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thinks the law is an ass (to quote an Englishman), he will ignore or go around it or simply suggest making up a new contract. The veneration of an abstract idea is somewhat alien to China’s practical mind-set. Social relations and trust are far more important than paper commitments. Microsoft could not get Beijing to enforce its intellectual-property laws for years—until the company spent time and effort developing a relationship with the government and made clear that it wanted to help develop China’s economy and educational system. Once Microsoft had convinced the Chinese government of its benign intentions, those same laws began to get enforced. Few Chinese have really internalized the notion that abstract rules, laws, and contracts are more important than a situational analysis of a case at hand, which means that Chinese political and legal development is likely to take a more circuitous and complex path than one might predict.

China’s cultural traditions also affect its approach to negotiation. Boston University’s Robert Weller argues, “The Chinese base their sense of cause and effect around the idea of qi energy. Qi is the stuff of fengshui, and the element in the body that is manipulated by acupuncture or Chinese herbs. It is part of a broad way of understanding the structure of the world as a set of interacting forces, complexly interrelated rather than working through a simple and linear cause and effect.” “It could also have an effect on foreign policy,” Weller says.13 Such speculation can sometimes be overdone and even sound silly. But in talking to Chinese about their ways of thinking, one quickly recognizes that concepts like qi are as central to their mind-set as a moral Creator or free will is to Westerners. Foreign policy is driven by many universal forces, but there’s no doubt that a basic worldview organizes the way people perceive, act, and react, particularly in crises.

Culture, however, does not exist in a vacuum. China’s past and its own DNA are shaped by its modern history—the impact of the West, communism’s decimation of tradition, the resulting vacuum in Chinese spiritualism, and, perhaps most of all, its recent efforts to reconcile its traditions with modernity. When you talk to Chinese economists, they don’t proclaim a Confucian way to generate economic growth or curb inflation. China’s Central Bank seems very modern and (in that sense) Western in its approach. That it does not jump when the United States asks it to revalue its currency may tell us more about nationalism than about culture. (After all, when was the last time that the United States changed its economic policy because a foreign government hectored it into doing so?) The Chinese have adopted Western rationalism in many areas. Some Chinese foreign policy analysts call themselves “Christian Confucians”—meaning not evangelical converts but Chinese people with a Western outlook, seeking to imbue Chinese policies with a greater sense of purpose and values. Like every non-Western country, China will make up its own cultural cocktail—some parts Eastern, some parts Western—to thrive in the twenty-first century.

Too Big to Hide

China’s biggest problem has to do not with the particularities of culture but with the universalities of power. China views itself as a nation intent on rising peacefully, its behavior marked by humility, noninterference, and friendly relations with all. But many rising countries in the past have similarly believed in their own benign motives—and still ended up upsetting the system. The political scientist Robert Gilpin notes that as a nation’s power increases, it “will be tempted to try to increase its control over its environment. In order to increase its own security, it will try to expand its political, economic, and territorial control, it will try to change the international system in accordance with its particular set of interests.”14 The crucial point here is that, throughout history, great powers have seen themselves as having the best intentions but being forced by necessity to act to protect their