The Trilateral Commission's advice on foreign policy strategy towards the People's Republic of China: the basket game

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Clearly, the Trilateral countries have a substantial number of significant
interests at stake with China. (...)  This necessitates having a sense of
priorities and a strategy for encouraging the desired Chinese responses. The
priorities recommended in this report are in the security and economic
domains and in assisting development of institutions contributing to China's
effective and good governance. Each of the baskets is important, however,
and the Trilateral countries should maintain loose linkages among them. That
is, progress on all the issues should be quietly reviewed during regular,
high-level meetings, and the Chinese leaders must come to understand that
failure to advance in one area will restrain progress in other areas. But
preconditions should be avoided, i.e., explicitly demanding progress in one
area in order to advance another.

This strategy entails approaching China from positions of strength, weaving
China into webs of economic interdependence, engaging China in the global
economy and in multilateral security arrangements, maintaining frequent
extensive high-level dialogue with Chinese leaders, and recognizing the
important roles that NGOs and the private sector must play in integrating
China with the world community. The positions of strength include a
forward-deployed American military presence, vibrant Japanese-American and
Korean-American alliances, the continued prosperity and stability of Taiwan
and the ASEAN states (with that development extending to Vietnam, Laos,
Cambodia, and Burma), and the development of regional and sub-regional
organizations and processes in which China is involved.

Source: http://www.trilateral.org/projwork/tfrsums/tfr45.htm