The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

motivation behind this U.S. engagement policy was
manifold. One, as President Nixon put it, was to “stop
the 700 million Chinese from nurturing their hatred
against the Americans.” (The United States and China
were bitter enemies back then, and the United States
did not recognize the regime in Beijing as a legitimate
government for 30 years prior to the reconciliation in
1979.) 33 The other was to use China as a counterbalance
against the Soviet Union. The third, and a longterm
goal, was that over time, economic development
in China would bring about political changes and
eventually turn China into a democratic state. By virtue
of being a democracy, China would have shared
fundamental values with the United States and a prosperous
China would be a U.S. friend rather than an
enemy.
This engagement policy served U.S. interests
well until the turn of the 1990s when the Cold War
ended. As the United States led many in the world to
celebrate the fall of Communism and the advance of
democracy, Chinese leaders survived the shock and
reemerged from China’s internal political turmoil, the
Tiananmen Square student movement, to defiantly
reaffirm their determination to continue communist
rule in China and resist U.S. heavy pressure for political
change. This defiant act effectively recast China’s
relationship with the United States as an unfinished
business of the Cold War. It also restored the ideological
divide between the two nations that had been set
aside in the previous decade for the strategic reasons
mentioned above.
This change was significant. It cast a dark shadow
over China’s subsequent rise. Complicating this
change of perception, China and the United States inadvertently
found themselves in a show of force over
the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995-96.
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