从会员到责任：中国向何处去？

China is big, it is growing, and it will influence the world in the years ahead.

For the United States and the world, the essential question is ?how will China use its influence?

To answer that question, it is time to take our policy beyond opening doors to China' membership into the international system: We need to urge China to become a responsible stakeholder in that system.

China has a responsibility to strengthen the international system that has enabled its success. In doing so, China could achieve the objective identified by Mr. Zheng: "to transcend the traditional ways for great powers to emerge."

As Secretary Rice has stated, the United States welcomes a confident, peaceful, and prosperous China, one that appreciates that its growth and development depends on constructive connections with the rest of the world. Indeed, we hope to intensify work with a China that not only adjusts to the international rules developed over the last century, but also joins us and others to address the challenges of the new century.

From China' perspective, it would seem that its national interest would be much better served by working with us to shape the future international system.

If it isn抰 clear why the United States should suggest a cooperative relationship with China, consider the alternatives. Picture the wide range of global challenges we face in the years ahead ?terrorism and extremists exploiting Islam, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, poverty, disease ?and ask whether it would be easier or harder to handle those problems if the United States and China were cooperating or at odds.

For fifty years, our policy was to fence in the Soviet Union while its own internal contradictions undermined it. For thirty years, our policy has been to draw out the People' Republic of China. As a result, the China of today is simply not the Soviet Union of the late 1940s:

It does not seek to spread radical, anti-American ideologies.
While not yet democratic, it does not see itself in a twilight conflict against democracy around the globe.
While at times mercantilist, it does not see itself in a death struggle with capitalism.
And most importantly, China does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system. In fact, quite the reverse: Chinese leaders have decided that their success depends on being networked with the modern world.
If the Cold War analogy does not apply, neither does the distant balance-of-power politics of 19th Century Europe. The global economy of the 21st Century is a tightly woven fabric. We are too interconnected to try to hold China at arm' length, hoping to promote other powers in Asia at its expense. Nor would the other powers hold China at bay, initiating and terminating ties based on an old model of drawing-room diplomacy. The United States seeks constructive relations with all countries that do not threaten peace and security.

So if the templates of the past do not fit, how should we view China at the dawn of the 21st Century?