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From “Strategic Partners” to “Strategic Competitors”: George W. Bush and the Politics of U.S. China Policy
Abstract
Ever since Richard Nixon's 1972 "opening" to China, U.S. presidential election campaigns have been the occasion for the opposition party to strongly challenge the incumbent president's policy of engagement toward China. Once in power, however, successful challengers (Carter, Reagan, Clinton) have softened their criticism and accepted the strategic necessity of cooperation with China. In the first stage of this cycle, the 2000 election appeared to be no exception, as presidential challenger George W. Bush sharply criticized Bill Clinton's notion of a "strategic partnership" with the PRC and proposed instead that the U.S. and China were "strategic competitors." This paper examines the first six months of the Bush presidency to see if the historic pattern of post-election reversion to the status-quo ante is repeating itself in the Bush Administration. Looking, inter alia, at the individual preferences of key administration policymakers, the administration's enhanced arms sale package to Taiwan, the president's pledge to do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan, and the mid-summer visit of Secretary of State Colin Powell to Beijing, the paper documents the existence of a sharp division between "soft" realists and "hard" realists within the Bush Administration; and it concludes that while there has been a perceptible shift toward a more adversarial outlook, it is too soon to tell whether this shift will be partly offset by the normal first-term "regression to the mean."
... Jiang and Clinton issued a joint statement to build the US-China relations as a "constructive strategic partnership facing the 21 st century", officially formulating America's status quo perception of China. 3 A few days before the meeting, Clinton addressed several concrete approaches to expand cooperation with China, including promoting a peaceful world, keeping peace and stability in Asia, maintaining nonproliferation, and liberalizing global trade. Among these approaches, inviting China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the most important approach to further opening China's market, producing a liberalizing effect on China. ...
... Even after a military plane collision occurred in April 2001, the Bush administration still rejected direct communication with President Jiang Zemin. In security areas, the Bush administration highlighted the security commitment to defending Taiwan against an attack from mainland China, thus transforming America's Taiwan policy from strategic ambiguity to "whatever it takes" [3]. Furthermore, China was listed as a potential target of a nuclear attack. ...
... The three principles include:(1) a stable, open and successful China meet America's interest; (2)US supports China to engage in the international society; (3) Solving the divergences through communication.3 Although a constructive strategic partnership should be promoted by both sides, it was difficult to image that such a relationship could be achieved without Washington's recognition. ...
The United States’ (US) changing policy towards China has become one of the most attractive issues in contemporary international politics. To explore the reasons underlying these changes, existing studies adopt four schools of explanation, i.e., status competition, institutional competition, failure of engagement, and domestic factors. Each school provides valuable theoretical insights. However, existing studies have obvious problems with single attribution and, thus, fail to formulate a causal mechanism explaining the long-term trajectory of the US’s China strategy. By recategorizing America’s unilateral perception of China as reformist, revolutionary, status quo and positionalist, which extends beyond the revisionist-status quo dichotomy, this article develops a systemic explanatory model and process tracing of the transition of US’s China policy during the post-Cold War period to explain the theoretical logic underlying the changes. This article argues that the positional change and the US’s unilateral perception of China are the two main factors triggering changes in the US’s China strategy. China’s foreign behavior, as the intervening variable, strengthens or weakens the government’s perception of China and, thus, determines the US’s strategic choices, i.e., whether to pursue a policy of containment, competition, precaution, congagement, engagement, or accommodation. Four comparative case studies are presented to demonstrate how this article’s explanatory model can be applied.
... In other parts of Asia, the war on terror provided the US with the rationale to return its troops to the Philippines, where bases had been abandoned in the early 1990s.To a certain extent, the deployment of American forces in Central Asia and East Asia [had been] perceived by China as the first stage of encirclement. (Ong, 2007, p. 37) This perceived geographical encirclement by the United States generated fear in China, and this fear combined with the Bush administration's view of China as a 'strategic competitor' (Baum, 2002;Shambaugh, 2000). ...
