For China, the new millennium marked the beginning of a new phase of relationship under a new generation of leaders in both the US and China: on the American side, administrations led by Presidents George W. Bush (served 2001 – 2009) in January 2001 and, beginning in 2009, Barack Obama; on the Chinese side, a “fourth generation” headed by President Hu Jintao (served 2002 – 2012) and Premier Wen Jiabao.

​

In 1972, Washington and Beijing was brought together because of their strategic mutual self-interest to outflank their common enemy in Moscow. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, the relationship morphed from an alliance of convenience against a mutual foe into a partnership based increasingly on trade and investment. To justify the new economic emphasis in the Sino-US relations, US presidents including Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior and Clinton had all, during the course of their presidency, espoused the belief that efforts to help China achieved a more market-based economy would eventually also bring about a more open Chinese society politically. Their efforts culminated in a difficult but workable approach that had helped China and US balanced discord and agreement for the three decades since Nixon’s ground-breaking visit to China.

 

The hard work of the six past presidents, however, appeared to be at risk of being written off by presidential candidate Bush Junior when, in 1999, he decried Clinton’s appeasement of Beijing during his election campaigning and adopted a clearly antagonistic stance towards China.[1]

 

To be fair, Clinton too criticized the Bush Senior administration before him of "coddling to dictators” in 1992 during his election campaign. He had also vowed to deny China the most-favoured nation (MFN) status until China had demonstrated improvements in its human rights records. By his second term, however, Clinton had not only decoupled China’s human rights and trade issues but also granted China normal trade status (the term MFN had been changed in hopes of reducing the political symbolism attached to the vote) permanently, clearing the way for China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 11 December, 2001.

 

In all likelihood, Bush Junior’s tough talks could thus be nothing more than election talks. Once elected, he could revert to the more constructive and cooperative China policy just like Clinton did. Such observations, however, overlooked the fact that, unlike Clinton, Bush Junior followed up his rhetoric with the inclusion of hawkish neoconservatists (‘neocons’ in short) as his advisors for foreign policy. After the election, the neocons followed Bush Junior into the White House and Pentagon holding influential policymaking positions.

 

The Rise of Neoconservatism

 

The neocons were a new breed of intellectuals and political elites that saw their rise to prominence in the early 1990s in the aftermath of the implosion and disintegration of Soviet Union which created a geopolitically unipolar world where the US reigned supreme. They started much earlier as liberals and social progressives in the Democratic Party. Because of their dislike of communism after the WWII, they adopted a similarly negative view towards the Soviet Union and supported the tradition of active involvement in world affairs and of fierce anti-communism practiced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, or even Johnson.

 

In the late 1960s, they disagreed strongly with the political realism in foreign policy adopted by President Richard Nixon (served 1969 – 1974) and Henry Kissinger who, despite being anti-communists, practiced the more traditional balance of power realpolitik by not only pursuing détente with the Soviet Union but also establishing relations with the communist China.[2]

 

In the course of the 1970s, the neocons felt that their own Democratic Party was not living up to that tradition, that the Democrats were becoming either too isolationist or way too dovish. Democrat President Jimmy Carter (served 1976 – 1980) alienated the neocons further with his even ‘softer’ course towards the Soviet Union and China as well as his non-interventionist policy concerning revolutions in Third World countries.[3]

 

By 1980s, however, most of neocons decided they could not support Carter running for re-election and they switched to supporting Republican Ronald Reagan (served 1980 – 1988) because the staunchly anti-communist Reagan was offering the right foreign policy that they were advocating themselves. That is when they switched allegiance from being liberals in Democratic Party to conservatives in Republican Party, hence the name neo-conservatives (‘neo’ is a prefix meaning ‘new’) to differentiate them from the traditional conservatives in the Republican Party.

