Editor's Note:

This year marks the 20th anniversary of China joining the World Trade Organization (WTO). But 20 years on, China-US ties are at a low point, leading some US scholars and politicians to reflect on "what went wrong" with the US "engagement policy" toward China over the past decades. Invited by Global Times reporters Hu Yuwei and Gu Di, John Mearsheimer (Mearsheimer), prominent American scholar of international relations who is best known in China for his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), and Chinese scholar Professor Wang Yiwei (Wang) from the Renmin University of China, also the translator of Mearsheimer's book, had an in-depth video conversation exchanging views on the ensuing conflict between the two countries and their joint future direction.

Mearsheimer, a critic of the "engagement policy," argues that America's playbook for China has been a complete failure. He believes there was no flashpoint between the superpowers in the Cold War that is as dangerous as Taiwan is today. Future cooperation between the two will be dampened by the momentum of increased conflicts.  

Wang, conversely, sees the strained ties as a tragedy of Washington Consensus but not a tragedy of the great powers. He believes common challenges facing mankind in the future are the primary issues to be jointly addressed by the two nations.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the stance of the Global Times.

John Mearsheimer in a dialogue with Wang Yiwei Photo: Hu Yuwei/GT

Part 1 Deteriorated ties a tragedy of great powers?

Mearsheimer: When I wrote the book in 2001, relations between China and the US were excellent. But today, relations have become terrible, even hostile. The question is, what happened? In 2001 we operated in a unipolar world where the US was by far the most powerful country in the world. China was in no position to challenge the US, so the two countries got along together quite well.

But as China grew more powerful, it has begun making moves to dominate Asia the way the US dominates the Western hemisphere. I think this makes perfect sense from China's point of view. But the US fears growing Chinese power and is bent on preventing China from dominating Asia. The US does not tolerate peer competitors.

Wang: In 2001, China joined the WTO, which was a dramatic opportunity as China could be part of the super globalization or new liberalism globalization with the mentality of Washington Consensus. Western countries make huge profits from China's access to WTO. But relations have gotten increasingly worse, not because of the tragedy of the great powers, but the end of the new liberalism globalization.

And now with COVID-19, people are declaring the end of the new liberation globalization. Even the US now wants to build a new system, especially in the Indo-Pacific region, to rebuild India to replace China as a world factory which benefits from accessing the WTO. The US now wants to build a new decoupled or "de-Chinalized" global supply chain. The result is a tragedy of the Washington Consensus but not of the great powers.

Mearsheimer: Our arguments are not mutually exclusive. You are correct that the US helped integrate China into this highly globalized economy and helped China to grow wealthy. China did a brilliant job of taking advantage of globalization to grow into an especially powerful country. The US thought that was a good thing, because, as I said in the recent piece published on the Foreign Affairs, China would become a liberal democracy and a "responsible stakeholder" in an American-led international order. So, Washington helped facilitate Chinese growth through its policy of engagement.

But as I warned in 2001, if China continued to grow economically, it was likely that we would end up in a terrible situation where the two countries, instead of having friendly relations, would have hostile relations.

The US was intoxicated with liberal triumphalism after the Cold War. Thus, it decided to pursue engagement, which helped China grow more prosperous and led to the present situation.

Wang: The logic behind your emphasis on US' help to China is a Christian logic that sees China's development as the proffer of America, as if it were a gift. It is essentially a religious way of thinking at the heart of America, mainly American Centrism and Manifest Destiny.

Part2 - Has US engagement policy toward China really failed?

Mearsheimer: There is no question that there is a powerful sense in the US that it is the city on the hill. This is what American Exceptionalism is all about. Most Americans believe that if every country looked like the US, we would all live happily ever after.

So, when the Cold War ended in 1989, the US basically decided to try to remake the world in its own image. Regarding China, the US pursued a policy of engagement. The idea was that if China was integrated into the international economy and international institutions like the WTO, it would become wealthy and would then turn into a democracy like the US. The two countries would then get along peacefully for the foreseeable future. This was America's "China dream."

