| 摘要 | What is the best sort of knowledge for understanding the world: detailed expertise on individual countries and key issues, or a broader grasp of strategy and the patterns of great-power rivalry? This is the deeper epistemological question at stake in recent arguments about who was right and who was wrong about China in the decades after the Cold War. The answer is complicated, but it matters a lot in terms of forging the right approach to China in the future.
The great-power gurus, those with less specific knowledge about China itself, were better at predicting the emergence of the disruptive rising power we see today. Yet the China hands — those who know that country, its language, and its politics intimately — will be the critical assets in the new competition.
As U.S.-China relations have worsened, experts have approached a consensus in favor of some toughening of the American posture. Still, opinion on China is hardly monolithic. The Washington Post recently described one split, between an older generation that came of age during the heyday of U.S.-China engagement and wants to prevent the relationship from entering an inescapable downward spiral, and a younger generation that is more willing to risk higher tensions as the price of protecting U.S. interests.
Yet this split is not the first major divide in America’s China-watching community. Since the 1990s, there have been two types of U.S. experts on China. The first group – the “China hands” – is composed of individuals who possess deep subject-matter expertise and have devoted their careers to understanding China. The China hands can be found in U.S. universities, think-tanks, and government (particularly the Foreign Service); they possess formidable Chinese-language skills and enviable contacts within the Chinese power structure and society. They can speak with great authority and nuance about Beijing politics; they are well attuned to the unique aspects of China’s history and strategic culture.
The second group – the great-power gurus – consists mostly of people who are not China specialists. They usually aren’t fluent in Mandarin; they haven’t spent their professional lives studying China. They it less as a unique civilization than as one more participant in history’s unending struggle for global power.
Interestingly, the latter group often did better in predicting China’s strategic path from the 1990s onward. Some of the most prescient articles about China’s future intentions were written by analysts with no particular expertise on China. These writers discerned that Beijing would not be successfully enmeshed into the U.S.-led global system, but would become more aggressive in challenging that system as its capabilities grew.
In 1997, the historian Robert Kagan wrote a landmark piece explaining that China was likely to challenge U.S. for leadership in the Asia-Pacific and perhaps globally, drawing on the precedent of a rising Germany challenging the U.K. a century earlier. In 2000, Princeton University’s Aaron Friedberg argued – in a piece mostly dismissed by China hands – that an intense “struggle for mastery in Asia” was underway. The next year, international relations theorist John Mearsheimer predicted that, unless Chinese economic growth slowed drastically, a fierce Sino-American struggle was well-nigh inevitable.
A few China hands, as well as some journalists who had spent time in Beijing, were also alert to the emerging rivalry. But on the whole, one could have gotten a better sense of China’s geopolitical future by reading the works of non-specialists than by perusing the pages of China Quarterly or other specialized journals.
The great-power gurus, in other words, were China hawks before being a China hawk was cool. They understood that a rising China was unlikely to be less disruptive than earlier emerging powers – because a country’s interests normally grow with its capabilities, because rising states have frequently sought to reshape the international system to suit their interests, and because mighty autocracies generally struggle to get along with strong democracies. Their knowledge of history and strategy allowed them to see that, whatever Chinese officials might have said about a peaceful rise, the timeless logic of great-power rivalry would be incredibly difficult for Washington and Beijing to transcend.
Unsurprisingly, the reputation of the China hands has taken a beating. (There have also been veiled accusations that China hands within the academic community have muted their critiques of Beijing’s policies as a way of maintaining access and influence within China.) Former presidential adviser Steve Bannon declared that the Donald Trump White House would push out longtime China experts, such as acting Assistant Secretary of State Susan Thornton, in favor of hawks. With few exceptions, the officials driving the administration’s trade confrontation with Beijing cannot be considered China specialists. More broadly, the fact that great-power rivalry is now so much in vogue has shifted the balance of influence away from the China hands and toward the great-power gurus.
U.S. policy toward China needed to change, so at least some of this can be viewed as a healthy correction. It is important that this shift not go too far, however, because this moment calls for the expertise and influence of the China hands.
A key question today is not whether China will become an ambitious revisionist power, but how those ambitions will manifest. Here, a general understanding of great-power politics is not enough. It seems likely, for example, that China will seek greater global influence and military capabilities to defend its growing economic footprint and protect itself against U.S. pressure. But a country that has traditionally taken a dim view of formal military alliances and often seeks to avoid the burdens of global leadership is unlikely to pursue a worldwide agenda in the same way that America or other great powers have done. An understanding of broad strategy and history can only get one so far in predicting an individual country’s and government’s behavior; intimate expertise is necessary to get beyond the generalities.
Deciphering how Xi Jinping’s government will react to economic pressure, or how it will handle the crisis in Hong Kong, is hard under any circumstances. It is nearly impossible without the detailed knowledge China hands can offer. It may not take a Mandarin-speaking expert to understand that China will not tolerate pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong indefinitely. But assessing how, when, and under what circumstances Beijing will respond requires a degree of real expertise.
Finally, the U.S. needs intellectual resiliency and balance in dealing with China, and this requires contributions from subject-matter experts and generalists alike. If the great-power gurus are the “hedgehogs” in America’s China debate — the thinkers who know one big thing about how rising powers tend to become revisionist powers — the China hands are the “foxes” — those who know many little things. Hedgehogs sometimes get the big things right, but their ambition and confidence can also lead them astray. Foxes sometimes struggle to see the big picture, but they are indispensable to keeping hedgehogs honest. The challenge from China will only become more severe. America won’t have the luxury of relying on any single source of insight about what that country is up to. |
