alt Hacker News> American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us
The NSC in the first Clinton admin and the HW admin was ambivalent-to-opposed to the "endogenous democratization" approach, as was seen with Clinton 1's decisions during the China Straits Crisis under Anthony Lake (who was canned in 1997) along with Bush 1's retrenchment of sanctions in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre under Brent Scowcroft. Much of the shift happened in Clinton 2 due to personnel changes and a significant loss of political capital due to then ongoing controversies.
> But prior to that, the argument was never made
Yep. The "endogenous democratization" argument only arose in 1997 after Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi's paper "Modernization: Theories and Facts" was published back in 1997 [0].
[0] - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Modernization%3A-Theor...
> Much of the shift happened in Clinton 2
That’s when the relevant argument was made and, by my reading, mistakes made per OP’s comments.
Nobody is criticizing Nixon splitting China from the USSR. The criticism is in trade liberalization and technology transfer following the 1990s.