ENGAGEMENT RECONSIDERED: CLINTON, CHINA, AND THE “IDEOLOGY OF INTEGRATION”

Abstract

Many critics of President Clinton’s post-Cold War engagement with China contend that the policy failed because it was infused with an idealistic and illusory aim of reforming China. Per this line of argument, engagement failed because freer trade and active engagement with China did not produce political reform. To what extent was the Clinton-era strategy of engagement predicated on Chinese political reform? More generally, what does a close reading of the record reveal about the means and ends of Clinton-era engagement with China? In light of a fractured literature, this thesis set out to document, analyze, and categorize three cases of engagement that resulted in trade agreements with China.

I hypothesize that a general and sweeping indictment of engagement misses the variety and nuance of the strategy of engagement pursued by the Clinton administration. In unpacking the framing and definition of “engagement” in the 1990s, I suggest that we need to disentangle different types of engagement—with distinct means and ends—pursued under the Clinton administration. I offer a simple analytical framework for categorizing three varieties of engagement based on separate means-ends logics: political-human rights engagement, commercial engagement, and strategic engagement. In examining these independent varieties of engagement across three case studies, I suggest that the Clinton administration saw pragmatic value in pursuing engagement, even when it debated and dropped objectives of political reform. Ultimately, I argue for a more rigorous understanding of what engaging China might mean—both to Clinton-era foreign policymakers and in contemporary political discourse—in order to nuance mainstream histories of the engagement with China in the 1990s. In so doing, I hope to inform contemporary U.S.-China policy prescriptions through a deeper understanding of the strategy of engagement.