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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
China's rise as a global superpower has completely reshaped the landscape of international politics. As the country's authoritarian regime becomes increasingly assertive on the world stage, the United States grows ever more hostile to its Asian rival. Repressive moves by China in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, military activities in the South China Sea and Western measures against Chinese companies have only exacerbated tensions. While the great powers of East and West battle over hegemony, the world is being led inexorably towards a new Cold War. During his time as a Cabinet minister attending National Security Council meetings, Oliver Letwin realised that there was no agreement among Western politicians and academics on how to conduct a peaceful long-term relationship with China. China vs America traces the contours of history, both ancient and modern, to explain how China has emerged as a challenger to American power in the twenty-first century and why this has created such uneasiness in the West. In this robust and controversial assessment, Letwin argues that the international rules-based order is completely ill-equipped to foster a positive relationship between China and the United States and that the global community must act now to correct the collision course these two behemoths are currently on before it's too late.
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CHINA VS AMERICA
A WARNING
OLIVER LETWIN
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In the course of writing this book over the past five years, I have benefited hugely from extensive exchanges with academics, politicians, diplomats and journalists across the world in formal seminars, informal settings and bilateral conversations. Many of these have freely contributed many hours of their valuable time, and have had a huge impact on my thinking. I refrain from naming any of them only because I am acutely conscious that almost all of them will vigorously disagree with many parts of what I have written, and I do not want to suggest that any of them in any way sponsor my conclusions.
I cannot, however, refrain from mentioning two institutions that have provided invaluable support through this long process: the Legatum Institute and the Policy Institute at King’s College, London. Without their help – freely given without any suggestion of influencing the conclusions I have reached – I would never have been able to complete the work in any reasonable timescale. I am profoundly grateful. viii
Above all, however, I want to thank my astonishingly long-suffering, hugely conscientious and highly intelligent research assistant, Patty McCabe, without whose efforts I would never have succeeded in assembling the materials necessary to perform the analysis and to substantiate the arguments set out in this book. While I remain wholly and personally responsible for every judgement in the book, it is due to her scholarship rather than mine that I was able to write it.
CHAPTER 1
SPIRALLING TOWARDS WAR, AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT
When President Trump dubbed Covid-19 ‘the China virus’ he wasn’t just making an unusually accurate geographical attribution. He was also trading on the conviction that China’s failure to alert the world to the severity of the new virus would play straight into a ready-made and increasing mistrust of the Chinese in the West.
There are lots of reasons for the increasing Western mistrust of China. Some of them have to do with the disgraceful human rights record of the current Chinese regime – poignantly illustrated by the appalling treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the brutal repression of the democracy movement in Hong Kong. Some have to do with Western fears that the ultimate ambition of China’s leaders is to rule the whole world. And some have to do with the belief that agents of the Chinese state are right now infiltrating Western universities, Western companies and Western technologies with a view to exerting power over the West. 2
Whether all of these Western concerns, fears and beliefs about China are justified is beside the point. Regardless of their justifiability or otherwise, the attitudes are real and widespread. And this is not just a problem in the West. The same or similar attitudes towards China are shared by people in countries that no one would call Western or even Western-aligned. In fact, it is difficult to identify any countrries other than Cambodia and North Korea which have been wholeheartedly friendly towards China in recent years. Certainly, suspicion of Chinese motives is widespread in Asia, across the Indo-Pacific region as a whole and in much of Africa.
The suspicion is mutual. Mistrust of the West, and of foreigners in general, is also rife in China. As with the rest of the world’s fears about China, some of these Chinese fears may be unjustified; but, whether well-founded or ill-founded, they are real. Moreover, they spring from a history that is real, the memory of which is regularly reinforced in the minds of the population by the Chinese Communist Party’s presentation of China’s story.
