Respected Chinese policy experts provided the House Committee on Armed Services with detailed analysis and suggested strategies for dealing with the continued economic and military ascendance policy of the Chinese leadership, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy.Aaron Friedberg, Professor Of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School, stated: Following the end of the Cold War, the United States adopted a two-pronged approach for dealing with China. On the one hand, we sought to engage China across all fronts, diplomatic, cultural, scientific, and above all, economic. But at the same time, successive U.S. administrations worked to maintain a favorable balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region. We strengthened our own forward-based forces. We bolstered our traditional alliances. And we built new quasi-alliance partnerships with other countries, like Singapore and more recently India. So we pursued a strategy that involved engagement on the one hand, but also balancing. And the goals of that two-pronged strategy were essentially to preserve stability while waiting for engagement effectively to work its magic on China. Engagement was supposed to encourage China's leaders to see their interests as lying in the maintenance and strengthening of the existing U.S.-led international order, while at the same time accelerating liberalization of its economy and eventually the democratization of its political system. Since the turn of the century, and especially in the last 10 years, it is become increasingly evident that this approach has failed to achieve its objectives. China has obviously become far richer and stronger, but instead of loosening its grip, the country's Communist Party regime has become even more repressive and more militantly nationalistic. Instead of evolving towards a truly market-based economy, as it was hoped and expected, Beijing continues to pursue-and in certain respects has expanded-its use of state-directed, market-distorting, mercantilist economic policies.Ely Ratner, Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow For China Studies, Council On Foreign Relations, testified: Number one, the United States and China are, in fact, now locked in a geopolitical competition that will ultimately determine the rules, norms, and institutions that govern international relations in the coming decades. Number two, the United States on balance is currently losing this competition in ways that increase the likelihood not just of the erosion of the U.S.-led order, but also the rise of an illiberal China-dominated Asia and beyond. To be concrete, here is what this would mean for the United States: weaker alliances, fewer security partners, and a military forced to operate at greater distances; U.S. firms without access to leading technologies and markets and disadvantaged by unique standards, investment rules, and trading blocks; weak international and regional institutions unable to resist Chinese coercion; and a secular decline in democracy and individual freedoms around the world. The net result would be a less secure and less prosperous United States that is less able to exert power and influence in the world.
