Five recent books offer five different but often overlapping explanations for how Sino-American relations have reached such a parlous state. Taken together, they suggest that while America may have overdone its previous policy of engagement, it would be a dangerous mistake to go too far in the other direction.
MILAN – The war in Ukraine has not changed America’s strategic priorities. China, not Russia, remains the greatest challenge to the liberal order. “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained in a recent speech. “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years.”
Still, the events in Ukraine have further deepened the diplomatic and political divide between the two great powers. Immediately before Russia’s invasion, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that the Chinese-Russian relationship had “no limits,” and he has since refused to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist aggression.
Equally, the West’s sweeping sanctions against Russia were designed not only to punish the Kremlin but also to send an early warning to China’s leaders who may be contemplating an attack on Taiwan. The escalation of tensions over US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s trip to the island have now widened the divide even further.
According to Blinken, the US should seek to “shape the strategic environment around Beijing” by investing in America’s technological-military capabilities and mobilizing US allies. This is not materially different from the approach taken by Donald Trump’s administration, whose 2017 National Security Strategy described China as a revisionist power that uses “technology, propaganda, and coercion to shape a world antithetical to our interests and values.” As the historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out: “Trump’s once so deplorable China-bashing has become a consensus position, with a formidable coalition of interests now on board the Bash Beijing bandwagon.”
Since the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” over a decade ago, China has gone from being a strategic partner to a strategic competitor, if not a strategic adversary. The books reviewed here tell different stories about how that happened, but each ultimately delivers a similar message. A consistent lack of common understanding, often owing to insurmountable cultural barriers and Chinese opacity, and unrealistic expectations led to disillusionment, followed by disappointment, tension, and conflict.
Failed Engagement?
For years, American strategists assumed that China’s integration into the global economy and the emergence of a Chinese middle class would bring greater political and economic openness to the country. As US President George H.W. Bush put it in 1991, “No nation on Earth has discovered a way to import the world’s goods and services while stopping foreign ideas at the border.” Similarly, President Bill Clinton argued almost a decade later that, “The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people. … And when individuals have the power not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”
Aaron Friedberg, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and a deputy national security adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney, isn’t buying it, joining a growing camp of foreign-policy experts who believe that the integrationist agenda of the pre-Trump era was a failure. In Getting China Wrong, Friedberg dismantles America’s bipartisan post-Cold War strategy of engagement, showing how China defied expectations – particularly under Xi’s rule – by moving away from market liberalism and toward state capitalism. China enjoyed access to foreign markets without playing by their rules and never publicly recognized the US role in fostering its own integration into the global economy and the World Trade Organization. And now, under Xi, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has reconsolidated authoritarian rule at the expense of the modest liberalization implemented under his predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
Now, notes Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy coordinator, “The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end.” Yet, as Friedberg warns, a lack of US-Chinese convergence brings tangible risks both for the US and the world. After all, China is an authoritarian state that is bent on increasing its influence, intimidating its neighbors, expanding its roster of client states, and undermining democratic institutions wherever possible.
Moreover, China and the US are at odds on a variety of issues that could lead to miscalculations and even military confrontations – from the status of the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to intellectual-property theft, human-rights violations against the Muslim Uyghur population, and disputes over emerging 5G networks and other technologies. COVID-19 has deepened the divide between the two powers even further, reinforcing their reciprocal mistrust and demonstrating clearly that China remains unprepared and unwilling to uphold its global responsibilities.
Alternatives to Engagement?
But China is a country of many contradictions, and anti-engagement arguments risk oversimplifying things. For starters, China’s hegemonic ambitions are less obvious and explicit than American strategic hardliners make them out to be. For the time being, at least, China’s efforts to augment its economic and military power appear to be more about reducing its own vulnerabilities than about gaining superiority over the US.
At a time of escalating global turmoil, there is an urgent need for incisive, informed analysis of the issues and questions driving the news – just what PS has always provided.
Subscribe to Digital or Digital Plus now to secure your discount.
