Washington's misguided China policy

A central premise of the Bush foreign-policy team is that China is trying to challenge the status quo. China is seen as a rising power with a grudge against the international system. In short, we are said to be entering the twenty-first century equivalent of the early twentieth century, when a democratic England struggled with a rising, authoritarian Germany. But this analogy - of a 'Wilhelmine China'- is flawed, for it is hardly obvious, in the year 2001, just who is defending the status quo. At the very moment of China's decision to integrate fully into the international system, the United States seems to have started the process of changing the rules. just as China aspires to become a 'normal state' for the first time in its history, the criterion for 'normal' is changing. As China goes multilateral in its foreign relations, America turns unilateral.