Dialogue for the Sake of Dialogue: The China Example

Gordon Chang penned this piece that attacks the notion that dialogue for the sake of dialogue is a good thing and uses China as an example. Chang makes several interesting points in the piece. The best one is this...

As an initial matter, China's central government moves slowly during crises, largely due to the fragmented nature of decision making in the Chinese capital. There are numerous civilian and military factions that must be consulted and won over before anyone can speak on behalf of the central government. In 2001, for instance, the fragile coalition that ruled China took days to decide what to say and do after a reckless Chinese fighter pilot clipped an unarmed Navy reconnaissance plane, which was forced to land on China's Hainan island.

Since then, Chinese officials have tried to clarify and streamline their decision-making process, but recent evidence shows that not much progress has been made. In November, China denied Hong Kong port-call privileges to the Kitty Hawk strike group on the day before Thanksgiving. On the day of the denial, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told President Bush that the turndown had been the result of a "misunderstanding." Yet a few hours later the Foreign Ministry in Beijing repudiated Yang's characterization of events.

The point Chang makes is that China's system is so chaotic and decentralized that dialogue is a difficult thing to figure out. It is never clear who exactly is the decision maker. The Kitty Hawk example is just one. Thus, if we are going to dialogue, who is it with. On the question of China, it ultimately depends on which issue we want to talk about.

There is a great irony in some of the criticism of Bush's foreign policy. On the issue of China, he has done exactly what his critics accuse him of not doing. He has reached out unconditionally and is looking for dialogue at all costs. Chang painstakingly analyzes how this policy has been an abject failure. The main reason is that we have created an open dialogue policy without having any understanding of the dynamics of their own internal decision making. As such, we have many times wound up dialoguing with folks that have no power on certain issues.

Another reason that the policy has failed is that the Chinese aren't impressed with a country that wants desperately to be its friend. Here is how Chang described it...

Yet there is an even more fundamental problem between China and the United States. In short, Washington and Beijing have fundamentally inconsistent objectives. Americans believe they have a role in Central and East Asia. The Chinese do not agree. To implement its grand strategy, Beijing is creating multilateral organizations, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, from which the United States is excluded. Moreover, Beijing has worked hard to separate Washington from its two military allies in the region, Tokyo and Seoul. This is, despite all the happy talk that one hears in Washington, a zero-sum contest.

Americans have sought to integrate the Chinese into the international system, to make them "responsible stakeholders," to borrow the State Department's hopeful formulation. In order to do that, we have chosen to overlook a pattern of especially dangerous conduct in Asia. We issued a letter of regret, for instance, for the Hainan incident in 2001, even though the Chinese stripped the plane of sensitive equipment and imprisoned the crew of 24 for eleven days. We said nothing when the Chinese aggressively challenged the Bowditch, an unarmed Navy oceanographic vessel, in the Yellow Sea in September 2002. Nor did we publicly complain when, in October 2006, a Chinese submarine for the first time surfaced in the middle of an American strike group and within torpedo range of its flagship. This episode, which occurred in the Philippine Sea southeast of Okinawa, was an obvious warning to the U.S. Navy to stay away from Asian waters. And periodically in the last two decades, Chinese generals have publicly threatened to incinerate American cities.

Beijing, through a pattern of conduct, could not be clearer about its intentions. China intends to project force "way beyond the Taiwan Strait," as Hong Yuan, a military strategist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said last October. Therefore, it is time for Condoleezza Rice to stop complaining about China's lack of transparency and start commenting upon the nature of its ambitions.

In other words, China doesn't reciprocate a hand of friendship just because. China has its own agenda and just because we extend a hand of friendship doesn't mean they will give that hand back.

There are those now that believe unconditional dialogue with our enemies is the way to inject bold new foreign policies. Much like China our other enemies also have their own agenda and they are also totalitarian regimes that have power structures that we are unaware of. The abject failure of unconditional open dialogue with China should be a lesson in judging the ideas of unconditional dialogue with the rest of our enemies.

Chang makes his most provocative and intuitive point at the end...

We fundamentally misunderstand the Chinese. Unlike us, they are not impressed by displays of friendship. Like us, they respect strength. They are ruthlessly pragmatic. By adopting an overly tolerant approach, we are merely papering over problems, thereby ensuring that new incidents will occur and that differences will widen over time.

That is something to think about not only with China but the world at large...