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Xi is not actively attempting to export the CPC ideology or system of government. He does not openly advocate a global communist revolution, as Stalin, Khrushchev, and other Soviet leaders did, not least because he is overwhelmingly focused on sustaining “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and a “national rejuvenation” at home.
Notwithstanding past US presidents’ sanguine statements about China’s inevitable democratization (a claim that was probably necessary to persuade American voters to open their arms to a communist country), political liberalization was never a realistic goal. As Henry Kissinger pointed out in 2008, we are talking about the only civilization with 4,000 years of self-government under its belt. “One must start with the assumption that they must have learned something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.”
A decade later, Chas W. Freeman, Jr., a veteran US diplomat, confirmed what engagement was really about: “However much the American public may have hoped or expected that China would Americanize itself, US policy was almost entirely aimed at changing China’s external behavior rather than its constitutional order.”
But even if one accepts that engagement was a strategic disaster, what would have been the alternative? Perhaps China would have remained an underdeveloped economy on the margins of the global order, and Americans would not have benefited from cheap goods and deficits financed partly by Chinese purchases of US Treasuries.
Yet even in this scenario, Alastair Iain Johnston of Harvard University contends, the US might “have faced a hostile, nuclear-armed China alienated from a range of international institutions and norms, kept out of global markets, and with limited societal/cultural exchanges. In other words, a China still ruled by a ruthless Leninist Party but one that had massively mobilized and militarized to vigorously oppose US interests.”
The Price of Interdependence
More importantly, detractors of the engagement strategy understate its greatest achievement. Trade, financial, and technological linkages have not only benefited consumers and firms in the West. They have also transformed the nature of geopolitical rivalry in a healthy way. Unlike in the Cold War, when communism and capitalism coexisted separately, Sino-American competition is playing out within the same economic system, owing to years of continuous interaction that has forced China to embrace the market – even if not always in satisfying ways. And one major benefit of this economic interdependence is that it raises the cost of going to war, even when competition is fierce.
This is the argument that C. Fred Bergsten, the founding director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, makes in The United States vs. China, which focuses on the economic dimension of engagement and highlights options for maintaining some form of Sino-American cooperation. Having been in and out of government for most of his career, Bergsten has a unique understanding of the global economy’s complexities. His book is less about the history of the Sino-American relationship than about the emergence of a global governance architecture that guarantees stability, addresses the challenges of our time, and assigns an appropriate role to China.
Any functioning international economic system requires leadership to overcome collective-action problems in cases where global public goods – such as international financial stability or economic coordination – are undersupplied. A leaderless world is thus Bergsten’s greatest fear. He is ever mindful of the “Kindleberger Trap,” so named for the twentieth-century economic historian Charles Kindleberger, who showed how an aspiring hegemon’s failure to provide sufficient global public goods can lead to systemic crises and even war. That is what happened after World War I, when the US, falling prey of its isolationist tendencies, refused to step fully into the United Kingdom’s shoes, setting the stage for the collapse of the global financial system.
Something similar happens in what Bergsten calls his G-0 scenario. If neither China nor the US is willing or able to stabilize the global economic system, the world would be left with a dysfunctional and unstable situation in which no one is really in charge. But equally concerning would be a G-1 world in which China holds economic primacy. The CPC regime would shape this order according to its own values and principles, taking advantage of the bargaining power that it would derive from its expanding economic influence.
In Bergsten’s view, the best hope lies in a G-2 world, with the US and China acting as an “informal steering committee” to handle global problems like climate change, pandemics, and economic development challenges. But it is unclear that China would accept this arrangement. During his first year in office, Barack Obama proposed that the US and China form a partnership to tackle the world’s greatest problems. China dismissed the idea for being incompatible with its decades-long advocacy of multipolar global governance, and a similar option looks even more unrealistic now, given the sharp rise in bilateral tensions.
Xi’s China Dream
Regardless of where one stands on the merits (or demerits) of US engagement, there is another equally important variable to consider: China’s own aspirations. In The World According to China, Elizabeth Economy, who is currently on leave from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to serve as a senior adviser to US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, shines a spotlight on China’s ambitious new strategy to reclaim its past glory.
