Read: Springtime in Tiananmen Square, 1989

Since 1989, successive Democratic and Republican administrations have banked on the idea that integrating China into the World Trade Organization would turn China into a responsible stakeholder and make the Middle Kingdom more like Western capitalist democracies. Instead, China has used the liberal international order to secure its illiberal political system and create unfair trade advantages for its favored domestic corporations while engaging in intellectual-property theft so massive that, in 2012, General Keith Alexander, then the nation’s top cyberwarrior and director of the National Security Agency, called it “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” This, from a man not known for overstating.

Why have so many been so off about China for so long? In part it’s because policy makers and academics alike look for patterns, not exceptions. We are trained to generalize across cases and use history as a guide to the future. But China has always been sui generis—an innovator in the ancient world that became a poverty-stricken nation in the modern one; a nation with a deep and proud imperial history ruled by a post-1949 Communist leadership with an aversion to remembering it; a rural nation with some of the world’s most sophisticated high-tech surveillance.

There is also a fundamental disconnect in how American and Chinese leaders see time. For Americans, memories are short, attention is fleeting, and policy lurches from crisis to crisis. In Washington, passing a budget and keeping the lights on seem more and more like heroic acts. In China, by contrast, memories are long, attention is enduring, and the government plans for the long haul. China’s rise in artificial intelligence and other technologies has been in the works for years. Its military modernization started in the 1990s. Back then, a Chinese admiral was asked how long before China would build its own aircraft carrier. He replied, “in the near future”—by which he meant sometime before 2050.

These different views of time hang over modern geopolitics. For American leaders, U.S. global leadership is the way of things. For Chinese leaders, it is an aberration: China was a great power until the Opium Wars in the 1840s ushered in a “century of humiliation” by the West. In Beijing, China’s rise isn’t new. It’s a reversion to the way things used to be.

Donald Trump’s administration has turned the page, acknowledging that the United States and China are locked in a competitive struggle with some mutual interests and many conflicting ones. The administration’s fundamental China shift doesn’t get the attention or praise it deserves. Even so, getting U.S. policy on China right won’t be easy. Our economies are tightly interconnected, our domestic politics are each highly charged, and our security interests are more and more at odds. A good China policy starts by recognizing that China’s rise is in many ways unique, and that general patterns and predictions may obscure more than they clarify.

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