For several thousand years before 1750, China was an advanced and powerful society, accounting for something like a quarter of the world’s total economy. But this changed in the 250 years between 1750 and 2000. First Britain and other European nations, then North America and parts of Asia were transformed by the Industrial Revolution – bringing them huge wealth and power that unindustrialised China wholly lacked. The result of this disparity was that China suffered a series of indignities at the hands of the newly industrialised nations from the nineteenth century right up to the establishment of a new 3 international system after the Second World War. The Opium Wars, the seizure of Hong Kong and of other ports under the Treaty of Nanjing, the eight-nation sacking of Beijing, the occupation of Manchuria by the Russians, the Japanese invasion and the establishment of Taiwan rather than the mainland as a permanent member of the UN Security Council are all remembered in China as illustrations of the way that they were treated during the period when the ‘great divergence’ rendered them powerless in the face of Western industrial and military might. Nor have they forgotten the most recent indignity: the relative poverty and virtual global irrelevance of China from the time of Mao’s revolution to the turn of the current century.
Alongside all of these historical reasons for the Chinese to be suspicious of foreigners, there are now – for the first time in 250 years – plenty of reasons for the Chinese in general, and for the Chinese Communist Party in particular, to feel a considerable sense of superiority.
China’s performance in the twenty-first century has been remarkable, indeed unprecedented in previous world history. Technologically, over a few decades, China has once again become as advanced as (and in some respects, more advanced than) the West. In a period during which Western growth rates have been sluggish, the Chinese economy has advanced by leaps and bounds. Over the past thirty years, more people have been taken out of poverty than in any other country at any other time. The Chinese have weathered the 2008 crash much better than the West; they have weathered Covid-19 much better than the West; they have been expanding and updating their 4 infrastructure much faster than the West. All in all, President Xi Jinping and his colleagues have good reasons to congratulate themselves on catching up with the West – and this is exactly the view they take of the matter. So, far from envying Western liberal (or, as they call it, ‘competitive’) democracy, they take the view that their own brand of authoritarian market socialism has been a winning formula. They consequently have no appetite for lectures from Western liberals about universal human rights, or freedom of expression, or democracy. They regard all such lectures as stemming from residual Western imperialism and unwarranted, arrogant Western interference in China’s domestic political arrangements. And this, of course, simply reinforces their deep suspicions of Western motives formed during their painful 250 years of powerlessness.
In short, both Western mistrust of China and Chinese mistrust of the West are now baked into the political cultures. But this mutual mistrust between China and the West is not merely an unfortunate instance of international misalignment. On the contrary, it is a real and present danger for humanity.
What makes it so dangerous is that this isn’t just a conflict of attitudes and views. At the deepest level, it is also a power struggle.
For several decades, the United States has been the undisputed top dog – the world’s leading power. Whatever misgivings people in Western and Western-aligned countries may have had about the particular policies of successive US administrations, they have been able to go to sleep at night comfortable in the knowledge that the umbrella of the US would ultimately protect 5 them from what they regard as tyranny. The power brokers of Washington have been equally able to go to sleep at night comfortable in the knowledge that, whatever troubles and vicissitudes they may experience in the conduct of foreign policy, in the end the overwhelming power of the US economy and the US military machine would enable them to ensure that what they will to be done would be done.
But the recent, amazingly rapid rise of China has changed all of this. China now has a large and ever more sophisticated naval fleet, a vast and increasingly well-equipped army, a nuclear arsenal and serious air power. True, these military capacities are at present less potent than those of the US. But everyone knows that this US military advantage won’t last for long. Fast-advancing Chinese technology, combined with the fact that the Chinese economy has already overtaken the US as the world’s largest in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, and will very shortly become the world’s largest in any terms, means that the Chinese won’t have to wait many years before they are able to deploy military assets equal or superior to those of the US.
And it isn’t just in hard power that China is beginning to compete head-on with the US. Increasingly dominant Chinese economic might means that China can buy influence all over the globe. The famous Belt and Road Initiative (now commonly referred to as the BRI) is just one of the many different ways in which the Chinese are investing billions into infrastructure and other assets not only in Asia and the Pacific but also in Africa, Europe and the Americas. The scale of capital that China can mobilise, and the highly coordinated strategic approach to the 6 investment of that capital, combined with the highly advanced technologies that Chinese firms can bring alongside the investment, means that China can often out-compete not only the US but also other Asian economies and the West as a whole in entering new markets and in constructing new commercial relationships. The fact that the Chinese capitalists who are constructing these international relationships can always be assumed to be working hand-in-glove with the Chinese Communist Party means that this is not just a matter of trade and investment. Increasingly, policy-makers both in the US and elsewhere in Western and Western-aligned countries regard China’s growing importance in global markets as worrying on the grounds that it represents a shift not just in the balance of economic power from New York to Shanghai, but also a shift in the balance of political power from Washington to Beijing.
