Strategic reassurance starts with small steps

• Source: Global Times
• [00:06 November 17 2009]
• Comments

China may not be ready to provide more complicated form of strategic reassurance. Intellectually and psychologically, China faces many questions, many of them generated or made more difficult by China's rapid rise.

What is China's identity? Is it a developing or developed country? Is it a country that emphasizes absolute sovereignty or a citizen of a globalized world with more fluid forms of sovereignty?

What are China's values, and are they universal or unique? What is the best way to achieve good governance in the developing world – insisting on principles of non-interference, or accepting, to some extent, the Western recipe that sees multilateral or even unilateral intervention as legitimate?

Can China continue to rise and enjoy prosperity within the existing international power structure, or must it seek significant changes?

Without a clear consensus in China on these issues and an effective mechanism to coordinate actions of Chinese government bureaucracies and private actors, people outside China will see mixed signals in China's international behavior. This will make the US and others suspicious of China's strategic agenda and lead them to request more strategic reassurance from China.

The key point for China-US relations on the eve of Obama's visit is this: The US needs to resist the temptation to make judgments about China's strategic intention from individual actions by a part of the bureaucracy or the business sector or other Chinese actors during an interim period when China has not yet developed the means to frame the meaning of such actions and limit their adverse impact on bilateral relations.

China must be aware of the gap between its strategic importance and influence and its intellectual and psychological readiness to do what is necessary to provide effective reassurance.

Although Deputy Secretary Steinberg used the word "bargain" when he called for strategic reassurance between the United States and China, we should not think of strategic reassurance as a package deal that the two countries can simply negotiate and then implement.

Strategic reassurance is ordinarily a process; it comes from an accumulation of confidence over time through step-by-step, often symmetrical, signals and actions.

There are already many channels for interchange between China and the US, including the Strategic and Economic Dialogue.

Steinberg's call for strategic reassurance, and Obama's visit to China, can help give those mechanisms a common theme and focus: to foster the assurance both sides seek.

They can be venues for the two sides to articulate and identify explicitly the reassuring measures each side has taken and the reciprocal response it expects from the other side. Besides official channels, scholars in the two countries can set up a joint task force to identify, articulate and evaluate reassurance measures from each side.

The author is Deputy Director with Institute of American Studies, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. This essay was originally published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in Philadelphia