Xi’s vision of the world, she explains, is rooted in concepts such as “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” or “a community of shared destiny” that promises to build an “open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity.” In practice, all these catchphrases imply a radically transformed international system, with an internally united China at its center.
Since the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese leaders have placed great emphasis on sovereignty, and in Xi’s case, his vision will be fully realized once all China’s territorial claims over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea are settled. According to Economy, Taiwan’s reunification with mainland China is a particularly important “historical task” for the CPC.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has carried out aggressive military maneuvers around Taiwan to demonstrate his resolve – and has escalated them sharply following Pelosi’s visit. Xi has said that Taiwan will be reunified with the mainland no later than 2049 – the centenary of the People’s Republic of China; but for that to happen in his own lifetime, it would almost certainly have to be sooner.
In any case, Xi has resorted to both soft and hard power to boost China’s global influence. He has called on Chinese officials to create an image of a “credible, lovable, and respectable” country, while also leveraging China’s position within the United Nations and other institutions to bring international norms and values more in line with its own.
Chinese hard power has been on full display not just in the exercises around Taiwan and the crackdown on Hong Kong but also in its construction of airstrips on reefs in the contested South China Sea. China is also promoting its domestic technology ecosystem and setting its own technological standards to compete with the global standard-setting of the US and the European Union. To that end, it has been building a network of loyal countries through the investments related to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
China’s Long Game
One might assume that this strategy is just the fruit of Xi’s own political ambitions. But as Rush Doshi shows in The Long Game, Xi’s efforts are part of a much longer-running project to replace America as a regional and global hegemon. Currently serving as China Director on Biden’s National Security Council, Doshi has produced an impressive scholarly work based on an original database of CPC documents (including senior officials’ memoirs, biographies, and daily records).
What emerges from these documents is an evolving Chinese “grand strategy” shaped by key events that changed China’s perception of American power: the end of the Cold War, the 2008 global financial crisis, the populist victories of 2016 (the UK’s Brexit referendum and Trump’s election), and the COVID-19 pandemic.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, China was conscious of the enormous, almost insurmountable power gap between it and the US, so it decided to “hide and bide” [its time]. For two decades, it pursued a strategy of “blunting,” allowing itself gradually to be integrated into the international liberal order through membership in its institutions and participation in the global economy, all without shouldering any leadership cost.
When the 2008 financial crisis erupted, the Chinese leadership saw it as the beginning of Western decline. That triggered a shift toward a strategy of “building,” whereby China has softly challenged the US economically, militarily, and politically. Then came the Anglo-American retreat from global governance in 2016, which presaged “great changes unseen in a century,” Doshi writes. The polarity of the international system had shifted, indicating that China was on the rise, and that Western decline was inevitable.
This shift in polarity meant that China could switch to a strategy of “expansion,” building spheres of influence not only regionally but also globally. According to Doshi, the end goal – for the time being – is to “erect a zone of super-ordinate influence” in its home region and partial hegemony across the developing countries tied to the BRI.
Now, Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan might have triggered another structural shift in China’s grand strategy, toward an even more assertive stance.
A Dangerous Decade
From these books, it becomes clear that China’s power ambitions have arisen naturally from the structural evolution of the country’s role within the international system. That means they will outlive the Xi era.
Today’s China exists on a completely different scale than the China of 20 years ago. For the Sino-American relationship to be put back on to a peaceful path, the US will need to acknowledge China’s aspirations. To ignore them would create a situation in which even a slight mistake or misunderstanding could trigger a clash between superpowers.
Still, too much of the debate about US-China relations has been shaped by political scientist Graham Allison’s notion of the “Thucydides Trap,” which warns that a hegemonic competition between a rising and a declining power necessarily destabilizes the international system, making a violent clash the rule rather than an exception.
In fact, nothing is inevitable. Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia who now leads the Asia Society, is convinced that war can be avoided if each side strives “to better understand the other side’s strategic thinking.” Among Western statesmen, Rudd is probably the only one who can claim to possess both the political experience and the intellectual tools needed to understand China sufficiently.
