No foreign policy challenge is more important, or difficult, than finding a way to simultaneously deter and engage China without provoking unwanted behaviours. Achieving this requires understanding the perceptions and priorities shaping Beijing’s actions.  

Despite China’s worsening economic problems and waning international trust, the March 2024 session of the National People’s Congress has reaffirmed Beijing’s determination to stick with policies fuelling domestic discontent and alienating foreign partners. The reasons are structural, not simply strong-man egoism. Policies in China are tightly interconnected, reflect hard-to-change perceptions, reinforced by bureaucratic and personal interests. Changing one facet requires changing the entire policy package. For now, that package prioritises domestic stability and security over economic growth. 

Beijing has fallen into an old mindset that sacrifices growth to reduce vulnerability to external and internal threats that leaders believe endanger the regime and China’s future. This is not good for China, the United States or the world. Washington cannot achieve immediate or fundamental changes in China’s behaviour but ill-considered actions can make things worse. The best we currently can achieve is wary coexistence, careful management to reduce dangers, and keeping the way open for a better day.

The current bilateral framework of big power politics and competition is harmful to both countries and to efforts to address global challenges. It is vital to acknowledge that US policy is one of the drivers of Chinese behaviour. The United States should strive for a minimally provocative deterrent posture. The United States should adopt policies that make clear that it hopes for the material progress of China in a cooperative framework and that it will support any resolution of cross-Strait relations peacefully agreed to by the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Eventually, the United States and China will adjust their policies toward mutual accommodation, but this could be well into the future and impose high costs on both nations in the interim.

Whenever that new day arrives, it will involve three parallel developments. First, Chinese acceptance that the United States is in Asia to stay. Second, US acceptance that the internal governance of China is a domestic choice of Chinese citizens, not a US change objective. Third, both countries deciding that cooperation to address global challenges is more important than each using the other to justify costly, contested or expedient policies.

Currently, prospects for such a meeting of the minds are poor. Leaders in both countries are firming up their internal support by depicting the other as an existential threat. China has blundered by aligning with the world’s worst actors — from Russia to North Korea and Iran — while the United States has erred by driving Beijing further in the wrong direction.

Since at least the 19th century, China has pursued national security and economic modernisation through selective engagement with the West, seeking to acquire technologies that would strengthen China without endangering the domestic system which its elites were determined to preserve. China’s twin goals of economic modernisation and internal stability are inextricably linked and always pursued in tandem, but circumstances and leadership calculations episodically change the weight given to each objective.

Over the centuries, China’s policy options have coalesced into one of two comprehensive policy bundles. The historically dominant policy bundle prioritises national and regime security over economic growth and is deeply suspicious of outside interference. In such phases China imposes more restrictions on foreign trade, investment, civil society and religion. There is increased emphasis on strong-man rule and ideological indoctrination. This is the China we face today.

Conversely, in periods in which internal stability seems more assured and the West is seen as a positive force in economic modernisation, China prioritises the gains to be made through interdependence and openness. Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping embodied this second policy bundle and President Xi Jinping embraces the first.

Until a better day arrives, US strategy needs to hold open the door to the second Chinese policy package, while limiting the damage that the current first policy package does to core US interests. The biggest move the United States could make to influence Chinese behaviour in constructive ways is to get its own governance and economic house in order. Speaking loudly, while carrying a small stick, is provocative.

The United States must avoid setting its strategic goals in a way that implies it is trying to keep China eternally weak, divided and isolated, or that regime change is the US goal written in invisible ink. Statements from officials such as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, Ely Ratner, suggesting that even peaceful cross-Strait reunification is strategically unacceptable to Washington, undermines the basis for normalisation achieved in 1979.

Washington should restate the long-held US position that the use of force in the Taiwan Strait is unacceptable, that the United States is not opposed to peaceful reunification and that ties between the United States and Taiwan are unofficial. One Taiwan, One China is not US policy. Washington needs to stop nibbling around the edges of the One China Policy.

The Xi regime is acting as much out of insecurity as it is strength. It also is acting from the belief that the United States is overstretched internationally and divided internally. Washington’s route forward, particularly in the 2024 presidential election year, is to make it clear that US foreign policy goals are not antithetical to the legitimate aspirations of the Chinese people. For its part, Beijing must realise it has blundered in choosing team Russia, Iran and North Korea over countries that fuelled its rise during the four-plus decades of engagement. Beijing needs to get back to a policy of reassurance rather than muscle flexing.

David Lampton is Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War.

Thomas Fingar is Shorenstein APARC Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. His most recent China book is Fateful Decisions: Choices that will Shape China’s Future, edited with Jean C Oi.