Chapter Five

Chinese Nationalism: Challenge to U.S. Interests

Edward Friedman

This chapter establishes two seemingly contradictory propositions. First, from the point of view of international relations, contemporary Chinese nationalism is usefully understood as a political project whose goal is Chinese hegemony in Asia. This Beijing project compels America and its friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific region to act vigilantly.

Second, despite the apparent fundamental conflict of this project with the interests of America and its friends and allies in the region, neither the government in Beijing nor Chinese foreign policy need be considered by the U.S. Government as an enemy. That is, the rhetoric of Chinese chauvinism is not the actual source of Chinese foreign policy.

What follows is a brief sketch to establish the validity of these two propositions and, more importantly, to explain why these two apparently incompatible claims need not be considered as such. America must respond to both sides of Chinese foreign policy, both the expansive chauvinism and the need of ruling groups in Beijing to grapple with serious domestic challenges by utilizing the advantages gained in peaceful international exchanges. The alleged incoherence that many critics claim to find in American policy toward China is actually a natural and necessary response to schizophrenic policy at the core of Chinese politics.

Let us first explore current Chinese chauvinism. While chosen starting points are inevitably self-serving and arbitrary, many analysts accept the end of the Cold War as a turning point in Chinese-American relations. When President Richard Nixon moved toward normalizing relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC), the government in Beijing was actually or potentially part of the effort to contain Brezhnev-era militarism, an effort that endured, as in the 1979-1989 resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. China provided weapons to Afghanistan. China was an ally of the late Cold War era.

By the Gorbachev era, however, the number of American critics of allying with China to contain Soviet Russia grew. These analysts found either that China was too weak to be helpful in the Cold War against Soviet-backed anti-American efforts or that China's interests were incompatible with America's or that Gorbachev's Soviet Union, in contrast to Brezhnev's, did not need containing, or that Washington, in the post-Brezhnev era, could cooperate with Moscow. In sum, it was not in America's interest to make major political concessions to woo China to be an ally since China increasingly seemed unwilling to or incapable of contributing to American purposes in Asia, except in Korea, where Beijing and Washington had major overlapping interests in avoiding war.

In a similar manner, by 1981, China's post-Mao paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, moved away from Mao's tacit Cold War alliance with America against the Soviet Union. Instead, Deng moved toward an independent policy including normal relations with Soviet Russia, a policy that was pursued even during the war to resist the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Deng wooed Moscow to serve, first, the needs of an economically rising China, and, second the goal of incorporating Taiwan under Beijing's sovereignty.

In other words, even before the Cold War imploded in 1989-1991, both the United States and China had already begun to abandon the deepest premises of the policy that had facilitated U.S.-Chinese detente starting with the Nixon administration. The end of the Cold War sped up dynamics that had already been unleashed in both nations. Consequently, U.S.-Chinese relations would no longer be premised on a basic, shared common interest, checking Brezhnev-era militarism. Naturally, in the absence of a shared and central adversary, the amoral and self-interested nature of ordinary international relations virtually guaranteed a more adversarial quality to Sino-American relations. The new challenges are not the consequences of malign intent. Yet America was reinterpreted in China as that nation's enemy number one. Why?

The killer poison in the new relationship resulted from a number of negative factors. First, the 1989-1991 end of the Cold War coincided with a major contingent political factor that turned the inevitable end of U.S.-Chinese detente into a situation where each side became an adversary for the other. Deng Xiaoping's decision to crush China's great 1989 nationwide democratic mobilization led to sanctions of China by all the Group of 7 democracies. The American support for the Chinese democracy movement led to the rise of a feeling within China that the regime's stability was at stake; in fact, nothing seemed more important than regime survival. America, therefore, was redefined by ruling groups in Beijing as China's most immediate and pressing political enemy. The United States was reimagined as on the side of forces and policies, the democratic movement and economic sanctions, which threatened to destabilize China by subverting control by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Of course, the top priority of CCP leaders was maintaining the system that kept them in power. The narrow self-interests of the Chinese ruling group in Beijing consequently redefined America as an ultimate enemy.

