Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013. xi, 205 pp. (Tables, B&W illus.) US$19.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-58826-874-7.
In this overview of America’s difficult relationship with China, Mel Gurtov sets out to challenge the notion that the new century belongs to China in the same way that the preceding century was said to belong to the United States. Professor Gurtov looks at the different schools of thought prevalent in both China and America and argues that it is too easy to overstate China’s strength, ambitions and capacity to lead. He also says it is wrong to exaggerate the likelihood of a decline in the United States’ global role. He regards it as important to keep engaging China as a respected partner and to avoid treating China as a threat and creating a new Cold War. He wants to strengthen US engagement with China and makes a series of suggestions as to how this should best be done. At the end of the book, he adds various documents such as excerpts of China’s National Defense policy document.
The book certainly serves as useful background to stimulate debate and he covers many bilateral issues which make the news. Occasionally, he slips up, such as when he says that the Asian Financial Crisis took place in the 1980s instead of 1998. The serious drawback to the book is what is left out rather than what is included. Professor Gurtov presents himself as a skeptic against the establishment hawkish view of China and as a dedicated advocate of engagement. As such he recommends reducing US military spending, abandoning Taiwan, giving China a greater power to veto humanitarian intervention wars and recommends a regional security forum which would put China in a strong position to influence US traditional allies in the region. This is very much what Beijing would like too. It would like Americans to underestimate China as a threat to its interests and its representatives are always warning Americans not to start a new cold war.
Throughout the book Professor Gurtov takes the liberal or left-wing position on China, or rather the Chinese Communist Party, and this has invariably been the default policy of the American establishment since the 1940s. The reason why this encounters a great deal of mistrust is that the promises and predictions of the engagement faction have failed to come true. Ever since Nixon went to China, we have been assured that the Chinese Communist Party would lose power, or at least get weaker, as it would be obliged to undertake political reforms, but China has not become a democracy nor has it even made a meaningful start in that direction.
We were also told that economic engagement would bring mutual benefits but it is China which has grown hugely prosperous, and America which has become dangerously indebted to China, with no appreciable rise in living standards. And many concerns about the wisdom of continuing the huge transfer of technology and know-how to China are justifiable because the country is not an ally but a rival.
We were also led to believe that as China became a pillar of the global economy it would become a peaceful and positive player. In fact, we know China continues to back all the worst dictatorships around the world: Cuba, North Korea, Burma, Syria, Sudan, Ghaddafi’s Libya, Milosevic’s Serbia, and so on. Its belligerent posture on regional issues, including claims to all of the South China Sea and dramatic military build-up, is frightening all the small countries in the region and has started a regional arms race.
At every critical point in history, the United States has made mistaken and misinformed choices on China. Washington first gave support to the Communists in Yenan during the Second World War, it forced the Nationalists to negotiate with the Communists in 1946/1947 and then withdrew support from Chiang Kai-shek. It did not expect the Communists to win the civil war, nor invade North Korea, nor back the Vietnamese Communists. During the 1950s and 1960s, CIA reports denied that tens of millions perished from famine in China so it rejected Taiwan’s calls for an invasion. Rather, it asserted that the Chinese economy was growing by 10 percent a year, faster even than Japan’s, so when Kissinger went to China, he failed to realize that he was dealing with a bankrupt failed state in the midst of a civil war. In 1979, the United States gave its support to Deng Xiaoping when he posed as a democratic reformer and again renewed that support after the 1989 Tiananmen student protests.
As such, his underlying assumption—that engagement has worked so well in the past that the answer to current problems is simply to have more of it—needs to be addressed and defended more directly.
It is open to question whether we are any the wiser about the ambitions and policies of China’s new leaders than we ever were. The CCP remains a secretive Leninist organization that produces a great many opaque statistics about its activities. For all these reasons, the public has every right to be extremely cautious about accepting the views that Professor Gurtov articulates in this book. It’s surely not because anyone wants a new cold war, as he suggests, but because American experts and politicians have been wrong so often in the past. Some may also recall just how wrong the CIA and the Sovietologists were about Mikhail Gorbachov, the state of the Soviet economy and the proportion of its economy devoted to military spending.
Professor Gurtov also argues that our key concern should be about the challenges to China, not the challenges from China. You can see what he means but many of these challenges which he talks about are not so much challenges to China but to the absolute rule of the Chinese Communist Party. It is surely important to distinguish between the two. If a different party were in power with different priorities, perhaps environmental issues, minority ethnic unrest or worker protests and so on would not pose a threat to stability but enhance it.
Jasper Becker
Independent Researcher, Bath, United Kingdom
pp. 575-577