 

Under Reagan, neocons initially played an important role in formulating foreign and military policies in the 1980s pushing aggressive and unilateral actions to promote regime change in Central America. At their behest, Reagan also ditched Nixon’s and Kissinger’s policies of détente and balance of power and confronted the expansionism of the Soviet "evil empire" head on. Foreign policy under Reagan was thus more aggressive than under the dovish Carter presidency. By the late 1980s, however, neocons gradually also parted ways with Reagan as he again shifted towards détente with the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

 

The neoconservatism movement underwent a short-lived resurgence in the early 1990s when they served under Bush Senior as the US emerged as the sole superpower with the disintegration of Soviet Union. But the hawkish aspirations of the neoconservatives were once again kept in check by Bush Senior, during the 1991 Gulf War, when he chose not to invade Iraq, after the liberation of Kuwait, to remove the strongman Hussein from power.[4] The neocons then tried to set new goals in American foreign policy for the realist Senior Bush administration in 1992 when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz under the supervision of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wrote the 1994 – 1999 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) calling for the promotion of America’s status as the sole remaining superpower in the world, while deterring and, if necessary, even unilaterally and pre-emptively attacking hostile nations. In short, the DPG was a US blueprint for total global supremacy. The paper, known later as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, was revised and moderated only after a leak of the early draft to The New York Times led to massive protest, especially by the media and high ranking officials like Collin Powell and realist National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft.[5]

 

Neocons also lamented the Clinton years as a period in which America did not capitalise on a once in a lifetime chance to cement its leading position in the world as it was without a peer competitor. Like his predecessor, Clinton’s whole approach to Iran and Iraq, for example, was based on containment and sanctions, not regime change, to perpetuate the status quo. In addition, the neocons were also displeased with President Clinton’s preference for soft power to hard. Instead of using US’ advantaged position as leverage, for example, Clinton gradually accommodated to the increasingly more assertive Chinese and Japanese governments by delinking human rights from economic issues with China while separating security policy from trade and other economic issues with Japan.[6]

 

In 1997, a group of neocons got together to form a think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) to oppose the timidity and drift of President Clinton’s foreign policy.[7] Its founding members included Bush Senior administration officials, such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz; prominent scholars, such as Francis Fukuyama; and intellectuals, such as Bill Kristol. Its stated goal was to “restore a ‘Reaganite’ foreign policy of ‘military strength and moral clarity’ by increasing military spending, challenging hostile regimes, promoting economic and political freedom, and accepting responsibility for America’s ‘unique’ role in defending a world order friendly to US interests and values”.[8] The group also asserted that appropriate codes of conduct could be exported and imposed upon the rest of the world if necessary. A document produced in 2000 by PNAC also called for radical change in American foreign policy amidst concerns over the unpredictable challenge potentially from China as well as threats from ‘rogue states’ Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Iraq, in particular, had long been a central concern, but the neocons recognized that public support for military actions was unlikely to materialize without ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event, 'on the scale of Pearl Harbour'.[9]

 

Impacts of Neocons on Bush Junior’s China Policy

 

While remaining in opposition under President Bill Clinton, neocons worked quietly to dominate Republican foreign policy. When Bush Junior (served 2001 – 2009) was elected, many PNAC members including Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz found themselves once again in positions of decision-making power within the White House and Pentagon this time serving the son of the former president they previously worked with.[10] In line with their idealist convictions, the neocons asserted that the foreign policy of a country must represent its internal moral character and held that US, with its indomitable military power, was blessed with the unique opportunity to set to a clear moral and ideological standard globally, to the benefit of not only the US but all.

 

Up till this point, geopolitical thinkers like Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was also President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981, still perceived China as unable to challenge the US ideologically, militarily, culturally, and economically.[11] In contrast, the United States stood as the only truly global power with its unrivalled military reach extended to every corner on the globe and its economic prowess fuelling world trade and industry.

