US-China ties: Key is aligning both's interests

RECALL the days when members of the American foreign policy establishment were reassuring us that growing US diplomatic and economic ties with Beijing and the entry of China into the post-Cold War international system and its integration into the global economy would transform the Middle Kingdom into a vibrant liberal democracy committed to free market principles and adhering to the rules of the American-dominated international order?

Indeed, the conventional wisdom in Washington in the early 1990s, advanced by both Democratic and Republican presidents and lawmakers, as well as by most pundits and columnists, was that sooner or later, China would follow in the footsteps of Taiwan and South Korea, as the…