Pragmatic Chinese Foreign Policy

When strategic concerns or foreign policy conflicts have threatened to interfere with the conditions necessary for growth, Chinese leaders have made pragmatic compromises to keep the economy growing.

So said Phillip C. Saunders in an occasional paper titled China's Global Activism: Strategy, Drivers and Tools (Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University Press, Washington DC, October 2006).

Such compromises include: 1) welcoming trade and investment from political suspect sources including political rival Taiwan, and 2) making concessions in order to ensure access to US markets. This can be seen when the US used the renewal of China's most-favored nation status in the 1990s to press for human rights improvements, whereupon Beijing grudgingly made the concessions necessary to maintain trade ties.

Other compromises include 3) curtailing nuclear cooperation with countries such as Pakistan and Iran, and reduced or eliminated assistance to Syrian, Iranian and Pakistani missile programs in response to US pressures, 4) taking a tolerant attitude towards the assertion of sovereignty by Taiwan leaders and the increased US arms sales to and security cooperation with Taipei, and 5) suppressing anti-Japanese protests when such sentiments have escalated to the point where they threaten economic ties.