 

It was against this background that Bush Junior and his team of hawkish advisors, dubbed the “Vulcans”, drew up the foreign policies against China in 2001. Their perception of international politics as great-power struggle inevitably led them to focus on China and to treat China as a “strategic competitor” instead of a “strategic partner” promoted by the Clinton administration.[12] In early 2001, for example, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the administration's arch China hawk, suggested it was time for the military to orient its strategic thinking toward the objective of containing Chinese regional ambitions in Asia. Moreover, to discourage China’s PLA from “accelerating an arms race it could not hope to win”, the “Vulcans” sought to keep US’ “military strength beyond challenge” by exploiting technological advantages.[13] Bush himself also broke a taboo by vowing to "do whatever it takes" to defend Taiwan against an attack from the mainland though he was quick in reassuring Beijing immediately afterwards that there had been no departure from Washington's longstanding "One China" policy.[14]

 

The new administration’s first test of its hawkish China policy came in the early months of the Bush presidency when a Chinese fighter collided with a US EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft in April 2001.[15] The collision resulted in the death of the Chinese pilot while the US Navy surveillance plane was forced to land on Hainan Island where it and its 24 crew members were seized. The incident came at a particularly sensitive moment of transition in Washington's relations with Beijing. Their first interactions, to begin with, were already difficult before the incident because of the defection of a high-level Chinese Army colonel to the US[16] and of China's detention of visiting American scholars of Chinese descent[17]. Bush was also supposed to make a decision, within weeks, on whether to sell sophisticated arms and radar equipment to Taiwan. Naturally, China's Internet chat rooms, always a sounding board for nationalistic sentiments, were filled mostly with angry invective. The collision incident brought back memories of NATO bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade just two years before.[18] In the end, the incident was resolved by Bush’s “Letter of two sorries” in which the president expressed regret first for the loss of the Chinese plane and pilot and then for entering China’s airspace and landing in Hainan without prior clearance.[19]

 

Still, the collision, coupled with US expanded arms sales to Taiwan and Bush’s rhetoric that enlarges the commitment to defend the island, presaged an increasingly antagonistic relation between the two countries.[20]

 

It was about this time China got its second big break when US was hit by the terror attack on New York Twin Towers which changed all the US’ calculations on its national security. The audacity of the attack on September 11, 2001, played out live in mass media shocked the nation and led to the Bush administration routing US into a series of military actions in the Middle East.

 

To focus on his new missions, Bush’s tone about China began to depart from his earlier confrontational stance when he described Beijing as a “strategic competitor”. Instead, in a speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2002, he welcomed “the emergence of a strong, peaceful, and prosperous China”. He also reaffirmed his predecessor’s conviction that Beijing’s entry into the WTO and its rapidly changing economy would eventually propel it onto a different, more cooperative path. To help to facilitate the transition, Bush promised US would help by cooperating with China where possible, without allowing their differences over issues like Taiwan, human rights, and non-proliferation commitments to interfere.[21] On the issue of Taiwan, the Bush administration not only reaffirmed the basic framework of “one China policy” once again but also proclaimed that any unilateral actions to change the status quo by Taiwan’s government, under its pro-independence President Chen Shui-bian, would be opposed by the US.

 

In short, instead of his earlier stance of viewing China as a strategic competitor, the Bush administration, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, switched to pursuing the same China policy of strategic partnership as the six past presidents did.[22]

 

By 2004, China was no more a hot topic during the Bush presidential re-election campaign. During this period, Republican’s control of the Congress helped to keep the administration’s China policy out of domestic political struggles. Economically, as America's fourth-largest trading partner, China’s linkages with the US economy, from manufacturing American sneakers to launching American satellites, continued to deepen. The corporate interests that fund both political parties in the US strongly discourage any jeopardizing of business with China for ideological or political reasons. A relatively stable, profitable and matured Sino-US framework soon took shape and the administration’s “constructive and cooperative” policy with China had been broadly accepted domestically. In the words of the US Secretary of State Colin Powell, “US-China relations are at their best since 1972”.[23]

 

