China's Trajectory: From Liberalization to Authoritarianism

It has become a trope to lament and lambast the wishful thinking that shaped U.S. policy toward China in the two decades after the Cold War. That policy rested on a prediction about China’s future: that with economic growth and ongoing diplomatic, economic, and cultural engagement—with the United States and the rest of the world—China would become more like the United States—more politically open at home and more accepting of the existing order abroad.

It is hard to deny that this prediction proved wrong. But Rana Mitter, the S.T. Lee Chair in U.S.-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the great historians of China, reminds readers that predictions about China almost always prove wrong. And as he writes in a new essay in Foreign Affairs, it would be equally foolish to assume that China must remain on its current trajectory of more confrontation abroad and repression at home. “Another China remains possible,” Mitter argues. And how that China develops will be one of the most important factors in geopolitics for decades to come.

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