Gary J. Schmitt
Although changes in American and Chinese leadership have brought current tensions between the two nations to the fore, the underlying reasons for the tensions are not tied to either President Donald Trump or President Xi Jinping coming into office.
Rather, the strategic competition between the US and China is principally the product of regime-driven differences over both what constitutes their national interests and what their respective visions were for the character of China’s rise.
The administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy is a relatively coherent response to the challenge China poses. But questions remain about the administration’s ability to resource it sufficiently and carry it out steadily given President Trump’s own idiosyncratic America First policy views.
Introduction
America’s ties with China are now centuries old. The first ship to fly under the United States’ flag, the merchant ship Empress of China, left New York’s harbor in 1784 bound for Canton to swap American-grown ginseng and silver for Chinese tea. Since then, as US journalist and author John Pomfret has noted, Americans and Chinese have been enchanting each other and disappointing each other in seemingly perpetual cycles.1
From the American perspective, there was the potentially vast Chinese market to tap into, millions of Chinese to preach the Christian Gospel to, and cheap Chinese labor to help build the American West. Conversely, the Chinese saw the Americans as fair traders, when compared with the European mercantilist powers. They saw the US Open Door policy as an attempt to keep China from being broken into pieces.
Moreover, like other immigrants, thousands of Chinese saw the American West as a land of opportunity. And when Sun Yat-sen founded the first Chinese republic after the fall of the imperial dynasty, he used Abraham Lincoln’s paradigm that government should be “of the people, by the people, and for the people” as the core for his own “Three Principles of the People.”2 But expectations on both sides of the Pacific have never fully been met. China has never developed into the nation Americans hoped it would become, and, from Beijing’s perspective, the US has never fully backed China’s attempt to reclaim its once great standing on the world stage.
This cycle of hope and disappointment was seemingly broken for good when Mao Zedong’s Communists drove Chiang Kai-shek’s forces off the Chinese mainland in 1949 and Mao established the People’s Republic of China (PRC). With China’s entry into the Korean War in 1950 and years of support for insurgencies aimed at American “imperialism,” relations were virtually nonexistent. The United States was the PRC’s implacable foe, and, for Washington, the PRC was an enemy only slightly less threatening than the Soviet Union.
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