The stable relationship however belies three thorny issues that could potentially rock Sino-US relations. The first is US’ arms sales to Taiwan. In this regard the Bush government had been blunt and public with its intention to ensure that Taiwan is equipped enough to defend itself militarily from any Chinese offensive. Hence, so long as the issue is not resolved, the likelihood remained that it could throw the relationship between the two superpowers off-balance. Second, contrary to the warm political and close economic ties fostered during Bush’s time in office, US-Chinese military exchanges remained tepid. The Pentagon continued to show its hostility toward China’s military development in major documents like “Reports on China’s Military Power”, while military exercises aimed directly or indirectly at China were still being conducted. Finally, there was this knotty issue of persistent and significant trade surplus China enjoyed over the US. Even though economic issues had generally become less politicized, hurdles such as the revaluation of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) and China’s WTO and intellectual property rights commitments still posed a threat to the stable development of bilateral economic relations.[24]

​

Notwithstanding, the relations between the two countries continued to broaden. Besides deep economic ties, the two countries also cooperated on non-traditional security issues such as counter-terrorism and North Korea’s nuclear program. To ensure that the relationship would not be damaged by any single incident, the two sides established dozens of fixed and regular mechanisms, from hot-lines to crisis management to facilitate communication. For example, Bush and Hu initiated the Senior Dialogue (SD) in 2004 for the two countries to come together to discuss strategic issues of mutual concerns. This was followed by the China-US Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) in 2006 which was a forum for topics related to economic relations between both countries. By 2008, a total of six SD meetings and five SED meetings had been held.

 

China’s Foreign Policy under Hu-Wen Leadership

 

By this time, China had come a long way since it embarked on its reforms in the late 1970s.

 

Deng era was an attempt to make up for lost time caused by its missteps under Mao. Jiang, on the other hand, assumed the helm when China was still recovering from the bloody Tiananmen Square incident and endeavouring to regain its international standing. By the turn of the century, the efforts of the Deng and Jiang periods had begun to bear fruit. In 2001, Jiang and Zhu had negotiated China’s entry into the World Trade Organization to facilitate its full participation in the international economic order. Hu and Wen thus presided over a country that no longer felt constrained by the sense of apprenticeship to Western technology and institutions. The China that they governed was confident enough to reject, and even on occasion subtly mock, American lectures on reform. China was now in a position to conduct its foreign policy not based on its long-term potential or its ultimate strategic role but in terms of its actual power.[25]

 

Hu and Wen’s initial approach to China’s foreign policy in the new era was largely incremental and conservative. Their goal was primarily to strive for a peaceful international environment (including good relations with the US) that was advantageous to China’s export trade while also ensuring that China’s had unrestricted access to raw materials needed for economic growth. With rising economic success, however, came also clamours from abroad for China to play a greater international leadership role, to which Hu and Wen responded cautiously, not forgetting Deng’s exhortations to “‘hide strengths while overcoming weaknesses’” (韬光养晦). They did however retain and even deepen their engagements with the developing world – a legacy of Mao’s Three Worlds theory (三个世界的理论) – even as China moved into the rank of economic superpower.

​

[What is Mao's Three World Theory?] According to Mao, the world could be categorized into three politico-economic worlds: the First world, Second world, and Third world. The First world comprises the US and the USSR, the superpower countries respectively engaged in imperialism and in social imperialism. The Second world comprises Japan and Canada, Europe and the countries of the global North–South divide. The Third world comprises the countries of Africa, Latin America, and continental Asia.

 

Mao's strategic thinking shed light on the fact that the two super-powers were then the main source of instability and turmoils in the world. Their acts of pursuing hegemonism, power politics, the big bullying the small, the strong bullying the week and the rich oppressing the poor gave rise to strong opposition and resentment by countries of the third world. As a member of the third world, China firmly supported the third world countries in their struggles against hegemonism and struggles waged by countries of the second world against interference and control by the super-powers.

 

China’s conservatism in its conduct of foreign relations at this stage was a reflection of the Chinese leaders’ predominant focus over issues of domestic concerns. Foreign policy matters mostly to the extent that it has an impact – positive or negative – on a fragile domestic order.[26] To the Chinese leadership, the goal of the government is first and foremost maintaining domestic stability (维稳) in order to safeguard economic growth and national unity.

