Long Debate over the US Challenge } 637
actions (though they sometimes did), but they warned that too assertive
Chinese use of its growing power could injure China in two ways: by slow-
ing China’s economic development drive, which it needed to sustain for sev-
eral more decades if it was to become a true first-class world power, and by
nudging China’s neighbors towards a coalition to contain it, a coalition which
would probably be backed by the United States. Moderate policy prescrip-
tions tended to be in line with Deng Xiaoping’s 1990 admonition that China
must “keep a low profile and hide its light under a basket.” The chronic debate
between PRC hard-liners and moderates will be reviewed in this chapter.
A second domestic driver of the bipolar nature of Chinese diplomacy has
to do with growing popular nationalism and its use to legitimize the CCP
regime. This aspect will be examined in subsequent chapters.
Post-Confrontation Renormalization of Ties
The 1996 military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait, the culmination of six
years of mutual bitter acrimony and battles over sanctions, confronted Beijing
with the real prospect that the comity with the United States that underpinned
China’s development drive might evaporate. Within the United States, the
consensus over China policy that had developed since 1972 collapsed, giv-
ing way to a full-blown debate over whether China was a hostile power that
needed to be treated as such. Many voices in this US debate asserted that the
PRC was not a friendly power but a new peer competitor and strategic rival.
They were critical of what they deemed to be the heretofore weak policy to-
ward the PRC and criticized as naive the efforts of earlier presidents to treat
the PRC as a cooperative partner.^2
By 1996, the steadying hand of Deng Xiaoping that had overridden PLA
demands for a tough response to Washington’s F-16 sale in 1992 was no longer
at work. Deng would not die until February 1997, but his health was dete-
riorating badly and it was clear he had fought his last political battle. Jiang
Zemin was also not in a position to overrule the PLA’s confrontational ap-
proach. But as soon as the military exercises that constituted the PLA’s pre-
scription ran their course in February–March 1996, Jiang put the MFA back
in charge of US policy and tasked Qian Qichen with rebuilding PRC-US rela-
tions. Qian began working toward an exchange of summit visits by Presidents
Jiang and Clinton.
A Politburo meeting in mid-April 1996 decided to end the confrontational
approach to the United States and return primary responsibility for US affairs
to the MFA.^3 Shifts in PRC media coverage of the United States soon became
apparent. The emotional and antagonistic themes that had dominated since
1989 began to disappear and were replaced by more balanced and less emo-
tional coverage. MFA dialogue with the United States soon resumed. One of