Why has China been unable to modernize successfully when not only several of its neighbors in East Asia but also many diaspora Chinese communities have done so? Why has the century-long Chinese search for some form of democracy failed so dismally, burying the hopes and ideals of Sun Yat-sen in the bloody tyranny of the Cultural Revolution and the crushing of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square? How can we in the West best help the Chinese people emerge from Communism and find a decent and just political and economic system? These fundamental questions about China's political evolution engaged the participants in a May 2000 conference sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. Such questions lead directly, of course, to the implications for U.S. foreign and military policy. Does China's expanding economic strength necessarily imply that it will seek greater military power, and then use that power to dominate East Asia? Should the United States confront the People's Republic over Taiwan, human rights violations, and other points of dispute, or seek to contain it, or attempt to envelop it in a web of commercial ties?

We were fortunate to gather some of the leading Asian and American students of China as well as several of the best and most experienced American foreign-policy analysts: Wang Gungwu, Roderick MacFarquhar, Yü Ying-shih, Charles Horner, Arthur Waldron, Michael Mandelbaum, Robert Kagan, Zaimay Khalilzad, and James Mann. We did not seek uniformity of views, and these contributions do not display much of it. There is considerable disagreement among them as to the likely, and desirable, level of conflict between China and the United States, the degree to which we should seek to influence China's ongoing effort to modernize, and the likely stability of the Chinese regime in the coming years as the Politburo seeks to maintain its control over an increasingly complex economy and society. What the contributors do have in common is extraordinary wisdom about China's troubled path in the twentieth century and about the difficult choices the United States faces in dealing with this ancient, vast, and increasingly powerful nation.