Aaron Friedberg, Getting China Wrong (2022)

Will Pyle alerted me to an article by Friedberg, which then led me to this book. It's a well argued book that effectively makes the case that the US's policy of "engaging" with China from the 1990s to 2010s - by facilitating trade and investment, smoothing the path to China's membership in the WTO, encouraging China to join international treaties and organizations, etc. - was based on fundamental misconceptions about China's ruling party and was bound to fail. It was also an understable policy, at least initially - since Woodrow Wilson, the US had aspired to remake the world in its own image; the triumph in the Cold War made it seem like markets and democracy were unstoppable trends. However, Friedberg suggests that the Chinese Communist Party's goals are to maintain its power and to restore China to a central place in East Asia and, ultimately, the world. In the 1980s and 1990s China seemed to be willing to fit itself into the Western "rules-based international order" merely because it was weak and wanted to benefit from opening up to the outside world, without allowing its hold on power to slip. The Leninist CCP has all along been driven both by ambition and anxiety about its own security. After 9/11 and China's accession to the WTO, the Communist leadership assessed that they would have a 20-year window in which the US would be distracted and China would have a chance to reset the balance of power, at least in East Asia. With the 2008 global financial crisis and the apparent dawn of a once-in-a-lifetime technological revolution in the 2010s, China under Xi accelerated its timetable and began to reveal its now global ambitions more openly. Friedberg lays out a path to "get China right:" basically, democratic states should partially disengage from China economically and steel themselves for a decades-long competition along many fronts. In other words, something roughly akin to a Cold War 2.0.