An Uneasy Codependence

Assuming trend lines hold, the eventual shift of global supremacy from the United States to China will be the show of the century. The question is whether it will lead to more conflict or more cooperation. For many U.S. citizens, national identity is wrapped up in being “number one,” whatever exactly that means. If an increasingly prosperous, stable, and confident China manages to assert itself as the global leader, Americans aren’t likely to slide gently into the backseat. No other relationship is as important, or as fraught, as America’s with China. On the one hand, the two nations are codependent. Americans import nearly $500 billion worth of relatively cheap electronics, toys, and seemingly everything else from China each year. China, meanwhile, holds $1.1 trillion in U.S. securities. The relationship, as observers like to say, is “too big to fail.” On the other hand are areas of deep tension, which long predate Donald Trump’s harangues about Beijing’s trade practices and currency controls. Washington is unhappy with China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, its routine violations of human rights, its cyberattacks on American companies, and more. Beijing, for its part, sees the U.S. as meddling excessively in China’s domestic affairs. This uneasy alliance is critical to the future of the entire planet. As John Pomfret, a former Beijing-based foreign correspondent, explains in The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, “No problem of worldwide concern—from global warming, to terrorism, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to the economy—can be solved unless Washington and Beijing find a way to work together.” His book makes that case persuasively while taking readers on an informative and entertaining historical journey through the endless cycles of “rapturous enchantment” and “inevitable disillusion” between the two countries. My first visit to China was in 1980, soon after Washington and Beijing restored diplomatic ties, which had been severed in 1949 when the Communist Party took power. The Chinese didn’t quite know what to make of our group of carefree, pushy Yankee tourists. We asked our official minders far too many questions about their political system, Mao Zedong’s legacy, and the fate of socialism. The only time I got a rise out of “Mrs. Zhu,” our lead guide, was when I suggested a similarity between Richard Nixon and China’s Gang of Four, the reviled hard-liners ousted after Mao’s death. She didn’t get it, because most Chinese liked Nixon, until I playacted the former president as a cartoonish bandit, brandishing imaginary six-shooters and lifting a wallet from a pocket. She nodded; it was an early moment of cross-cultural understanding. But if China at that stage seemed tentative in its embrace of the outside world, dramatic moves were under way behind the scenes. Mao’s successors understood that China had plenty to learn from the West, particularly in terms of economic development. And so throughout the 1980s, Beijing invited a procession of foreign economists in to share their ideas. These interactions are the subject of Unlikely Partners, by Julian Gewirtz, an Oxford PhD candidate who spent several years working and researching in China. Americans were part of this dialogue—even Milton Friedman, whose free-market fundamentalism was anathema to Communist Party policy. His first visit didn’t go well, Gewirtz reports. Friedman lectured his hosts on the unlimited virtues of capitalism; they lectured him on communist triumphalism. He left angry, sputtering about China’s ignorance of how markets work. The Chinese derided him as a man who “would not speak politely no matter how high your position.” Despite such hiccups, this era was the “golden age” of reform and openness in China, as intellectuals and party leaders debated a broad range of economic and political possibilities and began to implement the free-market experiments that would eventually drive the country out of stagnation toward being the world’s largest economy. (In terms of purchasing-power parity, it already is, and its absolute GDP is expected to surpass America’s by 2025.) Still, China isn’t becoming like the U.S.—despite numerous attempts by mostly well-meaning Americans to make it, with carrot or stick, more democratic, more capitalistic, more God-fearing. To be sure, some Chinese are infatuated with American ideals. When I served as Beijing bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, in the late 1980s, many spoke openly of their admiration for U.S. institutions and values and longed to see their country follow a similar path. But these days it’s clear that China is charting its own course, often defined as “authoritarian capitalism.” It’s not just that its leaders worry that adopting Western-style democracy could sweep the party from power. They also sense that the U.S. free-market model has failed. The low point came with the Great Recession. Pomfret recounts a 2008 meeting between Hank Paulson, the former U.S. treasury secretary, who has extensive ties to China, and Vice Premier Wang Qishan. “You were my teacher,” Wang told Paulson. “But now…look at your system, Hank. We aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore.” China probably isn’t equipped at this point to be a global leader on the political stage. But Fortune Makers, a new book by Michael Useem, Harbir Singh, Neng Liang, and Peter Cappelli, argues that a “China Way” is already emerging in the private sector and it’s one to emulate. The authors look closely at the success of companies such as Alibaba, Lenovo, and Vanke, and show that it wasn’t the product of government support or any other special favors but instead stemmed from a uniquely Chinese business and management mindset that has much to offer the West. Among their other virtues, these companies tend to focus obsessively on growth and aren’t overly concerned with maximizing shareholder value, at least not in the short term. Clearly, the U.S. model is under siege, and China is still ascendant. One can only hope that these two superpowers find ways to accommodate each other’s greatness.

An Uneasy Codependence

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