BOOK REVIEW: China: Neither fully foe nor partner

THE BEIJING CONSENSUS: HOW CHINA’S AUTHORITARIAN MODEL WILL DOMINATE THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

By Stefan Halper

Basic Books, $28.90

276 pages

Reviewed by Benjamin P. Tyree

China’s explosive “miracle” growth over the past several decades has positioned Beijing as a major player on theworld stage and a challenger to the American vision of international relations centered on the expansion of human rights. But the East Asian giant is not at this point to be regarded as a true enemy in the traditional sense, nor is it the “partner” of the United States that its friends and apologists claim it to be, says Stefan Halper, director of the Atlantic studies program at England’s Cambridge University.

Mr. Halper, a veteran Republican international-relations expert and former White House and State Department official, sees the challenge as competition between rival soft-power deployments of the United States and China rather than any near-term or acute threat of military conflict.

In “The Beijing Consensus,” Mr. Halper says the United States has failed to address the emergence of China’s new and rising model in the Third World: “the power of the market plus the stability of authoritarian rule.”

Moreover, he writes, “As capitalism deepens around the globe, so is the raw and relative pre-eminence of America diminishing.”

The inevitable quest by an economically expanding China for resources and markets, and its singular example of success, creates a competition for hearts, minds, bellies and desires for betterment in a world of want. But this, with few exceptions, excludes ambitions of territorial expansion or true imperium, though it does make irredentist claims against Taiwan and border regions in India and rides roughshod over absorbed but distinct regions and ethnic groups such as Tibet and the Uighars of its western territories.

To Mr. Halper, direct military confrontation with the United States would be out of sync with China’s careful, risk-avoiding long-term strategic thought. The often-ballyhooed Chinese military buildup, in Mr. Halper’s view, should be regarded without particular alarm: “In reality, Chinese leaders want neither the strain on finances nor the negative and potentially costly atmospherics that would accompany a genuine arms race with the United States. [Chinese military expenditures] are still dwarfed in comparison with their American counterpart.”

Mr. Halper eschews the theory that China is either an opponent or a partner. At various times, its interests may cause it to behave as one or the other or as a combination of both. But finally, at bottom, he says, is an immovable verity: “We are not partners,” and he prefers the term “political rival” to that of “foe.”

Mr. Halper says the possibility of China playing real hardball with its emerging economic muscle is held in check by what he calls a “marriage of liabilities” or an economic form of mutually assured destruction. Harming the United States would undermine China’s strategy for economic growth and thereby threaten the communist regime’s stability.

“China doesn’t fund American borrowing because it wants to humble or hinder the United States; it does so because the United States remains the largest overseas market for an economy that relies on exports.” He even adds that “China hasn’t deliberately set out to diminish the power of the Western bloc or the appeal of its brand.” These realities, he says, are rooted in the Communist Party’s determination to stay in power at home. Still, Chinese ownership of U.S. debt or the possibility of economic manipulation creates a “serious” concern over “how this stable system of mutual dependence has weakened America’s voice in global affairs.”

About 70 percent of China’s giant foreign-exchange portfolio is held in liquid U.S. dollar assets such as Treasury bonds, Mr. Halper notes. This $1.6 trillion is put to use expanding not only China’s military and industry, but its footprint as resource purchaser and importer and patron in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The recent call by China’s central banker for rethinking the dollar’s role as reserve currency “reflected growing unease about the threat of the dollar decline more than a desire to bring about its outcome,” Mr. Halper says.

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