by Robert Manning

The U.S.-China relationship is increasingly tenuous. Looking at China, America sees revelations about stolen nuclear technology, jailing of political dissidents, tensions over Taiwan, ballooning trade deficits. From the Chinese perspective, there is American posturing about Taiwan, extreme congressional rhetoric and our intentions to build an Asian missile-defense system. Things are getting nasty. True, we have seen this movie before. It all seems like an endless series of bungee jumps. Except this time, the chord just might break.

As the bough breaks

Just when situations like Bosnia and Kosovo might lead one to think that real shooting wars between major powers were obsolete -- that peacekeeping was the key mission of the U.S. military -- the dissonant noise from Washington and Beijing serves as a sobering reminder that major conflict between nuclear-weapons states is not unimaginable. For that is precisely where the current downward spiral of U.S.-China relations could lead.

This is in no small measure due to China's often-troubling behavior that sometimes bumps up against American interests and values. But it is also due to a rather stupid and flawed debate within the United States, as well as misperceptions, competing single-issue special interests, and the use of the China card for domestic political advantage.

Like the classic scene in "Casablanca" where the coupier hands Claude Raines his winnings in Casablanca, we act shocked, shocked that China runs spy operations here (we, of course, would never do such things). Some Americans act like they just discovered that China has nuclear weapons (only since 1964!).

This is not to say that the apparent result of Beijing's efforts -- leapfrogging to a next-generation smaller nuclear weapon with help from a scientist at Los Alamos laboratory -- does not underscore profound doubts about China's intentions that dog U.S. policy. Just that we should not be so surprised. Cold War or not, spying remains an enduring aspect of statecraft whether it is France, Israel, Russia or China.

The nuclear episode -- along with the recent U.S. denial of license for a $450 million Hughes satellite to be launched by China, and talk of deploying missile defenses in Asia -- reinforces a terrible ambiguity that dogs U.S.-China relations. The question now is whether the US and China are stumbling into a full-blown adversarial relationship, or whether both can live with the ambiguity of a relationship that has aspects of cooperation, as well areas where their respective interests may clash?

Mutual indignation

As the planned April official visit of Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji approaches, the glitter of President Clinton's unprecedented 10-day tour of China last June has long faded. Clinton administration rhetoric about "strategic partnership" appears vacuous at best. Indeed, a decade after the end of the Cold War and the June 1989 Tiananmen massacres, Sino-American relations still lurch from crisis to crisis absent real moorings. But with each cycle of mutual indignation and recrimination, both sides slip a notch closer to possible confrontation.

For its part, China views U.S. behavior as all of piece: a "containment through engagement" strategy to keep it weak and divided. The lightning-rod issue in this perception is U.S. willingness to arm Taiwan, which China views as a wayward province threatening to move toward formal independence.

Beijing fears that providing U.S. theater missile defense (TMD) systems to Taiwan will mean a much closer Washington-Taipei military relationship, one that may embolden those favoring formal independence. But the United States has no such advanced TMD, and will not be able to deploy one before 2007.

Ironically, tough U.S. TMD rhetoric may be playing into domestic forces in China that want to put a timetable on reunification with Taiwan, inadvertently making conflict more likely. In any case Taiwan is but the wedge issue, emblematic of the discordant pathologies weighing on both sides of the U.S.-China relationship.

A false debate

At the core of an endless array of contentious issues are two central questions: what kind of actor will China be as it emerges as a major economic and military power in the 21st century, and can the United States adjust to its rise -- and China accept the U.S. as a Pacific power -- enough for both sides to accommodate their basic interests? Whether the issue is China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), its military modernization, its aggressive posture toward Taiwan in the South China Sea, pressure on Hong Kong's legal system, or jailing dissidents, all revolve around these fundamental questions.

The unsatisfying reality is that China is in the midst of a historic social and economic transformation with an uncertain outcome. For every political opponent jailed, a hundred more Chinese students may be gaining access to the Internet or getting degrees in business management.

Beijing may be modernizing its arsenal, but it also is phaseing down military exports to Iran and Pakistan, and joining the nuclear test-ban treaty and chemical-weapons ban. Its markets are grudgingly opening, albeit not smoothly. In all probability we will have to live with an ambiguous China for a generation or more, neither ally nor enemy, not with a black or white hat, but only shades of gray.

The Clinton administration has done itself and the nation a disservice by casting the debate as "engagement vs. containment." Engagement is but a fancy word for diplomacy. It is not a policy or a strategy. And containment is not an option: China is not the Soviet Union, and our friends in Asia show little interest in joining a formal anti-China alliance.

It is time to move beyond these false choices. Even during the darkest days of the Cold War, we "engaged" Moscow, had summits, signed agreements. Of course, we must deal with a civilization of 1.3 billion people, nuclear weapons, a U.N. Security Council veto, and the seventh-largest economy in the world. The question is what is the purpose of engagement? There is a long list of legitimate concerns about China from the trade deficit to abortion practices, religious freedom, political rights, Tibet, missile exports to Iran.

The United States will never attain satisfaction on all issues. Clinton's laundry-list approach fails to choose priorities. China's nuclear weapons, the economic relationship, our respective roles in the Asia-Pacific, along with Taiwan, rate at the top of the urgent list. But in any case, China must accommodate an ambiguous United States and vice versa. There will be areas where U.S. and Chinese interests overlap and issues over which they clash.

The challenge is to find a balance of dissatisfactions where the minimal needs of both countries are met. That requires clarity and constancy of purpose, firmness and a new realism. Rather than engagement or containment, the point is to find a more mature approach on both sides that lowers expectations and focuses on the fundamentals. Don't hold your breath.

Robert A. Manning, a contributing editor to IntellectualCapital.com, is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. These views are his own, not the council's. His e-mail address is robertmanning@intellectualcapital.com.