Equally worrying to the power brokers of Washington is the network of alliances now being formed by China. Despite the underlying mistrust and in some respects uneasy and volatile relations between China and most other countries, President Xi and his colleagues have been quietly building an impressive array of treaty organisations centred on the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (or SCO) – which have strengthened Chinese influence, both in the economic and in the security sphere. To greater or lesser extents, India and Russia, as well as other central Asian, east Asian and south Asian powers – and now, much more widely, European, South American and African countries – have been brought into the network of overlapping institutions. This is by no means to suggest that mutual suspicion has 7 given way to mutual love. Nothing of the sort has happened. But the establishment of so many formal links nevertheless has a significant consequence. China, rather than being diplomatically isolated, is increasingly able to influence the direction of international diplomacy as a result of its own heavy investment in trading and security relationships even with countries of whom it remains wary and who remain wary of it.
From the point of view of many of the most important people in Washington these are alarming developments. They challenge the concept of American hegemony. They call into question whether the world will in future decades move in directions of which America approves. In short, they are eroding the assumption that America should and can lead.
It isn’t only the followers of President Trump who are concerned about this loss of automatic American leadership. There is little sign that President Joe Biden and his team are any more willing than their predecessors to abandon the concept of US world hegemony, or any more willing to slide gracefully into acceptance of a multi-polar world. On the contrary, the indications are that the present US administration very much wants to retain the leading role in world affairs to which Washington has become accustomed. And there is strong backing for this from influential members of the US Congress, right across the political spectrum.
It is equally clear that Beijing has no intention of allowing Washington to continue to exert such hegemony. President Xi and his colleagues are very much aware of the economic, military and diplomatic power base that they have built; and they 8 have every intention of making sure that the rest of the world (including the United States) is aware of it too. They have formed what is now increasingly being described as a ‘Group of Two’ (or G2) view of the world – a presumption that, whereas in recent decades the US has been the one indispensable power in the world (without which nothing important could have been achieved in the international sphere), there are now two indispensable powers. China expects, in other words, to be treated by the whole world as the ‘other superpower’.
This is what Graham Allison has famously described as the ‘Thucydides trap’. An incumbent world leader is challenged by an emerging rival. The incumbent is unwilling to share world leadership with its rival. The emerging rival is equally determined to take such a share of leadership. The result can all too easily be the kind of encounter that Thucydides so memorably described in his vivid account of the Peloponnesian War between ancient Athens and ancient Sparta. Tension between incumbent and rival gradually increases to the point where a clash of arms becomes almost inevitable.
What makes this developing global power struggle between China and the US so dangerous is that there are plenty of flashpoints – specific international tensions that could easily provoke conflict between the incumbent superpower and the rival superpower. In the East China Sea and the South China Sea there are territorial disputes and a cat’s cradle of mutual security alliances that could quickly draw China into conflict with the US. Along the shores of the Indian Ocean where the sea threatens the security of millions of Bangladeshis living within a few kilometres of 9 Indian Bengal, and in the disputed territories of the Himalayas where the glaciers are melting and the borders are contested, China, Pakistan and India are locked into an increasingly dangerous triangle of forces that could all too easily cause US intervention. In central Asia, where Russia, India and China, as well as the US, have important interests at stake, there are mounting tensions.
Of course, in theory we are all too grown up these days to let such tensions erupt into global conflict between superpowers. But this is just theory. There is no reason to suppose that, in practice, we are any more grown up about these things than our predecessors. True, we managed to prevent the Cold War turning into a hot war. But only just. There were moments during the Cold War when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear exchange. And the record on management of international relations over the past few decades hardly provides reasons to be confident that, since the end of the Cold War, the US and its allies are particularly adept at finding successful diplomatic means of avoiding armed conflict.