But it did not work. China has certainly grown more powerful since the early 1990s, but it did not end up looking like the US. That is hardly surprising. China is a country that has a deep and rich culture, and it has its own values. It has its own preferences regarding the kind of political system it wants to have. Most American policymakers failed to understand that basic fact of life. They thought they could do social engineering in China, in Russia, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, four countries where US policy resulted in colossal failures. On top of that, China today is a peer competitor of the US.

Engagement was a remarkably foolish policy. There is no way that the US could change China's political culture in any meaningful way and making China rich put an end to unipolarity.

Wang: China also accepts American values of democracy and freedom, like how China adopted Buddhism from Asia and India, and we make it localized. We are not against the human values of democracy and freedom. What we are against is America using its values to force China to comply, to interfere in China's internal affairs, and using Taiwan as a democratic pawn on the international stage. That is the reason why China is angry.

Secondly, we are more impacted by our ancestors, not by the US because it's a very young power. The engagement policy is only decades old, while China has a 5,000-year-old history.

Mearsheimer: Nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet. All countries want to determine for themselves what their political system will be. They don't want other countries - including the US - interfering in their politics. As you remember, most Americans were outraged at the thought that Russia might be interfering in the 2016 election. That was seen as an unacceptable violation of American sovereignty. But the US decided, starting in the early years of the unipolar moment, that it was going to interfere in Chinese politics. Unsurprisingly, that policy failed and angered many Chinese in the process.

Wang: That's the consensus reached. Every country should have its own model without outside interference. This is not nationalism but sovereignty.

You said the engagement policy failed. In reality, the engagement policy begins with former President Nixon's opening of China's door, and it also helped the US defeat the Soviet Union, and then Japan economically.

So an engagement policy hugely profits the US in the long term.

Part3 - Can peaceful reunification occur without US interference?

Wang: There is a major misunderstanding about Taiwan. Chinese people believe Taiwan is our domestic affairs. If you cannot liberate the island of Taiwan, how can you achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation? But in the logic of many Americans, Taiwan is not about the Chinese civil war but about so-called democracy. America thinks China's national reunification will undermine US dominance in the Western Pacific region, or even the US' alliance system.

Mearsheimer: I understand that the Taiwan question is seen by the Chinese as a domestic political issue. But it's important to understand that from an American perspective, that island is of tremendous strategic importance. Whether China takes back the island matters greatly for the security competition between Beijing and Washington.

For the foreseeable future, the US is going to be committed to preventing China from taking back that island. Of course, this will cause huge problems with China, which wants to take back the island of Taiwan not only for strategic reasons, but more importantly, because it is sacred territory.

If peaceful reunification is decided, I do not think the US would try to stop it. The real question is whether the US would go to war to defend Taiwan if military force is used to achieve reunification.

I believe that the Biden administration - and future administrations - would fight to prevent reunification through military means for two reasons. First, it would do enormous damage to America's alliances in Asia if the US did nothing to protect Taiwan. The reputational costs would be enormous. Second, the island is an important strategic asset for keeping Chinese military forces bottled up inside the so-called "first-island chain." That matters greatly for containing Chinese power.

There is no way this problem can be solved through negotiations. The US is not going to allow China to take back the island without a fight, while China is deeply committed to taking it back. This standoff makes the strategic competition between Beijing and Washington especially dangerous. There was no flashpoint between the superpowers in the Cold War that is as dangerous as Taiwan is today.

Wang: If you've read Sun Tzu's Art of War, you know there's a phrase in it called "subdue an enemy without fighting." If China is strong enough to deter the US from interfering in the Taiwan question, then peaceful reunification without US interference might be possible in the future.

Moreover, when the US oversteps too ambitiously and when it can't maintain its hegemonic status, it will definitely give up Taiwan because it is not core to its national interest.

Mearsheimer: There is great concern in the US that the intense security competition between the two countries might turn into a hot war. Neither side wants that to happen, but they can't stop themselves from competing for security, which permeates every dimension of their relationship and runs the risk of leading to a shooting war. Why? Because this is the way international politics works. It is effectively a zero-sum game, and because China is rising and challenging America's dominant position in the world, it is only natural that the US will seek to contain China and try to remain the dominant state on the planet.

