636 { China’s Quest
might lose as had Germany, Japan, and the USSR in their challenges to the
United States. Starting and then losing a war with the United States could
lead to the collapse of the CCP regime. Such considerations pointed toward
continued cooperation, amity, and avoidance of confrontation with the
United States—unless Washington imposed conflict on China.
On the other hand, China’s leaders were deeply suspicious of what they
perceived as US efforts to limit or thwart China’s efforts to increase its global
influence: encouraging Taiwan to reject Beijing’s eminently reasonable (or
so Beijing saw it) one country, two systems proposal; encouraging Southeast
Asian countries to challenge China’s just territorial rights (again, so Beijing
saw it) in the South China Sea; strengthening India’s military capabilities,
including the nuclear; and supporting Japan’s efforts to become a “normal”
military power in Asia. These and many other similar policies were seen in
Beijing as components of a US strategy of containing China and limiting
or aborting its rise. These impulses pointed toward hard struggle with the
United States.
China’s post–Cold War US policies reflected these deeply discrepant
interests.
A curious, almost bipolar, dynamic developed in Chinese diplomacy after
the upheavals of 1989–1991. At times, Beijing spoke of friendship and part-
nership and invited cooperation with various powers, especially the United
States, Japan, and India. At other times, Beijing spewed vitriol, backed away
from cooperation, and punished foreign states, especially the United States,
Japan, and India, in various creative ways. Periods of hostility alternated
with charm offensives seemingly designed to repair the injury to China’s
foreign relations inflicted during earlier negative episodes. In part, this con-
stant shifting was in response to foreign moves: US arms sales to Taiwan,
permitting a visit by Lee Teng-hui, bombing a Chinese embassy in Belgrade,
or conducting intelligence operations in China’s 200-nautical-mile Exclusive
Economic Zone (EEZ). But there were also factors within China that drove
these policy swings. Moreover, those domestic drivers seemed to become
more important as China became stronger in the twenty-first century.
One domestic driver of China’s policy swings was sharply divergent
views among China’s foreign policy elite—divergences usefully described as
between “hard-liners” and “moderates.” Hard-liners tended to impute delib-
erate, hostile anti-China motives to foreign moves contrary to China’s inter-
ests, and to prescribe harsh, frequently military-edged punitive responses to
those foreign transgressions. Hard-liners tended to believe that unless China
used the full scope of its growing national power, including its military, to
shape its international environment, it would find itself in an environment
shaped by powers hostile to China. Hardliners also tended to favor tighter
internal controls to thwart what they deemed Western subversion. China’s
moderates did not necessarily dispute the sinister motives imputed to foreign