Other factors and forces made this elite interest in China harmonize with popular concerns. When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, yet another contingent factor, the conjuncture in timing with post-June 4, 1989, anxieties intensified China's anti-American nationalism. Russia seemed a negative example. Politically conscientious Chinese tended to experience China's primary objective as not ending up weak, vulnerable, and humiliated, as a diminished Russia seemed to be. Chinese patriots wanted China to rise. If Russia, a negative example, were democratic and pro-Western, then China had to be the opposite. China's traumatized people wanted national glory and social stability, not international decline and division as in Russia. Consequently, for both elites and the general public in China, unity and stability became primary goals. This reorientation suddenly made projects such as democratization seem an alien language of another age, a naive project of people mesmerized by foreign lures and evils. America consequently was demonized.

The new nationalism of Deng's regime also raised the prominence of Taiwan on China's political agenda. Beijing's new antidemocratic, unity-driven nationalism rose at a time when Taiwan was democratizing and its nationalism was surging. In the context of 1990s Chinese hopes and anxieties, peaceful developments on Taiwan led to a super-patriotic logic and language in Beijing demanding action against enemies of the Chinese nation, the democratic people of Taiwan, whom the Chinese perceive as a separatist entity threatening the very unity of a fragile, sacred, and economically hopeful China. That is, if Taiwan splits from China so could Tibetans and Uighurs and others. The Chinese saw themselves as defenders responding to unprovoked life and death challenges.

After Deng's January 1992 southern tour reignited economic reform in the PRC, a surge of confidence spread throughout the nation. China was not Russia. The popular experience became that China could succeed and rise where Russia failed and fell. A feeling grew among patriots that a restrengthened but still threatened China should strike back at all obstacles and indignities. Again, at both elite and popular levels, it seemed indubitable that an ill-intended America was supposedly hurting China not only by backing democrats (disorder) and imposing economic sanctions but also by acting as the provider of weapons and military guarantees to democratic Taiwan. It seemed obvious that America was on the side of forces that would hold China down and prevent it from a return to greatness, as had long and painfully been the sad reality of the premodern era, the Opium War era, as Chinese patriots imagined history. America seemed to have malignly chosen the role of the villainous imperialist enemy of China.

In 1991, China worried that American boasting of winning the Cold War, defeating the Soviet Union, and making a new world order meant that Washington would target Beijing next. Chinese rulers imagined America as continuing the Cold War in Asia, not just to contain China but actually and aggressively to subvert its Communist Party dictatorship. Nationalistic understandings spread widely in China, which defined the United States as the enemy of Chinese stability, unity, and a Chinese return to greatness. In short, contingencies, conjunctures, history, and narrowly self-serving leadership choices in Beijing conspired to unleash an extraordinary surge of anti-American nationalism in China.

This buildup of factors and forces making for a reinterpretation of America as a dangerous anti-China force was palpably manifest in 1993 when the new anti-American brand of Chinese patriotism exploded. China expected to be rewarded with the 2000 Olympic games for its recent economic rise, an extraordinary feat that won global plaudits. After all, Japan had been rewarded with the Olympics in the 1960s and South Korea in the 1980s when they both rose economically.

However, China learned, as the decision neared, that the U.S. Congress voted against awarding the Olympics to the regime and city responsible for the June 4, 1989, massacre. It was a nonbinding resolution. When Sydney won the 2000 Olympics bid and Beijing barely lost the vote, China raged at America. The United States was held responsible for a humiliation of the Chinese nation, making China less than Korea or Japan. It seemed palpable proof that American hegemony in Asia took China as its enemy. An immoral America was understood as practicing Cold War containment in an effort to suffocate and humiliate China, preventing its rise, denying it living space, using all means to maintain American predominance in the Asia-Pacific region. In China, Beijing-Washington relations had come to be framed in a way that--almost whatever the facts, even in spite of the facts--America would have to be portrayed and experienced as an evil villain and China an innocent victim.

Actually, as everyone knows, the nonbinding resolution on the Olympics by the U.S. Congress did not even decide the vote of the independent U.S. representatives on the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In fact, Sydney won the 2000 Olympics by successfully bribing (that is, by playing by the same rules as Atlanta, Nagano, and Salt Lake City) the IOC. Beijing was not as effective a briber in 1993. But it was America that was scapegoated.

In reality, pre-1993 forces of an overwhelming nature had preshaped Chinese nationalistic consciousness such that America was already considered China's number one enemy. The 1993 Olympic decision was a mere spark that ignited anti-U.S. tinder that had long since piled up. Alleged American misdeeds did not cause a Chinese backlash. Something had profoundly changed Chinese political consciousness in ways that targeted and vilified America. Chinese patriots interpreted events by way of a paradigm that framed American policies and intentions such that America was imagined and reimagined as an evil party continuing a Cold War against an innocent and fragile China. Chinese patriots regarded China as passive and defensive, while they regarded America as active and aggressive.