 

There were two politically contentious issues that Hu and Wen needed to tackle.

 

First, unrestrained economic growth coupled with lax regulatory control had resulted in severe pollution and degradation of environments. The root cause was the central government’s adoption of economic performance as the sole yardstick for measuring performance of official at the local level. The narrow focus presented local officials with the incentives to drive economic development at all costs.

 

Second, Hu and Wen were also faced with the problem of rising inequality as a result of rapid economic growth under Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. The vast Chinese population had its first taste of unprecedented prosperity but the rapid growth created both winners and losers. Developmental focus, for example, was very much on the urban and not enough on mainland China’s rural poor. Besides the urban-rural social gap, there was also a widening disparity between the coastal region, where influx of FDI after China’s accession to WTO accelerated growth, and the inland region, where infrastructures needed for growth were still lacking. The economic imbalance between the rural and the urban areas and between the western inland and eastern coastal regions translated into rising number of peasant protests. In 2005, for example, there were 87,000 protests, riots and other "mass incidents", up 6.6% on 2004.

 

To promote environmentally-friendly development Hu introduced the concept of Scientific Outlook on Development (SOD 科学发展观) which incorporates scientific socialism, sustainable development, social welfare, a humanistic society, and increased democracy.  The SOD was proposed by the 16th CPC Central Committee in 2003, against the backdrop of rapid economic growth and a series of problems including excessive consumption of resources, serious environmental pollution and a widening gap between the rich and poor.

 

As for the problem of widening social gap, efforts to close the regional disparity had in fact already started in 2000 under Jiang and Zhu with their “Go West” strategy to boost economic development of 12 western provincial-level regions — Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi and Qinghai — that were home to more than 400 million people.[27] Under the strategy, the western regions enjoy support in infrastructure construction, foreign investment, environmental protection, education and talent retention.

 

In 2005, Hu introduced the socioeconomic vision of building a “harmonious society” (和谐社会) within which a functional middle-class could enjoy xiaokang living standards (小康 meaning ‘moderately well-off’).[28] The concept of social harmony dates back to ancient China, to the time of Confucius. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping first used the term “xiaokang society” in 1979 as the eventual goal of Chinese modernization. Hu’s vision was to be achieved through the adoption of SOD.

 

To narrow the urban-rural gap, for example, the Hu-Wen government unveiled ambitious plans to build "new socialist countryside" (建设社会主义新农村) in 2005 to help the 800 million people living in the countryside catch up economically with people in the cities. The policy is a significant shift away from the previous focus on economic development. Under the new initiative, greater weight will be given to the redistribution of resources and a rebalancing of income through more rural investments in education and healthcare as well as farm subsidies. The goal is to develop the rural economy and help farmers to become more affluent so that the development of the urban-rural dualistic national economy (城乡二元经济) could be made sustainable.[29]

 

China’s primary goal was thus still economic development to ensure stability of domestic order. Despite occasional debates stirred up by the nationalistic hardliners, the pro-reform Chinese leaders had by and large created an unassailable ethos that China's modernization depended on dramatically expanding foreign trade and investment predicated on maintaining a good relationship with the West.[30] The conventional belief was that, having had a first taste of prosperity, there was no turning back for China. However, this by no means made the job easier for the policymakers who had to contend with rising volatility caused by the restructuring that followed the influx of foreign investments as China opened up the domestic economy in compliance with the WTO rules. The millions of displaced workers due to competition from foreign companies became fuel that hard-liners used to invigorate the debates, even as the reformists fought to keep the door open to the West. Hard-liners’ calls for  dissent were also buoyed by the series of US provocations including weapons sales to Taiwan, the spy-plane standoff, the Clinton administration's backing down on a WTO deal in April 1999, and the accidental bombing of China's Belgrade embassy in May the same year.[31]

 

Otherwise, with its accession to the WTO, China’s economy began to take off while becoming increasingly integrated with the global economy.

