Caught up in the Asia Pacific [By Yang Yongliang/China.org.cn]

U.S. President Barack Obama's strategic rebalance to Asia/Pacific is aimed at containing the rise of China. But China is uncontainable as Defense Minister Chang Wanquan told his visiting U. S. counterpart Chuck Hagel: "No one, not even the United States could contain China." "With the latest developments in China, it can never be contained," he added.

"Containment" was the policy originally devised by the veteran U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan (1904-2005) in the late 1940s, most specifically in his "Long Telegram" from Moscow in 1946, and the subsequent "X" article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" of 1947. It was the policy the United States pursued in dealing with its principal adversary the Soviet Union in the Cold War, admittedly often against Kennan's original design.

Kennan talked about China at some length in 1999 in an interview with Richard Ulman. He said, "The Chinese are the French of Asia…. They are both proud people… conscious of being bearers of a great cultural tradition…. They like to be left alone." He suggested that U.S. policy "should be to treat them with the most exquisite courtesy and respect on the official level." Kennan was quite right when he said the Chinese are not going to love America and are not going to become like the Americans.

George Kennan had the rare insight that he said without hesitation "the planet is never going to be ruled by any single political center, whatever its military power." (see Ulman's interview in The New York Review of Books, August 12, 1999)

In fact, as Kennan's biographer John Lewis Gaddis pointed out, "The chief strategist of containment… became its chief critic."

Unfortunately, the American political class has not followed Kennan's advice.