The consensus view of the People’s Republic of China as an anti-democratic, human-rights-abusing, authoritarian, ideologically communist state represents a significant reversal in policy-maker attitudes over the last 25 years. At the start of this century — just a decade or so after the Tiananmen Square massacre — government leaders and policy-makers in Washington and in like-minded capitals around the world viewed the PRC as an emerging responsible actor in the global economy. There would be setbacks (Tiananmen was seen as one of them) but nothing that couldn’t be worked through in the expectation that market forces would bring China into the liberal world order.
Successive U.S. administrations of both parties got to that position by ignoring many indications to the contrary, in the hope of a more desirable outcome that in practice proved chimerical. Since then, the truths about the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party regime have become too obvious to ignore. But policymakers should also avoid erring in the opposite direction by magnifying the PRC’s capabilities as an emerging superpower. In fact, China under the Communist Party is a nation in long-term decline. It certainly is a threat in many respects, but if prior generations of policy-makers undersized the PRC as a problem, it would be just as wrong for today’s policy-makers to supersize it. Only by rightsizing our perceptions can we accurately assess the current situation and create the best policies for the future. Specifically, we should be better attuned to two realities: China is much weaker than it wants the world to believe, and our focus on a potential conflict in Taiwan — as important as it is — is diverting attention from other, more likely and attainable near-term Chinese objectives, including some in Central Asia, Russia, the Arctic, and Japan’s southern islands, that could destabilize the region and the world.
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