With such innate presuppositions, the Chinese worldview must cast America as the immoral leader of an imperialist West pursuing an anti-China crusade against the will and interests of the innocent people of China and even against the interests both of world peace and all the people of the world. This framing of the issue is decisive in interpreting events such as the Yin He incident and the war in Kosovo and in reinterpreting the 1991 Gulf War, the last moment in the 1990s when many confused Chinese could still respect American power and even seek to enroll in the U.S.-led force dislodging the expansionist Iraqi military from extinguishing an independent nation, Kuwait, a member of the United Nations.

Given this anti-American framing of U.S.-Chinese relations, patriotic Chinese tend to interpret events so they fit a particular paradigm. In China's nationalistic consciousness, the Chinese are portrayed as martyrs and Americans as murderers. In summer 2001, for instance, I learned that the nationalistic Chinese tended to "know" and confidently assert that the American military had invaded Chinese airspace over Hainan Island and intentionally hit a defending Chinese Air Force plane, wantonly murdering the pilot. In both popular and elite consciousness, it did not matter that Beijing never claimed that the U.S. surveillance flight was not over international waters.

The manifest passion since 1993 that infuses this anti-American attitude in China as well as its assertive political project of reestablishing Chinese predominance in the Asia-Pacific region to replace a presumed American hegemony still needs clarifying to illuminate its political project. This can be done by looking at the emotional popular response in China to the rise of Lee Teng-hui as president of a democratic, autonomous Taiwan. The key is that President Lee was seen in China as a continuation and proof of the resurgence of brutal, militaristic Japanese imperialism.

With anti-Japanese nationalism as the stomach-turning passion of Chinese patriots, the revenge-filled emotion stoked by Beijing policies since 1982 teaches the Chinese people that the only way to preclude a repeat of the pre-PRC tragedy of hideously brutal and murderous Japanese aggression is to have China rise to dominance in the Asia-Pacific. The pro-Japan performance of President Lee in Taiwan became tangible proof to anxious patriots in China that Beijing had to be willing to act militarily to preclude a repetition of the horror of horrors: militaristic Japan on the move again in Asia. Obviously, as with the irrelevance of actual American policy, the reality of Japan's quite constrained foreign policy actions has no impact on the surging Chinese chauvinism. It is important to remember how ungrounded in international reality China's domestically-driven expansive chauvinism is. That passion, however irrational, is war-prone.

Given Beijing's framing of the world, Taiwan also is understood in a way that distorts history. President Lee grew up when Taiwan was a colony of Japan. He went to college in Japan, and he spoke Japanese far better than he spoke Mandarin Chinese. His generation was appalled at the brutality and corruption of the Taiwan takeover by the mainland Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) after Hirohito's imperial Japan surrendered in 1945. With a post-war and newly democratized Japan home to anti-KMT Taiwanese forces in the 1950s, Lee Teng-hui devoured the works of Japanese intellectuals. On Taiwan, anti-KMT, prodemocratic political forces naturally had a strong pro-Japanese content, with post-World War II democratic Japan acting as the major haven for anti-KMT dissidents escaping a murderous white terror by recent arrivals on Taiwan from China. As Taiwan modernized in the 1960s and 1970s, politically conscious Taiwanese utilized Japanese-type policies of state-promoted development, as China began to do in the post-Mao era of reform and openness. With these Taiwanese looking at stagnant, miserable Mao-era China, they, of course, imagined their great fortune as having enjoyed the benefits of Japanese culture-health, education, and modernization-while a chaotic and stagnant China was at war with itself and its people suffered. Chinese in the 1990s had no empathetic understanding of the impact of Taiwanese history on Taiwanese consciousness and politics. What ruling groups in China instead saw on Taiwan was race traitors opposed to the return of Han China to glory and greatness.

Consequently, the president of a democratic Taiwan entering the 1990s, Lee Teng-hui was interpreted in super-patriotic China as the carrier, if not the embodiment, of pro-Japanese tendencies (an immorality akin to being pro-Nazi), which in the PRC felt like treason, insanity, or worse. President Lee gave an interview to a Japanese reporter in Japanese, noting his long-time embrace of and admiration for Japanese culture. To patriotic Chinese, totally ignorant of the pacifist and antinuclear strains in Japan's postwar political culture or of Taiwanese political development, it seemed as if Japan's East Asian coprosperity sphere was reviving. The vile language aimed at President Lee and his successor President Chen from Beijing is understandable only in terms of the ill-informed yet palpable political will in China to avoid the worst evil, a return of brutal Japanese hegemony in Asia, as in the imperial era of Hirohito.

