A House United.

This article examines the foreign relations between China and the U.S. According to conventional wisdom, Beijing, China's behavior toward Washington is driven by factional politics within the Chinese leadership. This assumption, however, is misguided and even dangerous. The politicians and pundits who frame the U.S. debate on China invariably focus on the struggle in Beijing between hardline ideologues and moderate reformers. The failure to recognize and acknowledge these crucial distinctions represents a larger failure in the West to recognize the common goals that unite the Chinese leadership and underlie its policy debates. If Washington truly wants to understand Beijing, it should look to its own history; an analogy to U.S. politics helps explain matters. On foreign policy the common denominator is a genuine commitment to Chinese nationalism, the inevitable result of China's bleak history of vulnerability to foreign powers. It is, consequently, a mistake to ascribe nationalistic, uncompromising, or suspicious statements or actions by Beijing to an intractable minority within the Chinese leadership.