Primary Sources from Post-Cold War Engagement with China

After WTO Accession

How realistic were U.S. hopes that engagement with China would lead to political reforms?

A worker rests at a construction site of new buildings in the Pudong Lujiazui Financial District in Shanghai on January 29, 2007. Source: China Photos/Getty Images.

After China joined the WTO, U.S. policymakers predicted that growing prosperity and political reform would proceed in tandem in China.

By many measures, China exceeded the economic predictions of policymakers in the 1990s. Its economy grew by roughly 10 percent each year through the 2000s. By 2010, China had surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Trade with the United States expanded too, rising from less than $100 billion in 1999 to $558 billion by 2019. The transformation reshaped Chinese society as well as its economy: the share of the population living in extreme poverty dropped from 83 percent in 1990 to under 1 percent by 2018.

But political reforms did not materialize.

Analysts initially saw hopeful signs that economic growth in China was slowly opening its political system. But after Chinese leader Xi Jinping rose to power in 2012, the Chinese Communist Party pivoted, tightening its grip on political life. Authorities cracked down on dissent, curtailed civil liberties, and expanded state surveillance. Serious human rights concerns persisted in China, including the mass detention of Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. Far from a growing middle class demanding political reform, the Chinese government found ways to deliver economic growth while maintaining and even strengthening authoritarian control.

A closed-circuit camera is seen in front of a portrait of Mao Zedong at the Tiananmen Gate on June 24, 2021. — A closed-circuit cameras is seen on a pole near a portrait of Chinese leader Mao Zedong in front of the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, on June 24, 2021. Source: Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images.

China’s behavior abroad also grew more assertive. The country forcefully pressed territorial claims in the South China Sea and increased military pressure on Taiwan. Far from being shaped by membership in liberal institutions, China leveraged its economic weight to build parallel institutions, like the Belt and Road Initiative, and resisted honoring its WTO commitments on intellectual property, market access, and state subsidies.

At home, the costs of economic integration with China became difficult to ignore. A surge of Chinese imports following WTO accession had hit U.S. manufacturing communities hard, eliminating roughly two million jobs between 1999 and 2011—far more than policymakers had anticipated. Economic anxiety over the so-called China shock fueled growing disillusionment with the global trade policies of the 1990s.

Frustration eventually gave way to open economic confrontation. Beginning in 2018, the Trump administration imposed sweeping tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods. China retaliated in kind, sparking a trade war that has transformed the U.S.-China economic relationship. In the years since 2018, both countries have wielded economic influence over critical sectors and taken steps to reduce their economic interdependence.

By the 2020s, the United States and China had settled into a relationship defined more by strategic competition than by the cooperative integration that 1990s policymakers had envisioned.

The gap between post–Cold War expectations and later realities has prompted many policymakers and scholars to reassess U.S. optimism about the spread of liberal values in the 1990s. Some analysts have argued that the United States operated on flawed assumptions and that authoritarianism proved far more resilient than theorists had expected. Others contend that those assumptions were not inherently misguided but were undermined by inconsistent policies or needed more time to bear fruit. That debate is not merely historical. How U.S. policymakers answer it shapes the way that the United States operates in the world today. 

On the following page, we’ll provide a discussion activity about U.S. engagement with China. Alongside that activity, consider the following discussion questions: 

Looking back at the post–Cold War era, was the United States overly optimistic about engaging with China? Why or why not? 
Political and economic integration worked differently in Russia, for example, than it did in China. What factors do you think account for the difference? 
What alternative approach toward China in the 1990s, if any, could have had different results?