TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The Obama administration is shifting course in its policy on China:

“This administration came in with one dominant idea: make China a global partner in facing global challenges,” said David Shambaugh, director of the China policy program at George Washington University. “China failed to step up and play that role. Now, they realize they’re dealing with an increasingly narrow-minded, self-interested, truculent, hyper-nationalist and powerful country.”

To counter what some officials view as a surge of Chinese triumphalism, the United States is reinvigorating cold war alliances with Japan and South Korea, and shoring up its presence elsewhere in Asia. This week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Vietnam for the second time in four months, to attend an East Asian summit meeting likely to be dominated by the China questions.

This is quite similar to the Bush administration’s strategy, which was, especially during the first term, quite distrusting of China. They attempted to surround China with U.S.-friendly countries.

The Obama administration has, rightly, decided to challenge the PRC on a number of issues. Setting aside exchange rates, the administration has pushed China on territorial disputes in the South China Sea and we had (until this week) scheduled naval exercises with South Korea in the Yellow Sea. This is important because as China rises, they could replace the U.S. as the dominant power in Asia, and this would be incredibly destabilizing.

Since the U.S. is an outsider to asia, it also acts as an objective arbiter between nations. The U.S. doesn’t have a direct interest in territorial disputes—it’s only interest is in maintaining stability. This neutral position is a benefit for asia, because it provides a framework for asian nations to cooperate through.

If China replaces the U.S. as the region’s dominant power, this will no longer be the case. China certainly does have a direct interest in any and all of these disputes, and as such may (and from their recent actions, will) use their position to benefit them. This throws the region’s balance askew. If there is no neutral framework for nations to work through, then each nation will be on its own. This very well could lead to a rise in conflict and, conceivably, military conflict.

There is a fine line between pressing China and keeping our current position, and pushing China into a corner. While talking with a friend of mine in China about China’s disinterest and distrust of the world, I theorized that it may be because historically, China has been a dominant power. While other empires rose, weakened and faded away, China’s remained, and the world beat a path to them for trade. Therefore, despite losing this dominant position in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, China may remain beholden to that same view of themselves, and thus to a position that other nations are lesser nations than them.

She disagreed. She said that their distrust isn’t a result of a feeling of superiority, but the opposite: inferiority. China’s final dynasty, the Qing, began declining in the eighteenth century, and that process was completed in the nineteenth when they were forced open by European nations and colonized. Their decline and colonization was profoundly traumatizing for China, and this experience still lingers in the nation’s consciousness.

So we must walk a fine line between legitimately pressing China and recalling the West’s abuses during the eighteenth century. There is a strong nationalist force in China, and this would lead to dramatic pressure on China’s leadership and would necessitate them to respond.