True, there is an elaborate architecture of international institutions specifically designed to reduce the chances of war. But, unfortunately, this so-called international rules-based order is not up to the job of defusing the time bombs that are manufactured by arguments between superpowers. During the old Cold War, the United Nations and its many ancillary and associated institutions created, at best, an arena within which the US and the USSR and their respective allies were able to play out a diplomatic psycho-drama. But the UN was not able to stop the 10 Korean War, the Vietnam War or the Cuban Missile Crisis. And during more recent years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the UN institutions have not been any more successful in reducing tensions between China and the US. Within the UN Security Council, the Chinese and the Russians have vetoed efforts by the US and its allies to establish global support for a series of interventions in the Middle East, thereby encouraging the US to organise instead ‘coalitions of the willing’ centred on NATO in order to conduct kinds of warfare of which President Xi and President Vladimir Putin did not approve. And the UN has not been able to construct any effective cooperation between China and the West either to contain cyber warfare, or to manage the increasing global pressures on food, water, energy and other natural resources. In short, far from providing a framework for cooperation between China and the US, the UN has essentially provided a forum within which the increasing discord between the two superpowers can be expressed and institutionalised.
These, then, are the salient facts about our world order. China, after a few centuries of impotence, has regained the economic, military and geopolitical superpower status that it held for millennia before the Industrial Revolution. Mutual suspicion, already deeply embedded in the political culture of both China and the US, has now been brought to the surface by the fundamental incompatibility between Washington’s desire to maintain its sole global hegemony and the increasingly strident demands of Beijing to share that global hegemony. This combination of mutual suspicions and conflicting demands is at present leading us inexorably towards a new Cold War. There are multiple, 11 already evident causes which could all too easily turn such a cold war into a hot war. And the institutions of the international system based on the UN are spectacularly ill-equipped to prevent such a disaster.
The question for the West is: how should we deal with this tense and potentially explosive situation?
One possible attitude is to ignore it, or wish it away. The problem with this attitude is that wishing won’t actually make the possibility of conflict go away, and ignoring it won’t make it any less likely to play havoc with our lives, or with the lives of our children and grandchildren. A couple of decades ago, it was possible to construct a plausible case for believing that China would not actually become a superpower. Even a few years ago, there were some well-informed commentators who were still inclined to believe that – as with Japan at the end of the twentieth century – China’s rate of growth might decline sharply in the early decades of the twenty-first century, leaving it far behind the US technologically, economically, militarily and geopolitically. But we have now reached the turning point between prophecy and fact. We have to face the full implications of the fact that China is the largest economy on earth by the measure that economists most use to measure these things. And it is continuing to grow much faster than the US. Of course, nothing in the world is for certain, and anything could happen. But if you are standing on the pavement and a large lorry is coming down the road, you would be foolhardy to step out into its way merely in the hope that it would stop short of you. Similarly, it would now be foolhardy – to the point of extreme irrationality – for anybody in 12 the West to assume that China is suddenly going to stop moving on its trajectory to superpower status and decline into relative global insignificance. There just isn’t any rational basis for Westerners to entertain this belief, however comforting some of us might find it. We are on the pavement. There is a very heavy lorry heading towards us. And it shows no sign of stopping.
Another possible attitude for Westerners to adopt is one of outright hostility towards China. The problem with this attitude is that there is no reason to suppose it will persuade the Chinese to abandon either their ascent to superpower or their demand to be recognised by the world as the other superpower. On the contrary, Western hostility plays directly into the hands of the hardliners in Beijing (of whom there are plenty). Every time the Chinese leadership are rebuffed, excoriated and verbally attacked their natural response is to believe that the West is playing the same game that it played for the 250 years from 1750 to 2000 – the game of dominating and exploiting China. And their natural course of action is to build up their economic, military and geopolitical power further, to make even surer that the same series of humiliations does not happen again. Of course, if Western hostility could be translated into some practical means (short of hot war) of stopping the Chinese from building their power further, it might be a rational approach. But that particular possibility no longer exists. China no longer depends on the West. The only result of disengagement, trade war and a new Cold War will be to make China even more determined to defend its interests.