In China, Japan is still represented by the image of Showa-era wartime General Tojo. One cannot overstate the surge of nationalistic fire in Chinese bellies crying out for action against a possible return of the Japanese evils of old. Chinese patriots will even dismiss President Jiang Zemin's embrace of Wang Wei, the pilot who went down after he collided in April 2001 with a routine U.S. reconnaissance flight over international waters, demanding to know why President Jiang silenced the commemoration of the Hong Kong Chinese martyr who earlier died in protesting the alleged imperialist expansionism of Japanese chauvinistic rightists at China's Diaoyutai Islands (actually Japan's Senkaku islets).

Few Chinese patriots praise their president as a proper nationalist. Instead, he is seen as weak, a virtual American toady, the leader of the pro-American faction. Nationalists demand military action against the enemies of China, supposedly as Mao would have done earlier. Given Jiang's actual promotion of military modernization combined with both Mao's and Deng's orders after 1953 to avoid military conflict with America, this patriotic demand for a Chinese leader tougher on Americans than Jiang cannot help but be worrisome. Many informed Chinese insist that after President Jiang is gone, real patriots will finally come to power in China. Jiang, in power, to obtain what he wants in other realms, keeps conceding to hawks on the other Taiwan issue.

Something very worrisome is happening in China. The Chinese government, by stoking hate-filled anti-Americanism, is riding on the back of a tiger. As with Islamicist regimes in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which try to buy legitimation by supporting fundamentalist, anti-Western education of the young, a chauvinistic force also is being created in China that could one day attack the rulers for being insufficiently patriotic. The political atmosphere in this China precludes accurate descriptions of Japan, America, or Taiwan and makes self-interested, common-sense compromises by the Chinese government seem, to many Chinese, to be virtual treason. Therefore, the Chinese do not readily appreciate how others see their foreign policies.

The Chinese do not believe that their missile threat to Taiwan is offensive intimidation that undermines peace in the region, which it is, but instead merely a deterrent preventing Taiwanese independence. Patriots in China demand more. They insist on action against an allegedly new separatist threat. In Beijing, the rise of Taiwanese presidents, first Lee Teng-hui and then Chen Shui-bien, is seen as but the tip of a surging Taiwan independence movement. The Chinese are never told that President Chen has always wrapped himself in the symbolism of the Republic of China, not an independent Taiwan.

This Chinese understanding of Taiwan separatism as a growing threat is pure militaristic chauvinism. It does not relate to any reality in Taiwan. There is no independence movement on Taiwan. The one pro-independence party never gets more than a couple of percent of the popular vote. The three main parties on Taiwan are all moderate status quo parties. They contend that the Republic of China, which was born in 1911 under Sun Yat-sen's aegis, continues on Taiwan as a sovereign entity. Therefore, a declaration of independence would be redundant and unnecessary. Independence would only be triggered by a Chinese military offensive against Taiwan. The government on Taiwan seeks peace and mutually beneficial cooperation.

In short, the Chinese missile threat to Taiwan is the opposite of what it claims to be. It alienates Taiwan from China. It is not a deterrent precluding Taiwan independence, since independence is not on the mainstream political agenda in Taiwan.

Chinese nationalism is worrisome because its blinding passion can keep rulers in Beijing from acting as their interests would otherwise dictate. This super-patriotism has an irrational and dangerous quality to it. Chinese chauvinism consequently has to make others in the Asia-Pacific region anxious and vigilant.

The dynamic of the new Chinese nationalism aimed at Chinese hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region is deep and angry. It assumes America will grow tired with the cost of its efforts in Asia and therefore is plotting one day to leave Japan in its place. Since Japanese predominance in Asia, understood as a return of Japanese militarism, is immoral and unacceptable for historically victimized Chinese nationalists, the only moral alternative is Chinese hegemony in that Asia-Pacific region. This goal is beyond debate, and to challenge it is to reveal oneself a traitor to China.

