Perspectives on Politics | 2021
The China Challenge
Abstract
I n the good old days, China routinely offered reassurance to countries, saying that its development would be good for all parties, and the United States reciprocated by saying that a peaceful, stable, prosperous China was good for the world. More recently, however, China speaks routinely about core interests and never yielding a single inch of land passed down from its ancestors, whereas the United States speaks of China as its single most important long-term challenge. The language of reassurance has changed into the language of deterrence; the language of diplomacy has become the language of military confrontation. The turning point in the United States can be dated more or less precisely to an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs in March–April 2018 titled “The China Reckoning: How China Defied American Expectations.” The article declared that engagement with China had failed to democratize it (though that was not its intended purpose) or to deter China from its desire to challenge US supremacy, at least in East Asia. The authors, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, were both experienced Asia hands with much Washington experience. Campbell was US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2009 to 2013. Today, Campbell is “Asia CoCoordinator” under President Biden. Ely Ratner was deputy national security adviser to Vice President Biden, 2015–17, and is now principal adviser on Chinamatters to General Lloyd Austin, the secretary of defense. The hardening of attitudes in China was matched by the toughening of attitudes in the United States. Much of the discussion about China in the world today centers on the “rise of China” and the so-called Thucydides’s trap, which refers to the increasing likelihood of conflict when one great power is faced with the rise of a rival power. In a widely read op-ed in the Financial Times, Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, evoked the Thucydides trap to characterize the conflict he saw emerging between China and the United States. Expanding on his thesis in 2017, Allison published a book,Destined for War: Can America and China Avoid the Thucydides’s Trap? The Thucydides trap, which is really a catchy renaming of A. F. K. Organski’s 1958 power transition theory, has stirred widespread discussion and perhaps fueled the notion that China presents a mortal threat to the United States. Given this context, Huiyun Feng and Kai He’s edited book, China’s Challenges and International Order Transition: Beyond the “Thucydides Trap,” is most welcome. One reason the Thucydides trap has become so popular is that it plays well into the China rising–US declining meme that reinforces the optimism of Chinese nationalists and the fears of Americans. It also seems to give a name to the assertive diplomacy of China and the US “pivot” to the Pacific. David Welch, in his contribution to this volume, expands on his 2015 article, “Can the United States and China Avoid a Thucydides Trap?” More than repeat his criticisms of the Thucydides trap, Welch challenges the whole China rising–US declining conceptual framework, noting that China faces enormous environmental