Given that we can neither wish away China’s power, nor bully 13 China into submission, the only way to secure a peaceful world is to do business with China. This doesn’t mean that we need to support or neglect the human rights abuses of President Xi’s regime, or that we need to assume that China is some kind of global angel. But it does mean being willing to acknowledge that China is now in fact the other superpower, and that Chinese participation is therefore indispensable in any serious global effort to deal with the common challenges of humanity, such as mitigating and adapting to climate change, combatting diseases, managing natural resources, relieving poverty in the Third World, governing cyber and artificial intelligence or providing sustainable energy. In other words, it means seeking gradually to establish productive working relationships with China in all of these domains, and thereby gradually to replace intense mutual suspicion with growing mutual trust. None of this is going to be easy. Establishing better working relationships takes time and effort. Hard-line critics on both sides will castigate the peacemakers as appeasers. There won’t be dramatic breakthroughs or sudden new dawns or glittering political prizes; just years of quiet, patient, constructive diplomacy. But there is at least a chance – and it’s the only real chance we have – of moving away from cold war and hence of preventing hot war.
These are controversial claims about the current state of the world, and controversial arguments about how we should deal with it. The claims need to be backed by evidence, and the arguments need to be reinforced by calm consideration of the alternatives. These are the tasks undertaken, as concisely as possible, in the rest of this book.14
CHAPTER 2
THE RHETORIC OF CONFLICT
In early 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was just beginning its insidious attack on humanity. The strategy of the virus was singular and global; it made light of national boundaries. The strategy of human beings, in response, was anything but unified. We might have expected world leaders, if guided solely by the common interest of human beings, to have worked in close cooperation to combat a common enemy. But the relationship between the world’s two most powerful leaders – President Trump of the US and President Xi of China – was not good enough to ensure that outcome. As the virus spread across the world, Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, tweeted: ‘It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.’ The Chinese state broadcaster, China Global Television Network, then gave Zhao the opportunity to add that ‘the US should try to find a way to curb the outbreak! … the US has hardly done anything’.1
A few days later, at a G7 meeting, Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, blamed China for the global spread of coronavirus and cited the pandemic as evidence that the Chinese 16 Communist Party posed ‘a substantial threat to our health and way of life’.2
Tensions reduced somewhat when President Xi and President Trump spoke on the phone at the end of March following these bitter exchanges.3 But not for long. On 18 April, Trump hinted that the Chinese authorities might deliberately have concealed the seriousness of the virus in the early stages of the epidemic and that, if they had done anything of the sort, there would be ‘consequences’.4
No one doubted that this dark hint at retaliation was intentional. True, the motive was evidently in part domestic political advantage. As a Republican strategist told the New York Times, ‘Trump has always been successful when he’s had a bogeyman and China is the perfect bogeyman.’5 But the dark hints also formed part of a pattern of increasingly robust anti-Chinese rhetoric which had the clear strategic intent of characterising President Xi’s regime as ‘bad guys’. True, Trump never quite reached the heights of condemnation that Ronald Reagan had reached with his description of the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire’ during the closing stages of the Cold War; but the use of language about China during the latter stages of the Trump administration was certainly headed in this direction.
