The vague term ‘engagement’ came to mean in practice a focus on establishing regular meetings by the top leaders and their respective ministers and on developing an interdependent relationship with China that would encourage not only a wide range of economic exchanges, but also exchanges in the military sphere and other dimensions of government as well as in areas beyond the government, such as social, cultural and educational interchanges. The policy could accommodate both tougher and softer approaches that varied from the insistence upon holding China to account to the extent of imposing select sanctions for violations of agreed trade practices, infringements of intellectual property rights and for allowing the proliferation of WMD, to allowing a greater range of compromises in the interest of avoiding confrontations. Underlying both approaches was the view that the policy of ‘engaging’ China would lead in the long run to changes in that country that would make it more market-orientated and more liberal politically. Meanwhile, policies of engagement held out the promise that Americans would benefit from China’s rapid economic growth and that they could ‘guide the newly emerging power into channels of international activity compatible with American interests. Engagement was used as an alternative to policies that called for isolating or containing China as an authoritarian state that oppressed its own people and that was a threat to American interests and, indeed, to American friends and allies. Constructive engagement was also designed to demonstrate to China’s leaders that, whatever their difference on specific questions, the United States genuinely looked forward to working with a stronger and more prosperous China that was better integrated into the international community.