The Lovable Police State?

C hinese supremo Xi Jinping has announced a new goal for Chinese diplomacy: that the People’s Republic of China should come to be regarded by the rest of the world as “trustworthy, lovable, and respectable.”

Well.

Lovable is going to be a stretch for a totalitarian police state that operates concentration camps for religious minorities and gulags for political prisoners. When you are a remorseless autocrat, looking like Winnie the Pooh is only going to get you so far on the lovability front.

The other two adjectives won’t be a lot easier.

Is Beijing trustworthy? No, of course not. The Chinese authorities lied about COVID-19 in its early days and may be lying still about the origin of the viral epidemic. They lie about the concentration camps and gulags. They lie about environmental disasters even as Chairman Xi works to position China as an environmental leader in contradistinction to the United States. One of the notable things about the Biden administration is its genuineness: Joe Biden is a genuine fool surrounded by genuine hacks, but even the Biden administration probably is not going to be genuinely foolish enough to trust Beijing.

Is Beijing respectable? Only in a limited way. But that’s enough for now, for our purposes — if we understand our purposes. Xi and his henchmen are nothing if not serious about what they perceive to be their national interest, and they pursue that interest with discipline and energy, if not always with intelligence and competence. That limited-purpose respectability is really the basis of China’s relations with the world at the moment. You can’t count on China to keep its word, but you can count on Beijing to keep tightly focused on its priorities and to follow through with a plan of action. And that is worth something, as Washington has in recent decades demonstrated superabundantly by displaying its own lack of that particular virtue.

There are areas of potentially fruitful cooperation between the United States and China, as long as that cooperation serves Chinese interests — and as long as Washington understands that this calculation, and not ideology alone or political rhetoric, is the real basis of any such cooperation. China’s foreign policy is in the end no less captive to domestic politics than is U.S. foreign policy, but Beijing runs on a different clock than does Washington, and Chinese leaders risk a much higher price for failure than do their American counterparts: If the Chinese people ever turn on it, then the Chinese Communist Party will exit by the same door it came in through.

Cooperation, yes.

Lovable? No.

And it doesn’t have to be.

There are many ways for China to be a great power engaged with the world on its own terms. Washington’s main diplomatic business with China is figuring out what these are and how to encourage them — or frustrate them — in a way that accords with American interests. Our relationship with China is not going to be one of loving cousins, as it is with the United Kingdom or Canada, but neither is China a country that can be isolated like Cuba or North Korea, and our cold war with China — that is what it is — is not going to be like the one with the Soviet Union. Nor would it serve our interests to make the U.S.–China relationship more like the old U.S.–Soviet relationship.

Our relationship is going to be one of negotiation, which is normal, and it is well past time for Washington to take that reality seriously.

There are even ways for China to become a decent, more trustworthy, and more admirable society without its becoming a liberal democracy, though it seems to me that Western critics who insist that Chinese culture makes impossible the emergence of an authentically Chinese liberal democracy are only echoing those who said the same thing about Japan and the Republic of Korea and were wrong about it. There was a time when the same thing was said about Germany, and it is worth remembering that within my short lifetime such utterly normal countries as Spain, Portugal, and Greece were ruled by military dictatorships. But while it would be better for the world — and for the Chinese people — if China had elections, a free press, a bill of rights, an independent judiciary, etc., American interests do not require that this be the case.

What American interests require is representatives — both in formal diplomatic roles and, critically, in the private sector — who understand those interests and pursue them with intelligence and consistency. The Biden administration is unlikely to make much progress on that front, and the American business establishment, from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, is a basket of kittens in a cage of tigers. The last time Republicans had a shot at shaping that relationship, the best they could manage was the laughable antics of the Trump administration, which damaged both U.S. economic interests and U.S. credibility.

Washington cannot come up with a meaningful strategy for getting what it wants out of the U.S.–China relationship until it figures out what it wants. Currently, it doesn’t know. Beijing doesn’t have that problem.

Chairman Xi may want to be loved, but he’ll be satisfied just to get his way.