The wiser heads in the US looked at this encounter with increasing alarm. Professor Joseph Nye, the inventor of the concept of ‘soft power’ and a previous head of the US National Intelligence Council, urged a very different approach. Recognising that, in diplomacy as in politics, the texture of the language used often affects the sentiments and hence the actions of those 17 who use it, he recommended that both sides should agree as a first step to de-escalate the propaganda wars, and that Vice-President Mike Pence and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang should then chair a bi-national high-level commission on Covid-19 in order to begin restoring the rich web of contacts among scientists and medical professionals that existed a decade ago, so that the two most powerful nations on earth could cooperate to combat the pandemic.6 Trump paid no attention to these suggestions. Indeed, he did the very opposite, increasing the ferocity of his verbal attacks on the Chinese leadership and widening his battlefront to include the international organisations that he regarded as collaborating with China. Most notoriously, in the midst of the worst global health crisis since the 1920s, he cut off US contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO) – on the grounds that, in the words of Senator Jim Risch (who chaired the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee), the WHO had become a ‘political puppet of the Chinese government’.7
Certainly, Trump had some good reasons to be concerned. The WHO’s failure to alert the world to the full significance of the killer virus, and the failure of Beijing to reveal the nature of the disease over several critical weeks before the WHO knew about it, were serious mistakes. And criticisms of the way in which the Chinese authorities had influenced the WHO were widely shared. Even observers much more willing than Trump to give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt were shocked by the way in which regional officials in Wuhan had suppressed reports of the new disease – no doubt preferring to engage in a conspiracy of silence rather than suffer the likely penalties 18 for admitting failure in China’s authoritarian state. Particular global outrage was caused by the silencing (and subsequent death from Covid-19) of the heroic Dr Li Wenliang, who had tried to alert his fellow medics to the danger of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic. Inevitably, trust in the transparency of the Chinese system fell to a new low at a time when such trust was much needed. However, to anyone familiar with the recent trend of Sino-US relations, it was clear that the reaction of the US administration was not determined solely, or perhaps even primarily, by these understandable concerns. On the contrary, the Trump administration’s rejection of Professor Nye’s constructive suggestions and the decision to respond instead by increasing the tempo of the propaganda war would have been entirely predictable even if these particular issues of trust had not arisen – because relations between the US and China had been deteriorating rapidly in every domain.
In 2018, Trump launched a trade war on the grounds that China was robbing the US of hundreds of billions a year through the theft of intellectual property, subsidising electric vehicles, dumping cheap aluminium and steel on the international market and manipulating its currency to gain unfair competitive advantage in international trade.8 Trump’s adviser, Peter Navarro, argued that these alleged Chinese actions constituted an existential threat to US jobs and security and qualified China to be regarded as ‘the planet’s most efficient assassin’.9 After a series of US tariffs, Chinese counter-tariffs, Chinese tariff reductions, US tariff reductions, further US tariffs and further Chinese counter-tariffs the US and China finally signed what amounted to an 19 uneasy truce in January 202010 – the spirit of which was quickly breached in August 2020, when Trump attempted to respond to the blocking of Google and Facebook in China by banning China’s TikTok and WeChat apps from being downloaded in the US, thereby precipitating long-running litigation in the US courts.
Part of the cause of this trade war has, of course, been the devastation of outdated manufacturing industries in the American Rust Belt, commonly believed to have been caused by state-subsidised competition from China. There is no doubt that the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs in traditional industries like steelmaking has been a major issue in US politics – with both candidates in the recent US presidential election going out of their way to woo electors in the Rust Belt swing states by making tough pronouncements about the need to protect US jobs. But, as the battle between Trump and Xi over the banning of each other’s high-tech internet and social media companies indicates, there is in fact something much more fundamental at stake. In the long run, the greater worry in Washington is about the prospects for new industries rather than old ones – manifested, for example, in the intense US effort to stifle the global growth of the Chinese tech manufacturer, Huawei. The trade warriors in the US are afraid that the Chinese Communist Party is using its power as the helmsman of Chinese industry to establish and maintain a lead in the sophisticated technologies that will determine economic success in coming decades.
What makes these US fears plausible is that the high level of Chinese technical skill has been complemented by the mobilisation of vast investment in infrastructure and technology in China. 20 The country’s annual investment rate doubled between 2000 and 2015. By the end of that period, China’s annual fixed investment had reached $5.7 trillion. The scale of this investment programme is unprecedented in global history. It represents total capital formation between 2000 and 2017 equal to 41 per cent of the aggregate Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) during those eighteen years. This has to be compared with US fixed investment equal to just 10 per cent of US GDP. And all of this ignores the fact that each dollar invested in China buys a larger amount of research, development and technology than a dollar invested in the US, because there is still a big gap between the purchasing power of dollar amounts in China and in the US. The true contrast between the volume of capital asset formation (the real increase in technological capacity) in China and that in the US is even greater than the raw dollar statistics imply.