The imagined future for Chinese nationalists thinking of a glorious hegemonic 21st century includes enrichment facilitated by the incorporation of a wealthy Taiwan and the resource-rich South China Seas into the PRC such that a subordinated Japan and a respectful set of lesser nations in Asia will do nothing to challenge China's interests and predominance in the Asia-Pacific region. Ruling groups in Asia instead will submit, as a South Korean journalist did at the October 2001 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shanghai, polite, prearranged questions so that China's political leadership can present its view of Asia's future as unchallenged, at least in Asia.

Such an accomplishment would undermine basic American interests in the region, but not because of any American interest in hegemonic domination. Rather, the United States seeks a balance of power in which democracies can flourish without fear of being rolled back by an antidemocratic, anti-human rights, hegemonic China. America, therefore, hopes to preclude a region subordinated to an anti-American and antidemocratic China.

Despite Beijing's singular anti-American nationalistic project, the government in China is not and should not be considered as the implacable expansionist foe of vital American interests in the Asia-Pacific region. Indeed, China should be treated as a potential partner. But why? How could that be, given the pervasiveness of a threatening Chinese chauvinism?

First, there is no public opinion in China, only public sentiment. The kind of ill-informed feelings sketched in this essay are highly volatile. They have no solid formation in informed debate. They can change overnight. One day, the Cultural Revolution will save the world; the next day, it is a disaster. The same holds with the character of Lin Biao. Sentiment lacks substance. The chauvinistic passion in no way captures some Chinese essence, not even the essence of Chinese nationalism.

The Chinese do not even know that America defeated Japan in World War II. Annually, at the end of the summer, as China commemorates the defeat of Japan in World War II, I read the Chinese press essays celebrating that event year after year. The Chinese people have yet to be properly informed as to why it was the American General Douglas MacArthur who received the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri. They are taught that Mao and the CCP freed China from Japanese aggressors or that socialist allies in the north helped them defeat Japan.

In a free and open political atmosphere, Chinese opinion could change hugely and rapidly. The world is replete with instances of such seemingly impossible transformations. In Ukraine, just before the Soviet Union split up, a survey of public sentiment showed almost 90 percent in favor of staying in the Soviet Union. The next year, in a free vote, 90 percent voted the other way.

A similar change could occur in the content of Chinese nationalism. The myths informing patriotism are ambiguous and contestable. Despite surging Chinese chauvinistic sentiment and anti-Americanism since 1989, there is no reason to believe that that is what would win out in a democratizing China. Instead, the very act of democratization would highlight cooperation rather than opposition. Suddenly, it would be both obvious and important that China and America were allies in the war against fascist racism, allies in World War II.

If a political opening were to occur in China, it is almost inconceivable that it would not have a transforming impact on Chinese foreign policy, larger even than the death of Mao and the rise of Deng had in terms of rapprochement with Russia and openness to the world economy. This yet larger change is likely because the Chinese would suddenly learn, among many other paradigm-shattering things, that Mao was complicit with Stalin in the aggression that launched the Korean War and led to almost one million Chinese casualties, that Beijing has long propped up a uniquely brutal regime in Pyongyang, that China was the major military backer of the Khmer Rouge, the cruelest regime in modern Asian history, that Beijing in 1979 launched an unprovoked war against Vietnam, and that China has long remained the major military backer of the thieving tyranny in Burma.

In short, the People's Republic of China has actually been a victimizer of Asian peoples. The CCP record can compare with the inhumanities perpetrated on Asian peoples by the Showa-era imperial Japanese armies of Hirohito. A fall of the dictatorship could discredit the chauvinistic mythos of the CCP. The Maoist framing of Chinese consciousness in which the Chinese people are singular innocent victims of evil foreigners could implode. A new world of possibilities would open up.

Issues would be reframed as well. Sino-Japanese conciliation would become possible. China would then not threaten its neighbors. Trust and cooperation would grow all over Asia. The APEC and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and ASEAN/ARF (ASEAN Regional Forum) could fulfill their promise for peace, prosperity, and pluralism in Asia, much as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union have done for Europe. In short, there is good reason for America promoting a long-term policy of full engagement with China, whatever the painful challenges and short-term setbacks that flow from Chinese chauvinism.

Second, the opposites of what prevails today are also in China but repressed. The voices of win/win liberal internationalism could emerge victorious in an open debate. Culture should never be essentialized. It is not this or that but this and that. No matter how loud and strong militaristic sentiment is today, there is, after all, a good case that it is in China's interest to maximize economic benefit from Taiwan and to bet on long-term peaceful evolutionary forces to resolve the cross-Strait issue. It is inconceivable that Taiwan could resist the attraction of a federalized, democratic, common-market-oriented and prospering China.

