Principles of the American Approach to Relations with PRC: Political Confrontation

Abstract

This article reviews the key doctrinal document that has shaped the U.S. policy towards the PRC – the United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China. The author explores the political principles of the approach, which reflect the fundamental perception of both China itself and its strategy by the American establishment. The article examines the principles defining the American understanding of the PRC’s place in the Indo-Pacific region, the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), the U.S. attitudes to the Chinese domestic governance model and narratives. It offers a scientific rationale for the principles under analysis, and demonstrates how the American approach to China was transformed by following them. It is stated that these principles stem out of the shift from the strategy of engagement pursued in the 1990s and 2000s to the competitive approach. The new approach, it is noted, reflects Washington’s response to Beijing’s policy of recent decades and is presented as a counterstrategy to China’s thirty-year-old grand strategy. The author identifies the range of experts whose ideas and proposals have created the basis for the principles reviewed. It is indicated that the provisions of the strategy approved by President D. Trump were bipartisan, and were taken by the Biden administration as a basis for the formation of its policy towards China. The article concludes that the redefinition of the American political principles has caused a revision of the entire set of relations with China and directly affected the U.S. policy in other areas of their interaction with the PRC: ideology, security, trade and economic relations.