“Hiding Capabilities and Developing Strengths”and Hedging Bets: Strategic Interactions in US-China Relations and China’s Rise

　　Abstract: Since the early 1990s, “Hiding Capabilities and Developing Strengths” has been a critical guiding principle in China’s international relations strategy. During this period, generally speaking the US has maintained a hedged strategy through its China policy of “engagement and containment”. The article conducts an analysis of this pair of strategies within the context of USChina relations. It argues that there are numerous contradictions within the American strategy of “engagement and containment”, and that in reality it represents a policy characterized by low level engagement and low level containment. As China has continued to rise, efforts targeted at engagement have weakened, while those targeted at containment have strengthened. This has made it increasingly difficult to maintain a policy of “hiding capabilities and developing strengths”, and decreased the effectiveness of the strategy. As the level of dependency between the US and China is so high, the two must move beyond the strategic pairing of “hiding capacities and developing strengths” and “engagement and containment”. This will enable bilateral relations to be based on a more stable and sustainable foundation, and push ties between the US and China in a direction that better meets their mutual interests.

　　Author: Zhou Fangyin is an Associate professor in the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Science