Why America and China will clash

[Commentary] Google's clash with China is about much more than the fate of a single, powerful firm. The company's decision to pull out of China, unless the government there changes its policies on censorship, is a harbinger of increasingly stormy relations between the US and China.

The reason that the Google case is so significant is because it suggests that the assumptions on which US policy to China have been based since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 could be plain wrong. The US has accepted - even welcomed - China's emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalization in China.

Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush firmly believed that free trade and, in particular, the information age would make political change in China irresistible. The two presidents were reflecting the conventional wisdom among America's most influential pundits. Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of best-selling books on globalization, once proclaimed bluntly: "China's going to have a free press. Globalization will drive it." Robert Wright, one of Mr Clinton's favorite thinkers, argued that if China chose to block free access to the Internet, "the price would be dismal economic failure". So far, the facts are refusing to conform to the theory.