Containment in the Eyes of the Beholder: US Policy and Chinese Perceptions

• In Event: China’s Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy in the New Era

Abstract

Has United States policy toward China evolved into a strategy of containment in recent years? Many in China seem to think so. It seems that in China everywhere one turns one hears the mantra, “the US is containing China.” Yet in speaking to US experts for this study, these experts on China and US foreign policy are near-unanimous in their refrain that no, the US is not containing China. They argue, as one US expert said to the author, “The US in many ways is the greatest facilitator …of China’s integration into the international system…” not an adversary engaged in containing China. Neither have any US policy makers or official policy statements from Washington indicated that the US has a policy of containment toward China of the likes of the Truman Doctrine (1947), NSC 68 (1950) or what followed in the heydays of US containment policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Yet why do so many Chinese observers persist in the characterization of US policy toward China as containment? What explains the apparent gap in perception between Chinese and American policy makers and experts as it regards something so basic as US policy towards China?
Taking up these questions, the hypothesis offered in this study is summarized here. China-US relations operate in a bilateral context characterized by strategic distrust (Lieberthal and Wang, 2012), and a relational culture that is slipping into a Hobbesian morass, alluding to Wendt’s (1999) cultures of anarchy used at the second level of analysis, wherein conspiracy theories abound and ill will is increasingly assumed about the other on both sides. This is complicated by a phenomenon called Fundamental Attribution Error, wherein each side attributes the worst intentions to the other, to be explained below. Also contributing to the perceptual gap is a decades long Chinese government campaign to depict the US as a threat to China, in which portraying the US as having a policy of containing China is one part. This study relies on the results of two sets of interviews (one set conducted in Washington and one in Beijing/China) of leading Chinese and American experts on China-US relations and the question of containment in Sino-American relations. It includes evidence from official/primary sources (policy statements by officials on both sides) and secondary sources (writings from experts in the secondary literature), to test and assess the hypothesis presented, as well as results from a systematic survey of Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson statements and official People’s Daily articles between November 1, 2018 and October 31, 2019, focusing on the terms ‘ezhi’ (遏制)in Chinese and ‘contain’ or ‘containment’ in English as a way of getting at the way in which the Chinese government uses the terms as well as the frequency of use. The study ends with a concluding section elaborating upon theoretical and policy implications

Author

• Gregory J. Moore, United States Air Force Academy