As China rises, Sino–US competition for influence in East and Southeast Asia has become inescapable. China’s growing influence on its south-western neighbour, Myanmar, is a case in point. The impact of China’s rise is more strongly felt, politically and economically, in Myanmar than elsewhere in the world. This article asks the follow question: What explains China’s more aggressive political and economic clout in Myanmar than elsewhere in the world? To answer this question, this article argues that Myanmar holds a unique importance to China’s balancing act against the preponderance of American power in a unipolar world. Most of the available literature on China’s inroads into Myanmar focus on China’s geopolitical and strategic interests. With such focus, existing literatures take on Myanmar’s importance to China in terms of China’s politics of resource extraction that meets the requirement of its overall economic development. There is no denying it—resource extraction is important for China in order to feed its expanding economy. But hardly any study frames Myanmar’s special weight in China’s politics of resource extraction from the perspective of Beijing’s balancing act against the United States (US). China’s balancing act is characterized by an ‘economic prebalancing’ strategy. The strategy is rooted in China’s grand strategy of acquiring ‘comprehensive national strength’, and more precisely, it is embedded in Beijing’s ‘peaceful development’ strategy. The article asserts that Myanmar is critically important in China’s economic prebalancing strategy against the United States.
... As China's weight in the world economy soared in the 2000s, it generated anxieties among the political and economic elites of China's neighbours and Western powers. While the Clinton administration had labelled China as "strategic partner," the Bush administration switched to "strategic competitor" (Baum 2001). ...
... As China's weight in the world economy soared in the 2000s, it generated anxieties among the political and economic elites of China's neighbours and Western powers. While the Clinton administration had labelled China as "strategic partner," the Bush administration switched to "strategic competitor" (Baum 2001). ...
This book explores U.S.-Taiwan-China relations during both the Trump and Biden administrations, revealing how policy changes under both presidents have impacted Washington’s decades-long strategic policy framework for Cross-Strait Relations.
By tracing the continuities and changes of U.S. Strategic ambiguity and One-China Policy framework between the Trump and Biden administrations, the book assesses how the foreign policy prism, through which U.S. leaders view China and Taiwan, has experienced a distinct alteration and subsequently led to a policy adjustment. Utilising a wide range of documents and primary material, such as White House documents (ranging from the Clinton to the Biden administrations) in conjunction with interviews with Taiwan officials, this volume brings a detailed portrait of past, present, and potential future U.S.-Taiwan-China relations. Moreover, it provides a succinct examination of U.S. foreign policy traditions such as internationalism, nationalism, and multilateral nationalism (providing a study of U.S.-China relations and policies from Nixon to Biden) and the resulting influence of such traditions on recent U.S. Cross-Strait policy.
Presenting a comprehensive study of both the Trump and Biden administrations approach to Taiwan, this will be a valuable resource for any scholar or student of U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S.-Taiwan-China Relations and Cross-Strait Relations.
This article provides a critical analysis of the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, which has been regarded as one of the most important international agreements concluded by both sides in recent years. The paper starts with a critical summary of the Agreement, which reveals that the Agreement failed to add much in terms of substance. What, then, explains the rationale for the Agreement? This article argues that the key to understand the Agreement lies not in the narrow commercial interests, but more in the broad strategic and geopolitical considerations of both the EU and China. The article concludes with a review of the development of the twin concepts of “strategic opportunity” in China and “strategic autonomy” in the EU, as well as what the confluence of these considerations would mean for the future of the Agreement.
Using neoclassical realist theory, this paper focuses on how the liberal logic underpinning the US engagement policy with the People's Republic of China (PRC) – to promote the PRC's greater marketization, internationalization, political opening, and even democratization – has shaped Washington's One‐China/strategic ambiguity policy since 1972. This approach is used to deal carefully with the Taiwan Strait impasse. However, as strategic competitions intensify between the United States and PRC, the Donald Trump administration is strengthening Washington–Taipei ties, in line with conservative nationalism, to counter a more assertive and authoritarian China. Declaring the failure of past engagement upheld by presidents following Nixon, the Trump government is less cautious about upsetting Beijing through the United States' more explicit backing of the island democracy. The United States’ bolstering of Taiwan's status, though short of recognizing its sovereignty, has received strong bipartisan support in Washington and is unlikely to be changed even if Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, is elected president in November 2020.
President Donald Trump has overseen an overhaul of U.S. China policy that includes a large military buildup, the most aggressive use of tariffs since World War II, the tightest investment and immigration restrictions since the Cold War, and the most expensive piece of soft power legislation in at least a decade. Yet Trump was not the sole architect of the hard turn in U.S. China policy. Tensions between the two countries had been growing since the end of the Cold War, albeit in fits and starts, and took a turn for the worst after the 2008 financial crisis. Trump put his unique imprint on U.S.–China relations, but U.S. China policy would have become more competitive regardless of who won the 2016 U.S. presidential election and will remain so years after Trump leaves office.
Institute for National Strategic Studies Bush Would Give Up China Partnership China and the forces of Globalization A Blue Team Blocks Beijing. Time China Issue Resists Usual White House Defenses Strategic Realism: The Future of US-Sino Security Relations. Strategic Review
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