A fluent Mandarin speaker who has visited the country more than 100 times, Rudd got to know Xi personally – first as a diplomat when Xi was a junior official in Xiamen, and later when Xi was vice president. And in The Avoidable War, Rudd proudly recounts a long conversation that he had with Xi in Canberra in 2010 (sadly, the book lacks the kind of revealing personal anecdotes that a curious reader would hope for).
Rudd defines the next ten years as “the decade of living dangerously.” The global balance of power will continue to shift – often in unstable ways – as competition between the two superpowers intensifies. Within this framework, he sees ten plausible scenarios for a potential Sino-American clash. All center around Taiwan, and half of them end in military confrontation. Of course, one hopes that we have not reached a point of conflict yet. But, again, China’s latest military operations around Taiwan have certainly added a new disruptive dynamic to a global economy that has already been fending off multiple crises for over a decade.
In Search of Goldilocks
To avoid these gloomy scenarios, all the authors propose strategies that combine different forms of engagement and decoupling, cooperation and competition. Their labels might differ, but the substance is roughly the same. For example, Rudd proposes a policy of “managed strategic competition”; Friedberg suggests “selective decoupling”; and Bergsten recommends “conditional competitive collaboration.”
One way or another, all entail developing mutually respected red lines, high-level back-channel diplomacy to enforce them, and collaboration on global matters such as climate change, pandemics, and financial stability. Bergsten rightly points out that economic issues should be separated from values issues. Excessive emphasis on the authoritarian-democratic divide risks sundering the entire Sino-American relationship.
Ultimately, whether peaceful coexistence between the two powers can be achieved will depend more on psychological factors than on strategic ones. The Sino-American relationship is really about the pride of a bygone hegemon, on the one hand, and the pride of a millenary civilization that has been marginalized for too long, on the other. A book on the psychology of countries in turbulent times would be a useful complement to these five.
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C. Fred Bergsten, The United States vs. China: The Quest for Global Economic Leadership, Polity, 2022.
Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Oxford University Press, 2021.
Elizabeth Economy, The World According to China, Polity, 2022.
Aaron Friedberg, Getting China Wrong, Polity, 2022.
Kevin Rudd, The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China, PublicAffairs, 2022.
MILAN – The war in Ukraine has not changed America’s strategic priorities. China, not Russia, remains the greatest challenge to the liberal order. “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained in a recent speech. “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years.”
Still, the events in Ukraine have further deepened the diplomatic and political divide between the two great powers. Immediately before Russia’s invasion, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that the Chinese-Russian relationship had “no limits,” and he has since refused to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist aggression.
Equally, the West’s sweeping sanctions against Russia were designed not only to punish the Kremlin but also to send an early warning to China’s leaders who may be contemplating an attack on Taiwan. The escalation of tensions over US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s trip to the island have now widened the divide even further.
According to Blinken, the US should seek to “shape the strategic environment around Beijing” by investing in America’s technological-military capabilities and mobilizing US allies. This is not materially different from the approach taken by Donald Trump’s administration, whose 2017 National Security Strategy described China as a revisionist power that uses “technology, propaganda, and coercion to shape a world antithetical to our interests and values.” As the historian Niall Ferguson has pointed out: “Trump’s once so deplorable China-bashing has become a consensus position, with a formidable coalition of interests now on board the Bash Beijing bandwagon.”
Since the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” over a decade ago, China has gone from being a strategic partner to a strategic competitor, if not a strategic adversary. The books reviewed here tell different stories about how that happened, but each ultimately delivers a similar message. A consistent lack of common understanding, often owing to insurmountable cultural barriers and Chinese opacity, and unrealistic expectations led to disillusionment, followed by disappointment, tension, and conflict.
Failed Engagement?
