this neocon-inspired China/Taiwan policy had begun to take hold in the Washington
political establishment.
‘Strategic competitor’ redux? Neocons’ China policy since ‘11 September’
A watershed in the post-Cold War era, ‘11 September’ has been remarkable for its
transformation effect on U.S. foreign policy in general and U.S. China policy in
particular. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the neocons shifted their focus from
confronting China to fighting terrorism. In the following years, the Bush administration
quietly dropped the term ‘strategic competitor’ in describing China, and saw it more or
less as a partner in the ‘War on Terror’. Does this, then, suggest that China no longer
registers on the neocons’ radar screen? A closer examination suggests that the answer is
negative.
Firstly, even in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks when there was much high hope for
sustained Sino-American cooperation (Shambaugh 2002), the neocons and their allies
did not relax their vigilance towards what they called the threat of China. This attitude
was manifested, for example, in the July 2002 reports on the People’s Republic by the
Pentagon and the USCC. Published ten months after ‘11 September’, both reports
repeatedly sounded alarms about an emerging China threat (U.S. Department of
Defense 2002; USCC
2002). Michael Ledeen, the USCC’s vice chairman and Resident
Scholar of the Freedom Chair at the AEI, told the media that ‘if push comes to shove,
China is perfectly happy to fight a war against us’ (cited in Perkins 2002: A17). PNAC
executive director Gary Schmitt (2002: 17) went a step further, arguing that the U.S.
should ‘take full advantage’ of its strategic gains in the war on terrorism to ‘tighten the
security noose around Beijing’s neck’. For much of the first half of George W. Bush’s
first term, no China expert was appointed to any senior position. When such an
appointment did come, it was the hawkish, neoconservative Aaron Friedberg, who
became the deputy national security adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney in June
2003. Jim Lobe (2003) called this appointment a new victory for neoconservative hawks
in the Bush administration.
Given the neocons’ insistence that spreading democracy be the new priority of U.S.
foreign policy, their continued focus on China’s threat is hardly surprising. As the 2002
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Convention