 

Global Financial Crisis – A Turning Point

 

Meanwhile, by the end of Bush’s second term, his administration’s problem was not just the war fought in two fronts in Middle East and the global “War on Terror”. Back home, it made no effort to stop the deindustrialization and financialization that had been set in motion in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s. In 2008, the free wheeling and dealing in the subprime financial derivative market encouraged by the lax regulatory environment triggered the Global Financial Crisis just as Bush was finishing his second term in office.

 

Already, the geopolitical influence of the US as the sole superpower had been on the wane because of Bush administration’s controversial practices of unilateralism, preventive war and illegal invasion of Iraq. The post-WWII rules and institutions and shared visions that shaped and sustained the US-led international order appeared to be eroding even among the American allies. The 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis triggered by the meltdown of American subprime housing loans and their derivatives further dented US’ reputation in the US-centric international monetary system. In particular, for the Sino-US relations, the Global Financial Crisis constitutes a major turning point.

 

For decades since its embrace of capitalism and globalization in the late 1970s, even though China benefited immensely from the international economic order led by the US, it had been a subservient rule-taker that accepted the status quo of the current US-centric international monetary order. The Global Financial Crisis, however, changed all that.

 

The Chinese were appalled by how regulators in the US allowed financial institutions to blatantly and systematically defraud investors, putting the entire global financial system at risk in the process. Anyone in China at that time watching how its government scurried to contain the damages of the shocks as the crisis evolved in the US would not have missed the resolve of the Chinese that something ought to be done about how the US is abusing the ‘exorbitant privilege’ it enjoys from the US-led international monetary system and the dollar hegemony.

 

Amid the progressive delegitimation of the US-led international monetary system in the aftermath of the crisis, China began to exhibit behaviours as both a rule-maker, promoting global reforms, and a rule-breaker, creating its own arrangements.

 

Hence, in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, Chinese officials began talks about a new international financial order not dependent on the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In early 2009, the governor of the Chinese central bank the People’s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, called for the de-dollarization of the international monetary system by gradually moving toward a “super-sovereign” reserves currency to minimize the risks associated with using a national currency as international money.[32] This could be achieved, for example, by establishing Special Drawing Right (SDR) as a supranational currency, which was valued based on a basket of four major currencies. Because the value of the SDR is independent of the macroeconomic policies of one country, it is less volatile than the US dollar currently is. Its stability therefore makes it a better store of value for countries that wish to park a proportion of their savings in foreign assets. For a start, the SDR could be used to denominate all IMF transactions as well as those between central banks. International financial institutions can also issue more debts denominated in SDR. In time, the stability of the SDR may encourage its adoption by also the private sector to denominate and invoice all international transactions.[33]

 

To prepare RMB for inclusion as one of SDR’s basket of currencies, China also embarked on its quest to internationalize RMB based on a plan to promote it first as a transactional currency for conduct of international trades and an investment currency for cross-border investments, then progressively as a reserves currency for central banks and safe assets investors. To reduce its dependency on the US dollar, China also announced in June 2010 that it would release the RMB from its dollar peg and allow the currency to float against a basket of currencies instead.[34]

 

Clearly, China saw the internationalization of the renminbi as an important step in reining in America’s abuse of the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency.[35]

 

It dawned on the US political elites that China now has not only the intention but also the capability and an action plan to strike directly at the root of American’s geopolitical power – the US-led international monetary system and the dollar hegemony – and a decisive preventive response is overdue. An inevitable showdown that both sides had all along known would come was imminent.

​

​

PREVIOUS : 2.8  Third Taiwan Straits Crisis and China's Accession to WTO under Clinton & Jiang (1993 - 2001)

NEXT : 2.10 US' Pivot to Asia under Obama and Hu-Xi (2009 - 2017)

​

TOP

 

REFERENCES

[1] See Thomas W. Lippman. (1999). “Bush Makes Clinton's China Policy an Issue.” Washington Post. August 20, 1999.

[2] See “Neoconservatism.” New World Encyclopedia

[3] See Peter Just. (2010).

