ABSTRACT
Strategy is stronger than politics, just as politics is stronger than commerce. Sino-American commerce is thriving, motivating powerful interests in its continued growth. The commercial interest in continued amity, the many personal and institutional bonds that link Americans and Chinese will not long resist the impulses that are driving the United States and China towards a strategic confrontation. In a variety of diplomatic endeavors, including the construction of a global free-trade regime under the aegis of the World Trade Organization, the US and China are vigorously cooperating. In China, prospering cities and towns are filled with migrants uprooted from ancestral villages, while their own traditional courtyard-and-alley neighborhoods have been replaced by rows of sterile apartment houses. China's economic growth is still a fragile phenomenon, greatly dependent on exports and foreign investment. A serious contention with the United States, even well short of war, could inflict catastrophic damage. But such details never deter nationalist fervors.