Part4 - Is technological decoupling inevitable?

Mearsheimer: There is an intense competition taking place between the US and China today over the development of sophisticated technologies like quantum computing and artificial intelligence, just to name a few. The US is determined to make sure that it remains the leading country in the world in terms of developing cutting-edge technologies. China wisely wants to replace the US and dominate that realm.

Which side wins that competition matters greatly in determining how wealthy China and the US will be moving forward, which is of profound importance for shaping the balance of power between them. This logic explains why both the US and the USSR cared greatly about their relative wealth during the Cold War.

Wang: But we are still living in an internet system the US established and innovated, and I don't think China has been a competitor in that realm. That's why Huawei, a more advanced top 5G company still suffered from the US' long-arm jurisdiction. As the founder of Huawei Ren Zhengfei said, it's not one company's problem, it is a system problem. Despite being the best in 5G, it still exists in a system the US established.

Mearsheimer: But what you see is that the two economies are becoming increasingly disengaged. China is now being forced to develop its own chips. The US is not happy about China's dominance of 5G and is telling countries around the world not to adopt Huawei's 5G system. This was not the way the world worked in 2001 when Americans and Chinese alike believed that economic relations between them was an expanding pie that benefitted both sides equally.

Over the following years, however, China grew richer at a more rapid pace than the US, and Beijing closed the power gap between the two countries. Chinese are exceptionally good at innovating and manufacturing and thus have become a serious competitor for the US in ways the Soviets never were.

Of course, the US thought that as China grew more powerful economically, it would become a responsible stakeholder in the international system, which meant it would be content to continue operating in an American dominated international order.

But as China grew more powerful, it wanted to rewrite the existing rules to suit its own interests and create its own institutions. This made perfect sense from Beijing's perspective, but not from America's. The idea of helping China to grow in the belief it would become a responsible stakeholder was a strategic blunder of the first order.

Wang: China is in fact more responsible than the US. China has joined more international treaties and organizations than the US which had for one time quit the WHO and the Paris Agreement.

But what matters now is the US wants a new system and global supply chain. It wishes to dominate again. But China never thinks about domination.

Part 5 - Intense competition over cooperation in near future?

Mearsheimer: There's no question that despite the security competition between China and the US, there are two major problems that require their cooperation: pandemics and even more importantly, climate change. But my argument is that the more intense the security competition between the two sides, the more difficult it will be for them to cooperate on those issues. Given that it appears that the competition between China and the US will be very intense for the foreseeable future, I am quite depressed about the prospects of them cooperating to deal with pandemics and climate change.

We are locked in an intense security competition, and there's little that can be done to ameliorate, much less end that rivalry.

Wang: But what if more urgent challenges and threats arise in the future that need joint action?

Honestly, the Chinese side is more worried about American domestic politics preventing future cooperation due to its highly polarized state. The US lacks China's strong leadership.

More, there are numerous US politicians blaming everything on China, from trade war to rising US inflation to a shambolic pandemic response. China could even help America with infrastructure building and domestic consumer debts. By now US has lost numerous opportunities to work together with China as it tries to make China the scapegoat of US domestic governance.  

Mearsheimer: Correct. If you look at US domestic politics, the country is badly divided. For the US moving forward, this is a really serious problem that hopefully will be rectified.

Wang: There are numerous politicians blaming everything on China, from trade war to rising US inflation to a shambolic pandemic response in the US. China could even help America with infrastructure building and domestic consumer debts. By now America has lost numerous opportunities to work together with China as it tries to make China the scapegoat of US domestic governance.  

Mearsheimer: When it comes to America's domestic problems, some blame is placed on China, but not much. The Chinese are just not much of a scapegoat in this realm. It's more a case of the Democrats and the Republicans blaming each other for America's problems at home.

But if you switch to the international realm, many Americans are super critical of China, which is hardly surprising. After all, this happened with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Security competitions between great powers tend to become personalized. This is regrettable, because the driving force behind these great-power competitions is the structure of the system, not personalities, ideologies, or the type of political regime.