This is bound to cause fear in the bowels of anyone who wants the US to remain technologically supreme, and it provides a huge additional motivation for trade warfare of a kind that has no direct connection with preserving jobs in the American Rust Belt. Of course, this additional motivation for American worries about China’s industrial advance cannot be admitted in public – since the international trading rules to which both China and the US at least nominally subscribe do not permit barriers to be erected against superior technologies. So complaints about dumping (i.e. selling below cost) or state subsidies or supposed threats to national security are advanced instead as the official reasons for erecting such trade barriers. But these rhetorical subterfuges provide at best a thin disguise for the fact that the 21 US has been conducting trade warfare at least partly with the aim of slowing down China’s rapid progress in the technology race of the twenty-first century.
The recent tensions between Beijing and Washington have not, however, been caused only by conflict over the management of global public health and global trade. There are also geopolitical causes of conflict – disputes about who is the king of the jungle. This shouldn’t be any great surprise. Such power struggles between the leaders of tribes, city-states, nations and empires have, after all, been common during the course of human history. All it takes for the struggle to start is for influential people within one of the two polities that are vying for local, regional or global power to start upping the ante by pointing to the danger posed by the rival power. And when it comes to the wider security relationships between China and the US, there are plenty of influential players who are more than willing to up the ante both in Washington and in Beijing. Naturally, the influential people in question do not by any means see themselves as being involved in a game. On the contrary, they believe that they are involved in something deadly serious. They are hawks, because they think that the vital interests of their own side are threatened by the other side.
The Washington hawks come in various forms. But they share one feature in common: they all take as their starting point the assumption that the Western powers need to maintain hegemony – or, in less pompous language, that the US needs to be the leader of the world – for the foreseeable future, and that this will inevitably involve some form of encounter with China.
22 The Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College recently published a document entitled At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World.11 This document explicitly recognises that, due mainly to the rise of China, the world risks entering a period of what it calls ‘post-US primacy’.12 It goes on to recommend a whole series of things that the US should do to prevent this risk from materialising. These include securing US territory, securing access to markets and resources, maintaining what the document calls ‘a favourable and adaptive global security architecture’ and preserving US military advantage.
It is worth pausing to consider the implications of these stated objectives, remembering that they appear not in a newspaper headline but in an official publication of the US Department of Defense. The first objective, to ‘secure US territory’ is, of course, an entirely natural aim for the Department of Defense to adopt: what else would one expect from any defence ministry anywhere in the world? But once we move beyond this first proposition, a careful look at the remainder of the objectives shows that they have a quite different character. The assertion that the US should sponsor an ‘adaptive global security architecture’ sounds neutral enough, until one adds the Department of Defense requirement that this architecture should be ‘favourable’ (i.e. favourable to US interests) and that it should ‘secure access to … regions, markets, and resources’ – or, in other words, should specifically permit US commercial firms to roam freely around the globe. And all of this is to be underpinned by ‘US military advantage’ (i.e. military power) sufficient to enable the US to ‘meet foreign 23 security obligations’ (i.e. to maintain its network of military alliances around the world), in order to ensure ‘favourable … access to … regions, markets, and resources’. In short, by the time one reaches the end of the story, one can see very clearly that this official document, produced by a core institution within the US military complex, is in fact nothing less than a manifesto for permanently maintaining the global primacy of the United States.
But the hawks are by no means only in the US Department of Defense. Many of the intellectuals in the wider US foreign policy establishment are equally keen to preserve permanent US primacy over China – even if they put the point in a somewhat more nuanced way than the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College. One example is provided by Ashley Tellis. Writing in the influential Washington Quarterly in 201313 and in a major paper for the Carnegie Endowment in 2014, Tellis describes China’s rise as the most serious geopolitical challenge facing the United States today. He then sets out to identify the best way of safeguarding US global hegemony in the face of this challenge, with the explicit ambition of protecting, and wherever possible expanding, ‘the extant US advantages in relative power’.14 Tellis’s argument is economically sophisticated. He fully acknowledges that any attempt to contain China and suppress its growth by isolating it from the rest of the world cannot work, because the level of interconnectedness of the global economy is now too great to permit the US to follow any such policy of containment without engaging in self-harm. But, far from accepting that, in such an interconnected world, the US will need to share power 24 with China and become just one player in a multi-polar geopolitics, Tellis proposes that the US should instead redouble its efforts to preserve its leading role in the world by outmatching China both technologically and militarily. His objection to those Washington theorists who want to ‘contain’ or reduce China’s power is not that there is anything amiss with their underlying aim, but just that increasing American economic and military power is a more realistic way of beating the Chinese. In short, just like the US Army War College, Tellis’s fundamental intent is to maintain US primacy in a world of transformed great power competition. He, too, is a hawk – though a hawk who understands how far the US and China have become technologically and commercially interdependent.