For years, American strategists assumed that China’s integration into the global economy and the emergence of a Chinese middle class would bring greater political and economic openness to the country. As US President George H.W. Bush put it in 1991, “No nation on Earth has discovered a way to import the world’s goods and services while stopping foreign ideas at the border.” Similarly, President Bill Clinton argued almost a decade later that, “The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people. … And when individuals have the power not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”
Aaron Friedberg, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and a deputy national security adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney, isn’t buying it, joining a growing camp of foreign-policy experts who believe that the integrationist agenda of the pre-Trump era was a failure. In Getting China Wrong, Friedberg dismantles America’s bipartisan post-Cold War strategy of engagement, showing how China defied expectations – particularly under Xi’s rule – by moving away from market liberalism and toward state capitalism. China enjoyed access to foreign markets without playing by their rules and never publicly recognized the US role in fostering its own integration into the global economy and the World Trade Organization. And now, under Xi, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has reconsolidated authoritarian rule at the expense of the modest liberalization implemented under his predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
Now, notes Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Indo-Pacific policy coordinator, “The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end.” Yet, as Friedberg warns, a lack of US-Chinese convergence brings tangible risks both for the US and the world. After all, China is an authoritarian state that is bent on increasing its influence, intimidating its neighbors, expanding its roster of client states, and undermining democratic institutions wherever possible.
Moreover, China and the US are at odds on a variety of issues that could lead to miscalculations and even military confrontations – from the status of the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to intellectual-property theft, human-rights violations against the Muslim Uyghur population, and disputes over emerging 5G networks and other technologies. COVID-19 has deepened the divide between the two powers even further, reinforcing their reciprocal mistrust and demonstrating clearly that China remains unprepared and unwilling to uphold its global responsibilities.
Alternatives to Engagement?
But China is a country of many contradictions, and anti-engagement arguments risk oversimplifying things. For starters, China’s hegemonic ambitions are less obvious and explicit than American strategic hardliners make them out to be. For the time being, at least, China’s efforts to augment its economic and military power appear to be more about reducing its own vulnerabilities than about gaining superiority over the US.
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At a time of escalating global turmoil, there is an urgent need for incisive, informed analysis of the issues and questions driving the news – just what PS has always provided.
Subscribe to Digital or Digital Plus now to secure your discount.
Subscribe Now
Xi is not actively attempting to export the CPC ideology or system of government. He does not openly advocate a global communist revolution, as Stalin, Khrushchev, and other Soviet leaders did, not least because he is overwhelmingly focused on sustaining “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and a “national rejuvenation” at home.
Notwithstanding past US presidents’ sanguine statements about China’s inevitable democratization (a claim that was probably necessary to persuade American voters to open their arms to a communist country), political liberalization was never a realistic goal. As Henry Kissinger pointed out in 2008, we are talking about the only civilization with 4,000 years of self-government under its belt. “One must start with the assumption that they must have learned something about the requirements for survival, and it is not always to be assumed that we know it better than they do.”
A decade later, Chas W. Freeman, Jr., a veteran US diplomat, confirmed what engagement was really about: “However much the American public may have hoped or expected that China would Americanize itself, US policy was almost entirely aimed at changing China’s external behavior rather than its constitutional order.”
But even if one accepts that engagement was a strategic disaster, what would have been the alternative? Perhaps China would have remained an underdeveloped economy on the margins of the global order, and Americans would not have benefited from cheap goods and deficits financed partly by Chinese purchases of US Treasuries.
Yet even in this scenario, Alastair Iain Johnston of Harvard University contends, the US might “have faced a hostile, nuclear-armed China alienated from a range of international institutions and norms, kept out of global markets, and with limited societal/cultural exchanges. In other words, a China still ruled by a ruthless Leninist Party but one that had massively mobilized and militarized to vigorously oppose US interests.”
The Price of Interdependence
More importantly, detractors of the engagement strategy understate its greatest achievement. Trade, financial, and technological linkages have not only benefited consumers and firms in the West. They have also transformed the nature of geopolitical rivalry in a healthy way. Unlike in the Cold War, when communism and capitalism coexisted separately, Sino-American competition is playing out within the same economic system, owing to years of continuous interaction that has forced China to embrace the market – even if not always in satisfying ways. And one major benefit of this economic interdependence is that it raises the cost of going to war, even when competition is fierce.