Similarly, an energy-importing China would benefit from peace in the South China Seas that would allow all sides to pump the oil freely and securely. Peace and cooperative development are in China's most basic interests. It is important not to be mesmerized by today's seemingly homogeneous super-patriotic consensus. There are major structured economic interests that keep restoring both normal Beijing-Washington relations and regional stability after what seem to be, time after time, relationship-breaking crises. So far, these strong forces have been denied a voice reflective of their actual weightiness.

Some Chinese insist that the revanchist nationalism described in this essay is actually more worrisome to the regime than it need be to America; ruling groups in Beijing understand well that the real target of the chauvinists is China's corrupt rulers, seen as serving only themselves. Ruling groups are not actually caught up in this chauvinist sentiment. It is not a basis for making Chinese foreign policy. Many among ruling groups would like a safe way to get off the back of the tiger that they have been riding because the chauvinism actually threatens China's rulers.

Even in the military, many of whose officers come from central China, that is, neither the rich coastal regions nor the peripheral non-Han regions, people from central places whose suffering by Han Chinese leads the military to have reservations about reform openness and globalization, seen as not benefitting their people, their anti-foreign chauvinism is actually mainly a complaint about domestic Chinese priorities and policies. The military is looking for a better deal for its support base. It uses nationalism to convince the party not to favor coastal regions tied to the global economy, claimed to be causes of societal polarization in China. But, as the party leadership, the military also is not looking for war with America.

Despite economic openness, China remains a monist state. The leadership and line at any one moment make other possibilities invisible. When Mao died in 1976 at a time when Jiang Qing's ultras dominated the propaganda apparatus, the reform possibility was hidden. Yet reform won out. So it is today that chauvinistic anti-American sentiment obscures much that is also there. One does not hear of the students who did not join the May 1999 anti-American riots because they opposed anything associated with the corrupt and brutal CCP dictatorship. One does not hear southern voices who have faith that, in the long run, an economically successful, democratized, and federalized China is an irresistible magnet to the Taiwanese. Such people believe that the war-mongering chauvinists who would use military power against Taiwan are actually narrow patriots who would sacrifice the long-term economic rise of China on a selfish altar of careerism. In short, at both elite and mass levels, there are strong forces that would resist and defeat the aggressive nationalists.

The change of certain popular doggerel hints that Beijing chauvinists may be more isolated than they seem at first glance. In the 1980s, when the southern city of Canton seemed the core of a new and burgeoning economy integrated through Hong Kong to America, it was rhymed, "Beijing aiguo, Shanghai chu guo, Guangzhou maiguo" (Beijing people love the country [are patriots], Shanghai-ese leave the country, Cantonese betray the country). By the end of the 1990s, when trade flourished between Taiwan, the new leader in investment in China, especially with Xiamen across the Taiwan Strait in China's south, a Taiwan portrayed in Beijing as the separatist threat to stability, it was then said, "Beijing wants war, Shanghai seeks peace, Xiamen would surrender." The expansive chauvinism of China may be, first and foremost, a Beijing phenomenon. There is good reason to think of the south, whose population has increased recently by 50 million as northerners flee there for work, as China's better future. The south is not just a region. It is a consciousness, a project of peaceful cooperation whose voice is drowned out by the propaganda of chauvinism, a project that can be embraced in Beijing, too, a politics that could yet win out in China.

In addition, new interests are being created by the economic rise of China which can learn, in contrast to the chauvinists whose framing of international relations precludes such learning, that China can benefit from win/win multilateralism. Some people believe that China's positive response to the American effort against the perpetrators of the September 11 mass murders has again opened space for such win/win people to woo other Chinese to their side.

The reason for supporting an American engagement policy accompanied by quiet vigilance, therefore, is not naivete and ignorance about today's Chinese chauvinism and its war-prone hegemonic project. There are indeed dangerous forces within Chinese politics. But analysts must heed other forces, better prospects, which are rendered misleadingly invisible by the propaganda monism of the authoritarian state. America should both prepare for the worst and build on the better forces.

