its side, if it can rejuvenate itself through another round of serious and sustainable reforms. Thus, the Chinese leadership may continue to be predominantly inward-looking and refrain from taking hasty actions over territorial or other disputes with its neighbours, such as a military clash over the South China Sea.

Mismatched mindsetsTo reverse the trend towards a Sino-American strategic showdown, one must first of all understand the psychological mismatch between the two countries. No one knows how long a US-led cold war in Asia could last. Much depends upon whether Americans will eventually abandon a deeply rooted mental disposition towards viewing world history through the logic of ‘rise and fall’, most visible among the neo-conservatives who are attempt-ing a comeback with Mitt Romney. This rhetoric is notably unhelpful in dealing with US–China relations today, yet the morbid fear of someone overtaking America’s superior position provides a leading motivation for those in favour of a containment policy towards China. The prospect of China’s GDP surpassing the United States’ in less than 20 years has spurred a great debate in the West, but it is a debate that depends on the rhetorical

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framework first promoted by Edward Gibbon and Oswald Spengler and later revived by Arnold Toynbee and Paul Kennedy. Discourse on ‘rise and fall’ is an Anglo-American proclivity with a Eurocentric bias. Thus, the current concern is over whether China will integrate into the existing (that is, Western-dominated) liberal world order or seek to destroy it.

In his The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, Paul Kennedy argued that the Chinese leadership ‘seems to be evolving a grand strategy altogether more coherent and forward-looking than that which prevails in Moscow, Washington, or Tokyo, not to mention Western Europe’.15 That this insight came at such an early stage of the Chinese reform process is impressive, and it has proven more enduring than the views of current authors who enjoy the advantage of observing China’s reform with hindsight. In the 1990s, predictions of China’s collapse were commonplace, with titles such as The Coming Collapse of China becoming instant best-sellers, but none of these predictions has come to pass. The teleological fantasy underlying all these predictions, that all regimes will eventually become liberal democracies, has been shown to be wrong.

Now that the ‘China collapse’ trend has run its course, the ‘China supe-rior’ thesis is taking over. Many intellectuals in the West, particularly on the left, have launched a feisty defence of China’s economic and even political system. The Chinese themselves have been rather bemused by this trend, which has produced a stream of hilariously titled publications such as When China Rules the World, The Beijing Consensus and Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do.16

Neither approach seems relevant to Chinese realities. The truth is, China’s current trajectory is not best described as a ‘rise’, but rather as a res-toration. The country has had huge trade surpluses and reserves before: as late as 1820, China’s GDP accounted for 32.9% of the global total, and most of the world’s silver reserves were in Chinese hands.17 The real challenge posed by China today lies not in what it is doing, but in what it will not do. Specifically, it will not pursue wholesale Westernisation, and it will not accept, in their entirety, the existing, Western-derived ‘rules of the game’. But it is absurd to assume that the Chinese will establish a new ‘model’ to replace the Western one. The Chinese have never had the missionary urge,

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and model-building is not part of the culture. To build a model requires either ontology or teleology, but neither has a home in Chinese thought. The key question in the Chinese tradition is ‘where is the way?’ (or Tao), but never the Cartesian, ontological ‘what is it?’. In other words, politics is by nature a contingent act, and it is futile to harbour any ambition for influenc-ing the future, however ‘scientific’ the prediction may seem.

The kind of ‘rise and fall’ analysis popular in the West aims at discovering a universal pattern of great-power behaviour, despite the fact that China has never been a typical great power. The country has no interest in challenging the liberal order on ideological grounds, because the Chinese believe that

any order can only be brought down by its own faults. No doubt the liberal order has weakened. This does not mean the Chinese system has been strengthened as a result. The paradox is, the Communist Party of China has engineered one of the greatest social and economic reforms in human history; but the population has become restless and angry about the regime itself. Confucian political logic, not Western democratic theory, has undermined the party’s legitimacy: the party’s failure to ‘rule by virtue’ has threatened its ‘Mandate of Heaven’. China’s future will be determined by

internal factors, just as that of the liberal order will. If the West understands this, it might interact with China more effectively than by following the ‘rise and fall’ logic.

It is important to remember that Chinese leaders do not think in the same terms as their American counterparts. The Chinese view of history is cyclical, not linear, and hence does not aim towards a predestined end. According to the cyclical view, dealing with legitimacy questions at home is a never-ending process, one in which foreign relations play only a minor part. This can be seen in the way that China has long eschewed colonisation and territorial grabs for resettlement. Moreover, the Chinese believe that every system has its own fundamental flaws. Even the American political system, today rent by deep political divisions and deadlock, has demon-strated its inability to resolve the tensions created by the country’s physical and moral decline. Simply on the basis of its own weaknesses, it may not be

Chinese leaders do not think in the same terms

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up to the task of maintaining America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent physical and moral power.