This is the argument that C. Fred Bergsten, the founding director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, makes in The United States vs. China, which focuses on the economic dimension of engagement and highlights options for maintaining some form of Sino-American cooperation. Having been in and out of government for most of his career, Bergsten has a unique understanding of the global economy’s complexities. His book is less about the history of the Sino-American relationship than about the emergence of a global governance architecture that guarantees stability, addresses the challenges of our time, and assigns an appropriate role to China.
Any functioning international economic system requires leadership to overcome collective-action problems in cases where global public goods – such as international financial stability or economic coordination – are undersupplied. A leaderless world is thus Bergsten’s greatest fear. He is ever mindful of the “Kindleberger Trap,” so named for the twentieth-century economic historian Charles Kindleberger, who showed how an aspiring hegemon’s failure to provide sufficient global public goods can lead to systemic crises and even war. That is what happened after World War I, when the US, falling prey of its isolationist tendencies, refused to step fully into the United Kingdom’s shoes, setting the stage for the collapse of the global financial system.
Something similar happens in what Bergsten calls his G-0 scenario. If neither China nor the US is willing or able to stabilize the global economic system, the world would be left with a dysfunctional and unstable situation in which no one is really in charge. But equally concerning would be a G-1 world in which China holds economic primacy. The CPC regime would shape this order according to its own values and principles, taking advantage of the bargaining power that it would derive from its expanding economic influence.
In Bergsten’s view, the best hope lies in a G-2 world, with the US and China acting as an “informal steering committee” to handle global problems like climate change, pandemics, and economic development challenges. But it is unclear that China would accept this arrangement. During his first year in office, Barack Obama proposed that the US and China form a partnership to tackle the world’s greatest problems. China dismissed the idea for being incompatible with its decades-long advocacy of multipolar global governance, and a similar option looks even more unrealistic now, given the sharp rise in bilateral tensions.
Xi’s China Dream
Regardless of where one stands on the merits (or demerits) of US engagement, there is another equally important variable to consider: China’s own aspirations. In The World According to China, Elizabeth Economy, who is currently on leave from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution to serve as a senior adviser to US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, shines a spotlight on China’s ambitious new strategy to reclaim its past glory.
Xi’s vision of the world, she explains, is rooted in concepts such as “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” or “a community of shared destiny” that promises to build an “open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity.” In practice, all these catchphrases imply a radically transformed international system, with an internally united China at its center.
Since the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese leaders have placed great emphasis on sovereignty, and in Xi’s case, his vision will be fully realized once all China’s territorial claims over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea are settled. According to Economy, Taiwan’s reunification with mainland China is a particularly important “historical task” for the CPC.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has carried out aggressive military maneuvers around Taiwan to demonstrate his resolve – and has escalated them sharply following Pelosi’s visit. Xi has said that Taiwan will be reunified with the mainland no later than 2049 – the centenary of the People’s Republic of China; but for that to happen in his own lifetime, it would almost certainly have to be sooner.
In any case, Xi has resorted to both soft and hard power to boost China’s global influence. He has called on Chinese officials to create an image of a “credible, lovable, and respectable” country, while also leveraging China’s position within the United Nations and other institutions to bring international norms and values more in line with its own.
Chinese hard power has been on full display not just in the exercises around Taiwan and the crackdown on Hong Kong but also in its construction of airstrips on reefs in the contested South China Sea. China is also promoting its domestic technology ecosystem and setting its own technological standards to compete with the global standard-setting of the US and the European Union. To that end, it has been building a network of loyal countries through the investments related to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
China’s Long Game
One might assume that this strategy is just the fruit of Xi’s own political ambitions. But as Rush Doshi shows in The Long Game, Xi’s efforts are part of a much longer-running project to replace America as a regional and global hegemon. Currently serving as China Director on Biden’s National Security Council, Doshi has produced an impressive scholarly work based on an original database of CPC documents (including senior officials’ memoirs, biographies, and daily records).
