ABSTRACT
The pages of The National Interest have abounded in recent months with analyses, prognostications, predictions, and arguments over what to do with and about China. Robert Zoellick argued persuasively for the need to rebuild a bipartisan consensus on U.S. policy toward China, and both he and Paul Wolfowitz have urged that such a consensus take as its touchstone the recognition that the problem is one of accommodating the rise of a new power (the Wilhelmine Germany analogy), and not that of containing an implacably hostile imperialism (the Stalinist postwar Soviet Union analogy). It is hard to deny, too, the good sense of recognizing the essential tension between China's rush toward economic development and its ossified political system, a tension that Henry S. Rowen and others maintain will be resolved in the end in a relatively benign way, in favor of democracy. And it also makes sense, as Bruce Cumings has suggested, for Americans to understand the historical-and, in some cases, the very subjective-origins of their own images of China before setting off to propound U.S. interests in Beijing.