Equally hawkish sentiments about China prevail in the congressional US–China Economic and Security Review Commission. This commission was established by law, with bipartisan support, to provide Congress with politically neutral and highly informed briefings on the state of relations between the US and China. In practice, the high-level commissioners regard themselves as being responsible for keeping a continuous eye on what they regard as the threat posed to the US by the rise of China. They are assisted in this watchdog role by an array of professional staff and lavish financial resources. Over the years, the hearings of the commission have given a succession of opportunities for congressional hawks to express their fears about China – an attitude well summed up by the vice-chairman of the commission, Richard D’Amato, when he urged Congress to help him out with the answer to a difficult question: ‘If you can 25 figure out how to integrate a Chinese communist dictatorship with over a billion people … into the world economy, please let me know.’15 And this same highly sceptical approach to the possibility of doing business with China has remained sufficiently hard-wired into the commission’s work for it to pervade all of the reports and studies produced. In the commission’s ‘2018 Annual Report to Congress’, for example, not a single one of the twenty-six recommendations aims to reduce tensions with China; many of the recommendations are for moves designed to shore up US defences (both commercial and regulatory) against Chinese aggression; and seven of the twenty-six involve taking positive action against Chinese interests – including proposed sanctions on key Chinese state-owned enterprises and individuals and the incorporation of Taiwan military personnel into US military exercises.16
In Washington, such suggestions do not cause any particular surprise – partly because they are echoed across the US, and feature also in the publications of highly influential west-coast establishment think tanks like the RAND Corporation. In 2014, the RAND Army Research Division (RAND Arroyo Center) conducted a major study on the role of the US Army in Asia from 2030 to 2040. True, the study emphasises the need for engagement with China, and for avoiding miscalculations that could lead to conflict, as well as acknowledging the Chinese administration’s interest in maintaining a peaceful and stable international environment. But its authors nevertheless regard any effort by the Chinese to modify the international rules-based order, even at the margins, as a potential source of stress between 26 China and the US, which might place the two powers on a military collision course; and they are even more concerned about the prospect of the Chinese in some way threatening the ability of the US to maintain its position in Asia (a continent of which, despite its Pacific seaboard, the US is not part). They appear to be in no doubt that it is part of the manifest destiny of the US to police Asian waters in order to contain Chinese ambitions – and they argue that, to respond to threats of Chinese adventurism, the US Department of Defense should develop ‘a range of credible non-nuclear escalation options for US leaders, achieved by exploiting enduring US advantages in global power’.17
All of these east-coast and west-coast hawks can trace their lineage back to Samuel P. Huntington’s famous work in the 1990s on what he called the ‘clash of civilisations’. Professor Huntington’s prophecy that tensions between opposing civilisations were likely to emerge after the end of the Cold War has turned out, unfortunately, to be true – not least in relation to the clash between the West and the Islamic world. Huntington was not himself a ‘neo-con’. He was clear that in a world composed of fundamentally differing and competing civilisations, rather than ideologically motivated state actors, any effort by the West to universalise its own liberal democratic political culture would inevitably and increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilisations, most seriously with Islam and China. And he rejected as ‘immoral’ the imperialism that he foresaw would be required to make non-Western peoples adopt Western values, institutions and culture. But his recommendations for Western policy were by no means as peaceable and tolerant of other political cultures 27 as this may make them sound. On the contrary, Huntington argued that the West should respond to the cultural challenge not only by uniting to renew and preserve its own political culture in the face of competition from non-Western societies but also – much more controversially – that, to preserve Western civilisation in the face of declining Western power, the US and European countries should actively ‘restrain the development of the military power of Islamic and Sinic countries’, and take all necessary steps to ‘maintain Western technological and military superiority over other civilisations’.18