[4] See Kalaitzidis, Akis & Streich, Gregory W. (2011). pp 201.

[5] See Peter Just. (2010).

[6] See Huntington, Samuel P. (1996). Pg 213.

[7] The PNAC ceased to function in 2006 and was replaced by a new think-tank named the Foreign Policy Initiative, co-founded by Editor of The Weekly Standard William Kristol and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Robert Kagan in 2009. The latter two were project directors of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.

[8] See Kalaitzidis, Akis & Streich, Gregory W. (2011). pp 257

[9] Quoted in ‘The Plan: Were Neo-Conservatives’ 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?’, abc.NEWS.com, 10 March 2003.

[10] See Kalaitzidis, Akis & Streich, Gregory W. (2011). pp 257

[11] See Brzezinski, Zbigniew. (2001). “The Geostrategic Triad: Living with China, Europe and Russia.”

[12] See Greg Austin. (2015). “US China Policy Under a Republican President.” The Diplomat. October 25, 2015.

[13] See Philip Stephens. (2008). “Bush’s China policy may outlast his presidency.” Financial Times. June 27, 2008.

[14] See Tony Karon. (2001). “Bush China Policy Defaults to Engagement.” Time. July 31, 2001.

[15] See Thomas Donnelly. (2008). “Lincoln, Churchill, Bush?” American Enterprise Institute. December 29, 2008.

[16] See James Risen. (2001). “Defection of Senior Chinese Officer Is Confirmed.” NYTimes. March 24,2001.

[17] See Human Rights News. (2001). “China: Detention of Scholars and Human Rights Conditions.” June 19, 2001.

[18] See Elisabeth Rosenthal With David E. Sanger. (2001). “U.S. Plane In China After It Collides With Chinese Jet.” NYTimes. April 2, 2001.

[19] See CNN. (2001). “China Promises Releases of U.S. Crewmembers.” April 11, 2001.

[20] See Chiou Chwei-liang. (2005). “Another cold war era inescapable.” Taipei Times. January 1, 2005.

[21] See Ivo H. Daalder, James M. Lindsay, & James B. Steinberg. “The Bush National Security Strategy: An Evaluation.”The Brookings Institutions. Policy Brief #109. October 2002; Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay. (2003). “America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy.” Brookings Institution. September 1, 2003.

[22] See Tony Karon. (2001). “Bush China Policy Defaults to Engagement.” Time. July 31, 2001.

[23] See People’s Daily. (2003). “Powell Says US-China Ties Best Since 1972.” September 7, 2003; Yuan Peng. (2004). “China Policy Under The Next Bush Administration.” Jamestown Foundation. China Brief Volume: 4 Issue: 22. November 11, 2004.

[24] See Yuan Peng. (2004). “China Policy Under The Next Bush Administration.” Jamestown Foundation. China Brief Volume: 4 Issue: 22. November 11, 2004.

[25] See Kissinger (2011). Pg 658

[26] See Philip Stephens. (2008). “Bush’s China policy may outlast his presidency.” Financial Times. June 27, 2008.

[27] See Xinhua. (2016). “New five-year plan brings hope to China’s west.” December 27, 2016.

[28] See Maureen Fan. (2005). “China's Party Leadership Declares New Priority: 'Harmonious Society'.” Washington Post. October 12, 2006.

[29] See Jonathan Watts. (2006). “China vows to create a 'new socialist countryside' for millions of farmers.” The Guardian. Feb 22, 2006.

[30] See Tony Karon. (2001). “Bush China Policy Defaults to Engagement.” Time. July 31, 2001.

[31] See Tony Karon. (2001). “Bush China Policy Defaults to Engagement.” Time. July 31, 2001.

[32] See Zhou Xiochuan. (2009).

[33] See Yu Yongding. (2011).

[34] See Perkowski, Jack. (2010).

[35] See Kenneth Lieberthal. (2011). “The American Pivot to Asia.” Foreign Policy. December 21, 2011.

​

 

​

​