America’s ‘morbid decline’ coincides with the coming to power of a new generation of leaders in Beijing. This generation does not personally remember the Second World War and was brought up in a vehemently anti-imperialist environment, but this does not mean it will be more nationalistic and xenophobic. For one thing, it will soon face acute problems of politi-cal legitimacy at home. The Communist Party’s survival depends upon three forms of political legitimacy: revolutionary credit, actual performance and the moral character of the leadership, all three of which could be chal-lenged in the near future. Previous generations could still invoke their own heroic participation in the Long March and othe revolutionary struggles to make direct claims on the right to govern, something the future lead-ership, especially the princelings (the descendants of the first generation of revolutionaries) who are likely to take power over the next year cannot do. They cannot inherit revolutionary credit from their fathers. Secondly, the princelings as a group have demonstrated little Confucian virtue, for they have obtained the biggest slice of national wealth through power plays rather than hard work. Thirdly, the fifth generation of leaders will inherit an economy that may reach its peak in the near future and begin to slow down or even halt. After all, no national economy in history has sustained unfet-tered growth indefinitely.

In the dynastic era, the emperor was considered the ‘son of heaven’, but his worthiness had to be proven by the welfare of his subjects and his ability to guarantee order and harmony. In today’s China, no more than two gen-erations can genuinely claim any credit for participating in the revolution. Attempts by the princelings to promote their own revolutionary credentials, as disgraced Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai tried to do by encourag-ing the singing of ‘red songs’ (while simultaneously filling his own pockets with a large share of the nation’s wealth), have failed. After all, revolution-ary movements such as Bo’s ‘red song’ campaign need to be sustained by a kind of theocracy. But China has become a faithless country: official ideol-ogy and revolutionary idealism are things of the past. More importantly, efforts to invoke revolutionary heroes have only deepened popular mistrust

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of the system, as the princelings’ behaviour and lifestyle is in sharp contrast to the asceticism and idealism of the early Communists.

In the dynastic era, government bureaucrats kept part of the taxes they collected as a kind of bonus for services rendered, though with the expec-tation that the rest of the money would be handed over to the state. What today’s Communist cadres are doing is worse, for they often collect direct ‘rents’ merely because they hold office. Modern Communist bureaucrats are too busy collecting capital to read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital; they know nothing about Kantian notions of man’s propensity for evil and are hardly yearning for salvation in any spiritual sense. Since Confucianism deals only

with the problems of this world, life remains a series of events, rather than a whole coherently orientated toward a transcendental end. Thus, the only power it can provide for the guidance of human conduct is familial piety based upon a belief in ancestral spirits. If one’s primary duty is toward specific human beings, living or dead, it is easy to see how a ruler whose

political legitimacy was essentially inherited would find it difficult to avoid abusing power.

Today, the Chinese people have grounds to challenge – potentially through widespread social protest – all three dimensions of the Communist Party’s legitimacy. To avoid such a fate, the Communist Party has no choice but to launch political reforms, even if limited ones. Dealing with official corruption would be a popular move, but without political decentralisa-tion, the vested interest group represented by the princelings would be extremely hard to crack. Some form of political pluralism would be useful as a decompression valve, particularly now that the complex demands of economic globalisation have increased the burden of governance beyond what the current Chinese system can bear.

It remains to be seen whether the fifth generation of Chinese leaders will grasp the opportunity to rescue the party and the state. Fortunately, Xi Jinping is tough, congenial but also pragmatic. He represents a generation that is, counter-intuitively, the most ‘mature’ of the three generations that have taken power since the revolutionary veterans faded from the scene.

The Communist Party has no choice

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The reason for this is accidental: this generation just happened to experi-ence certain key moments in the history of the People’s Republic. The two generations before them were technocrats, beneficiaries of both the Mao and Deng eras. The Jiang Zemin (third) generation, for example, not only had the opportunity to study in the pre-1949 college system, but also benefited from the reconstruction that followed the revolution. Many of this genera-tion’s members, including Jiang himself, were even able to study in foreign countries, albeit only those within the Soviet sphere. Members of the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao (fourth) generation are in fact the most limited in experience, but also a most lucky generation, for this group was able to com-plete college before the Cultural Revolution and managed to secure jobs with relatively handsome pay when Deng Xiaoping decided in the early 1980s to recruit young technocrats into the party hierarchy.

The fifth generation has suffered the most from the ups and downs of China’s post-revolutionary history. The members of this generation saw their educations disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, and many, such as Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, the premier-in-waiting, were sent down to the poorest countryside for a harsh ‘re-education’ programme. (Xi was sent at the age of 16 and remained in the countryside for six years.) Such forma-tive experiences not only hardened their will, but also exposed them to the bottom of society, allowing them to see China’s real problems. Once the Mao era ended, new opportunities to study at college became available to them, as did opportunities to expose themselves to the Western world. This experience of rising through the party ranks under such sharply contrasting social and political conditions has produced an intellectual maturity that no other generation could really lay claim to.