It certainly would be naive to support engagement with the assumption that freedom will naturally and necessarily evolve from wealth expansion. This faith is based on a misreading of the histories of Taiwan and China. In fact, peace, multilateralism, and democracy are all political projects that have to be won by political struggles in a semiautonomous political arena. They will not evolve automatically or swiftly. They also will not be overly helped by the aid, intervention, or good wishes of foreigners. These are internal Chinese matters. China is a great nation, not a banana republic subject to foreign manipulation. China's political fate will be decided by the Chinese in China. Politics is a politically contingent matter involving struggles in China. The single nasty voice of anti-American chauvinism is not the only dog hunting in Chinese politics. One should not confuse propaganda with deeper political dynamics.

All American engagement can do for the potential win/win forces that already exist in Chinese politics is not to make political success more difficult than it already is for these peace-prone, cooperative political forces. The most important achievements of an American engagement policy with China would flow from the success of America's global policies. America can strive to make possible an international world where the Chinese, as others who choose to do so, can, in fact, play win/win games. Given the challenges of the new moment in globalization, with its volatility and out-of-control financial forces, success for such a global policy is in no way guaranteed. But it may be crucial for the success of engagement in the Asia-Pacific region. That is, building a new international financial architecture facilitating growth with equity can have a major impact on peace in the Taiwan region.

Consequently, given how little America can do to impact Chinese politics directly, the fate of engagement rests mainly with forces in China. There is a tense and angry domestic world in China that makes the chauvinists strong and popular. It is those internal political dynamics that are most decisive for the political fate and economic future of China, and, therefore, for the American policy of engagement. Moreover, one cannot be sanguine about China's domestic dynamics.

Today's Chinese super-patriots do not see the world in ways that would lead them to embrace win/win policies. Indonesia's 1997 financial crisis and the subsequent fall of dictator Suharto show the dangers of corrupt Asian authoritarianism. For stability and a continuing economic rise, to avoid Suharto-era-type ills, China should democratize so that crooks can be held accountable and be peacefully removed from office. But rulers in Beijing interpreted those Indonesian events in a way that denied the importance of political reform. Instead, they took the Indonesian crisis as proof that a centralized authoritarianism in Indonesia, as already had been the case in Russia and Yugoslavia, could fall apart if it did not maintain a strong, centralized, successful, and unchallengeable center. Authoritarianism interprets matters to relegitimatize its own power premises. The result has been an increase of repression in China, not an opening to democracy.

But if China begins a democratic transition, Indonesia would be seen differently, seen in a way more in harmony with American interests and values. It is crucial to remember that, in nation after nation, political reform, once seen as the enemy of real power groups, nevertheless was embraced as the only way to make more stable progress likely. The same possibility exists for China. The future is wide open. Best and worst possibilities are in conflict. As a result, America needs a foreign policy as nuanced as Chinese uncertainties and complexities.

The chauvinistic and military realities of China dictate for America not a mere policy of engagement but one of engagement with vigilance. But this is not because dangerous forces in China must win out. China can be analogized to late 19th-century Germany and Japan. There was no inevitability in the 1890s that the expansionist regimes of the 1930s would rise and emerge triumphant. Many observers thought that both Taisho and Weimar democracy would emerge victorious. That they did not, most historians agree, has a lot to do with out-of-control global forces, contingent events such as the Great Depression, the end of win/win international trade, and the lack of an international financial architecture capable of blocking these worst-case economic events, thereby making a win/win international economy virtually impossible.

The better forces can be weakened or defeated by international factors that shape domestic possibilities. That is why a good China policy for America is mainly the offshoot of enlightened international policies in general. The better Chinese leaders actually understand this deep and long-term logic.

America should be presenting itself and acting in the world to build the international architecture that would once again, as in the Bretton Woods era, facilitate growth with equity. It does not help America's goals for itself to act as the supposed sole superpower, the supposed indispensable nation needed to solve all global issues. America too must abjure self-serving unilateralism for win/win multilateralism.

Consequently, America should acknowledge that globalization weakens all states and makes ever more important the building of broad international cooperation to grapple with vital issues that are beyond the reach of any single state, even the strongest, both China and America. Such a cooperative project seemingly takes us far from the challenge of Chinese nationalism to American security interests. Yet it may be the heart of the military issue. It reminds us that the worst-case scenarios inherent in the Chinese challenges to a peaceful, prosperous Asia of open, pluralist societies, prospects that obviously require continuing American vigilance, including military vigilance, are best dealt with in a framework much larger than U.S. policy with China, no matter how crucial that matter is to America's most vital interests.