credible capacity to “generate global power”’. Shortly after ‘11 September’, though not
directly naming China, the Pentagon in its 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review Report
warned the emergence of ‘a military competitor with a formidable resource base’ in
Asia (U.S. Department of Defense 2001: 4). The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review
Report no longer bothers to conceal such overtones. ‘Of the major and emerging
powers’, it insists, ‘China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the
United States’ (U.S. Department of Defense 2006: 29).
Thus, although the handling of Iraq by the neocons is under attack, their China policy
seems much less contentious. Indeed, on China’s emerging threat, not only are they
more united internally, but they are also joined in varying degrees by many of their
detractors, both from the Democratic left and the conservative right. For example, on
the day of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington, Nancy Pelosi, the
minority leader in the House of Representatives, painted a negative picture of China
which is hardly distinguishable from that seen by the neocons (Pelosi 2006). In her
article, the Californian Democrat urged the Bush administration to stand up to Beijing
on the issue of Taiwan, adding that ‘Only then will we have the moral authority to speak
out for freedom in other parts of the world’. Similarly, while criticising the folly of the
neocon policy on Iraq, the conservative writers Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke
(2004: 298) find their quarrel with the neocons on China lying mainly in the perceived
neoconservative neglect of the Communist regime in recent years, an accusation which
the neocons are likely to dispute. While this convergence of China perceptions does not
mean that the neoconservative policy on China has become a consensus across the wide
political spectrum in the United States, it does suggest that on the China issue there
exists a considerable degree of perceptual overlap with both some liberals and
conservatives. Given this welcome common ground, the neocons, who have been
notorious for their opportunistic instinct, are unlikely to pass up the China ‘opportunity’
if they want to remain on top of the battle over the direction of foreign policy making in
Washington.
Apparently, the scenario of a renewed neoconservative focus on China seems to assume
that the ‘War on Terror’ will soon run out of steam and that the neocons need to look
elsewhere for targets. What, one may ask, if the war continues and even extends to the
remaining members of the ‘Axis of Evil’, Iran and North Korea, as some neocons have
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Convention