Because many of China’s fifth-generation leaders have ‘princeling’ back-grounds, China watchers in the West tend to think of them as pampered and fragile, but this is to misread their collective identity and character. This generation is pragmatic and flexible, but also intensely patriotic (though not intensely nationalistic), for they have witnessed the tumultuous develop-ment of the People’s Republic and understand how difficult it is for a poor society to become a prosperous one. A peaceful international environment has provided a decisive opportunity for China, one that must not be squan-

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dered for short-term gains. Many among the fifth generation have a strong sense of mission to promote the well-being of the people, and if the system needs serious repair, they are perhaps less likely to drag their feet in launch-ing serious reforms. Their unique sense of history and political stamina in politics and foreign relations will be a decisive factor for years to come.

Although Beijing’s repeated assertions of its ‘peaceful rise’ have fallen on deaf ears in the West, Chinese Confucianism has always stressed moral adjustment to the world, not rational domination of the world. The Americans, however, base their moral superiority in foreign relations on a set of universal values, including a ‘rise and fall’ perspective on world history. The two views could not be farther apart. The life-hardened fifth generation sees no need to accept any American tutelage, as previous gen-erations did. Indeed, Xi’s life experience is arguably much richer than that of Obama. Even though he has had only very limited foreign-affairs experi-ence, Xi seems to have grasped the gist of the Sino-US relationship, as seen in the his policy shift towards ‘control and management’. In the coming years, the Chinese leadership may demonstrate greater willingness to confront America’s cold-war mindset head-on, but with controlled measures. In the long run, this approach may prove more effective in engaging Washington. If the new cold war lasts for a while, China will have time to strengthen its national security, but if it fizzles out quickly, China’s moral image could reap the benefits.

Notes

1 For an authoritative view on China’s alleged assertiveness, see Jeffrey Bader, Obama and China’s Rise (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), especially chapter seven, ‘Dealing with an Assertive China’.

2 Cao Zhi and Li Xuanliang, ‘Hu Jintao huijian haijun dangdaihui daibiao’ [Hu Jintao Receives Representatives of the PLA Navy Party Congress], 6 December 2011, http://www.gov.cn/

ldhd/2011-12/06/content_2012872.htm.

3 Xi first used this phrase during a meeting with Henry Paulson in Beijing on 6 December 2011, and has since repeated it many times. See, for example, Xie Huanchi, ‘Xi Jinpin huijian Baoersen’ [Xi Jinping Meets Paulson], People’s Daily, 7 December 2011, http://politics.people.com.cn/GB/1024/16533654.html; and the report on his visit to the Pentagon published

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by the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China, 14 February 2012, http://www.gov.cn/ldhd/2012-02/15/content_2067672.htm.

4 See ‘China and America Have Wisdom, Ability and Ways to Maintain and Develop a Good Relationship’, Xinhua, 14 February 2012, http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2012-02/15/c_111528380.htm. Surprisingly, the Western media did not pay much attention to this remark.

5 Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘Hillary Clinton: Chinese System is Doomed, Leaders on a “Fool’s Errand”’, Atlantic, 11 May 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/05/hillary-clinton-chinese-system-is-doomed-leaders-on-a-fools-errand/238591/.

6 ‘Why There is a “Trust Deficit” with China’, Washington Post, 11 February 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-there-is-a-trust-deficit-with-china/2012/02/10/gIQAjR1x6Q_story.html.

7 Leon Panetta, ‘The US Rebalance Towards the Asia-Pacific’, speech at the 11th IISS Asia Security Summit, the Shangri-La Dialogue, 2 June 2012, http://www.iiss.org/confer ences/the-shangri-la-dialogue/shangri-la-dialogue-2012/speeches/first-plenary-session/leon-panetta/.

8 ‘We Should Not Fight with Americans with Force, but with Wisdom and Tolerance’, Global Times, 4 June 2012, http://opinion.huanqiu.com/1152/2012-06/2784041.html.

9 Panetta, ‘The US Rebalance Towards the Asia-Pacific’.

10 Cheng Guangjin and Tan Yingzi, ‘Vice-President Xi’s Trip to Address “Trust Deficit” with US’, China Daily,

10 February 2012, http://www. chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-02/10/content_14573690.htm.

11 For a video of the speech, see http://www.cnas.org/node/3466.

12 ‘Strategic Reassurance? Yes, Please!’, People’s Daily, 29 October 2009, http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6797307.html.

13 ‘Views from China’s Vice President’, Washington Post, 12 February 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/views-from-chinas-vice-president/2012/02/08/gIQATMyj9Q_story_1.html.

14 David Calleo, ‘American Decline Revisited’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 4, August–September 2010, p. 215.

15 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 447.

16 See Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009); Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010); and Loretta Napoleoni, Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make Better Capitalists Than We Do (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).

17 Angus Maddison, ‘Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run: Second Edition, Revised and Updated 960–2030), Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007, Table 2.2a (‘Shares of World GDP, ‘1700–2030 AD’), p. 44, http://browse.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/pdfs/product/4107091e.pdf.

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