After the Cold War: Domestic Factors and U.S.-China Relations (review)

Pity the scholar writing about U.S.-China relations. The course of events almost always catches up with the publication process. Those writing in 1997 would talk about the rise of Chinese nationalism, but could hardly have predicted the anti-American demonstrations in Beijing protesting the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Predicting the course of China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) was similarly difficult. Few would have imagined that the Chinese premier would arrive in Washington with real concessions in hand, only to be rebuffed by the Clinton administration. Even fewer would have predicted that the president would then play phone tag with Zhu Rongji as he traveled around the country lobbying American business groups to pressure Washington. And security analysts, used to playing the espionage game by Cold War rules, would not have anticipated a Congressional report that publicly accused the Clinton administration of such laxity that the Chinese were able to steal all of America's nuclear secrets. Even the issue of Taiwan has blown up in unexpected ways, with President Lee Teng-hui moving the island one step closer to a two-China policy, much to the consternation of both China and the United States. Each of these issues—nationalism, the international economic regime, security, and cross-Strait relations—has bedeviled U.S.-China relations for years. How these issues play out, however, is often dramatic and unexpected.

Robert S. Ross has edited a volume of essays on U.S.-China relations that were developed during workshops in the United States and in China. Scholars at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and at Beijing University's Research Center for Contemporary China participated in a research project funded by the Asia Foundation. Five authors are included in this volume, with chapters on strategic issues (Robert S. Ross), the role of public opinion in the making of U.S.-China policy (Steven M. Teles), domestic American politics and the Taiwan issue (Robert G. Sutter), and two essays on U.S.-China economic relations (Marcus Noland and Barry Naughton).

The premise of the book is that in the post-Cold War era, "the course of U.S.-China relations will be fundamentally affected by the evolution of each country's domestic system and that understanding the impact of domestic factors on U.S. and China policy-making is crucial to understanding U.S.-China relations and the prospects for stability in both East Asia and in global politics" (p. viii). The final product, according to Ross, "reflects the insights of both Chinese and American perspectives on the importance of domestic factors in U.S.-China relations" (p. xiv).

How to manage the strategic relationship is the first focus of the volume. Robert S. Ross reviews U.S.-China relations within the context of East Asia as well as within the bilateral context (proliferation, human rights, and economic issues). According to Ross, "the challenge of post-Cold War U.S.-China relations is to maximize cooperation and manage conflict in the absence of strategic imperatives and in the face of considerable domestic pressures" (p. 34). Domestic pressures, Ross suggests, will be felt more by American policy makers than by Chinese leaders, but both will feel the need to respond to public attitudes and special interests.

Steven M. Teles examines the role in shaping Washington's China policy played by special interest groups that focus on strategic and military issues, economics and trade, and human rights. All of these interest groups, for different reasons and with different expectations, support the further integration of China into the international security, economic, and human rights regime. However, without serious presidential attention to U.S.-China relations, particularly the articulation of a broad framework to guide policy decisions, the negative attitude of many Americans toward China...