What's involved in taking China's agenda sufficiently seriously?

Two pieces I've come across so far this morning have me thinking about China.

One is a report in the Japan Times that the Communist Party's Central Committee has taken it upon itself to amend the Chinese constitution to scape term limits for president, allowing Xi Jinping to presumably stay in office indefinitely. It's pretty clear he is now the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao.

Xi, as the son of a famed Communist Party veteran, is known as a “princeling.” He rose through the ranks to the position of Shanghai’s party leader in 2007 before being promoted the same year to the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. A year later, in a sign that he would succeed then-leader Hu Jintao, he was tapped to be vice president.

Since his elevation to the presidency in 2012, Xi has overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on corruption that has helped him eliminate rivals and consolidate his grip on power.

As commander in chief of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Xi has also been at the helm of a military modernization campaign that poured cash into the country’s defense budgets while streamlining its forces.

He has also moved to shore up his legacy, last year taking on the mantle of “core” of the party leadership, elevating him above his predecessors to a position reminiscent of communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong.

Granted, the article goes on to cite a Rand Corp. scholar who says that such a cult-of-personality concentration of power actually indicates structural party weakness.

But consider the agenda that has culminated its cohesion in recent years, as outlined by Hal Brands at The National Interest:  

Beijing has never been willing to alter what it perceives to be its most crucial national-security interests to suit Washington’s concept of global order; witness the unending, and continually unavailing, U.S. efforts to obtain the desired level of Chinese cooperation in pressuring North Korea over its nuclear weapons and missile programs. Worse still, China does not seem to have moderated its behavior, or fundamentally bought into the U.S.-led international system, as it has grown more powerful. If anything, its expansionist tendencies in the South China Sea and East China Sea; its efforts to bully neighbors along its maritime and territorial peripheries; its increasingly frequent resorts to diplomatic, economic and paramilitary coercion; its harassment of U.S. military aircraft and vessels in international waters; its ongoing military buildup; and many other actions tell a different story. Such behavior, Aaron Friedberg observes, compels us “to re-examine the pleasing assumption that the country is fast on its way to becoming a status quo power.” Even where China has benefited from the existing system, in fact, it has frequently declined to play by the rules. Xi Jinping may be a rhetorical champion of free trade and globalization, but Chinese economic policies often tend toward the protectionist and mercantilist.

When Chinese commentators speak of “Asia for Asians,” when Chinese leaders demand that its neighbors show greater deference to Chinese prerogatives, when China continually seeks to undermine U.S. alliances and partnerships in the Asia-Pacific, one thinks not of a “responsible stakeholder” but of a proud and ambitious nation determined to bend the system to its liking. Nothing could be more normal; this is how rising powers usually behave. And so, as China’s power continues to grow relative to America’s, one should only expect Beijing to become less, rather than more, accommodating. U.S. leaders should certainly continue to engage China on issues where cooperation is possible. But the idea that China will simply accept the international order that America designed is an illusion that must be punctured.

Again, I think about the economic-development aims of the city in which I live. The world's premier diesel-engine maker is headquartered here. It has several plants in, and joint ventures with, China. Various high-tech spinoff companies are similarly involved with China. A team composed of city government officials and representatives of these companies, as well as Chamber of Commerce types, goes there for an annual junket. Local business journalism is one of my main beats as a writers, and I still have not found a way to crack the nut of getting anyone to candidly discuss the context in which all this activity takes place.

I'm going to keep trying. I'm intensely curious about the extent to which such considerations affect plans for further partnerships.

I'm no isolationist, nor am I a protectionist. But what is needed to ensure that economic benefits to our area aren't outweighed by wittingly or unwittingly abetting Chinese strategic advantage?