What emerges from these documents is an evolving Chinese “grand strategy” shaped by key events that changed China’s perception of American power: the end of the Cold War, the 2008 global financial crisis, the populist victories of 2016 (the UK’s Brexit referendum and Trump’s election), and the COVID-19 pandemic.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, China was conscious of the enormous, almost insurmountable power gap between it and the US, so it decided to “hide and bide” [its time]. For two decades, it pursued a strategy of “blunting,” allowing itself gradually to be integrated into the international liberal order through membership in its institutions and participation in the global economy, all without shouldering any leadership cost.
When the 2008 financial crisis erupted, the Chinese leadership saw it as the beginning of Western decline. That triggered a shift toward a strategy of “building,” whereby China has softly challenged the US economically, militarily, and politically. Then came the Anglo-American retreat from global governance in 2016, which presaged “great changes unseen in a century,” Doshi writes. The polarity of the international system had shifted, indicating that China was on the rise, and that Western decline was inevitable.
This shift in polarity meant that China could switch to a strategy of “expansion,” building spheres of influence not only regionally but also globally. According to Doshi, the end goal – for the time being – is to “erect a zone of super-ordinate influence” in its home region and partial hegemony across the developing countries tied to the BRI.
Now, Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan might have triggered another structural shift in China’s grand strategy, toward an even more assertive stance.
A Dangerous Decade
From these books, it becomes clear that China’s power ambitions have arisen naturally from the structural evolution of the country’s role within the international system. That means they will outlive the Xi era.
Today’s China exists on a completely different scale than the China of 20 years ago. For the Sino-American relationship to be put back on to a peaceful path, the US will need to acknowledge China’s aspirations. To ignore them would create a situation in which even a slight mistake or misunderstanding could trigger a clash between superpowers.
Still, too much of the debate about US-China relations has been shaped by political scientist Graham Allison’s notion of the “Thucydides Trap,” which warns that a hegemonic competition between a rising and a declining power necessarily destabilizes the international system, making a violent clash the rule rather than an exception.
In fact, nothing is inevitable. Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia who now leads the Asia Society, is convinced that war can be avoided if each side strives “to better understand the other side’s strategic thinking.” Among Western statesmen, Rudd is probably the only one who can claim to possess both the political experience and the intellectual tools needed to understand China sufficiently.
A fluent Mandarin speaker who has visited the country more than 100 times, Rudd got to know Xi personally – first as a diplomat when Xi was a junior official in Xiamen, and later when Xi was vice president. And in The Avoidable War, Rudd proudly recounts a long conversation that he had with Xi in Canberra in 2010 (sadly, the book lacks the kind of revealing personal anecdotes that a curious reader would hope for).
Rudd defines the next ten years as “the decade of living dangerously.” The global balance of power will continue to shift – often in unstable ways – as competition between the two superpowers intensifies. Within this framework, he sees ten plausible scenarios for a potential Sino-American clash. All center around Taiwan, and half of them end in military confrontation. Of course, one hopes that we have not reached a point of conflict yet. But, again, China’s latest military operations around Taiwan have certainly added a new disruptive dynamic to a global economy that has already been fending off multiple crises for over a decade.
In Search of Goldilocks
To avoid these gloomy scenarios, all the authors propose strategies that combine different forms of engagement and decoupling, cooperation and competition. Their labels might differ, but the substance is roughly the same. For example, Rudd proposes a policy of “managed strategic competition”; Friedberg suggests “selective decoupling”; and Bergsten recommends “conditional competitive collaboration.”
One way or another, all entail developing mutually respected red lines, high-level back-channel diplomacy to enforce them, and collaboration on global matters such as climate change, pandemics, and financial stability. Bergsten rightly points out that economic issues should be separated from values issues. Excessive emphasis on the authoritarian-democratic divide risks sundering the entire Sino-American relationship.
Ultimately, whether peaceful coexistence between the two powers can be achieved will depend more on psychological factors than on strategic ones. The Sino-American relationship is really about the pride of a bygone hegemon, on the one hand, and the pride of a millenary civilization that has been marginalized for too long, on the other. A book on the psychology of countries in turbulent times would be a useful complement to these five.