全球智库信息集成服务系统

Introduction

China’s rapid development has evoked a host of reactions from within and without. As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to reassert itself in all aspects of citizens’ lives, promote unfair and nonreciprocal trade and investment practices, steal technology, and modernize its military, conventional wisdom is giving way to a new narrative about a vast and increasingly powerful country that combines resurgent authoritarianism at home with long-suppressed regional ambitions and revanchism abroad. Beijing’s rapid resurgence coincides with the end of a period of unrivaled U.S. power and wealth and a unipolar world order that had persisted since the fall of the Soviet Union. That era has passed, or some would say has wasted away.

The world is entering an uncertain era of revived great power competition and balance-of-power geopolitics. Russia and China are nursing grudges and redressing grievances on their peripheries and beyond. The United States has begun to shrug off responsibilities for the global order that it used to welcome, or at least grudgingly accept. Washington increasingly seems to be feeling overextended, disrespected, and preoccupied with domestic tasks. The U.S. president is devaluing the country’s alliances. Elsewhere, the Middle East remains in deep turmoil, and the European Union is not really united.

What is the best way forward for the United States with respect to China? A debate over this question has unfolded in the past few years. Many observers, especially those in what former president Dwight Eisenhower famously termed “the military-industrial complex,” believe that the United States needs to rearm and redeploy forces from the Middle East to the Asia Pacific to meet the emerging challenge head on.¹ Others, including both realists and liberal internationalists, argue that Washington should disengage from former positions of preeminence in the Asia Pacific and withdraw to bastions beyond the reach of China’s new weapons systems.

Amid these conflicting recommendations, the United States’ friends and allies in the region, who have long benefited from the prosperity enjoyed under the Pax Americana, now are watching nervously to see how Washington will decide its future role. These countries also are watching Beijing uneasily and are sensing its growing strength and influence, yet they are still eager to seize the opportunities that China presents. In effect, U.S. regional partners remain anxious over the classic dilemma of wishing neither to be entrapped in unwanted conflict nor abandoned to an uncertain dependence on and vulnerability to a powerful neighbor, in this case, Beijing.

A logical starting point is to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the United States and China in the Asia Pacific and at large. The objective is to formulate a realistic and practical set of strategies and policies to meet the greatest challenge facing the two countries: how to protect and, to the greatest extent possible, advance their vital interests—particularly their shared interest in avoiding a devastating conflict. Achieving this will require a combination of military, diplomatic, and economic tools employed flexibly to coax relevant actors to accept non-zero-sum outcomes. This endeavor should start with the belief that China is neither as strong as many portray it to be, nor as weak as many wish it was.

Looking back, the United States has weathered many challenges in Asia before, including the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the stalemate on the Korean Peninsula in the early 1950s, its hurried retreat from Vietnam in the 1970s, and the rise of Japan as an economic competitor in the 1980s. These experiences exposed Americans to episodes of self-doubt and reassessment, only for them to see their country adapt, bounce back, and eventually thrive again. However, such renewal and adaptation was not automatic, nor swift, nor inevitable. Over the last twenty-five years, U.S. leaders have failed to grasp many opportunities and have made profound mistakes, such as the war in Iraq.

China is another such challenge. Meeting this call to action requires constructive thinking and a self-assured assertion of U.S. interests. This mentality must be combined with an understanding that China, too, has interests, which (in some cases) overlap with U.S. ones but often do not overlap and at times even directly conflict with U.S. positions. The goal is to find ways to translate this entangled web of interests into mutually satisfactory outcomes or, when that is not possible, at least to avoid disastrous outcomes. In a sense, the United States faces a test of self-confidence. Having risen to the occasion in response to challenges before, Washington cannot assume failure, but neither can it assume success. The American way long has been to careen between bouts of optimism and pessimism before settling on a practical course. This analysis is an effort to sketch out such a practical, forward-looking path.

Therein lies the key to managing competition and avoiding conflict between the resident great power in the Asia Pacific, the United States, and the rising power, China. The essential tasks for Washington are to create a coalition of values, norms, and interests that is flexible and adaptive to changing circumstances; to be willing to engage with China for mutual benefit when possible; but to be prepared to put up effective defenses against unfair, nonreciprocal, or coercive behavior when necessary.

Setting the Stage

Economic reforms have facilitated China’s resurgence. The country is emerging as a great power because in 1978 the collective CCP leadership under Deng Xiaoping, having been deeply traumatized by Mao Zedong’s dogmatic rule and the self-destruction of the Cultural Revolution, decided to experiment with reforming China’s state-directed economy and gradually opening its markets to international competition and investment. Since then, China has experienced historically unprecedented gross domestic product (GDP) growth of nearly double digits annually.²

China’s Resurgence and a U.S. Policy Rethink

China’s decision to allow its enormous low-cost labor force to participate in global markets opened the door to international trade. It became the world’s largest trading nation by 2013, according to the World Bank.³ China’s trade surged from around a 12 percent share of GDP in 1980 to about 62 percent by 2005, before declining to below 40 percent today amid slowing worldwide trade volumes and the collapse of commodity prices after the 2007–2008 global financial crisis.⁴ The World Bank estimates that China’s GDP reached $11.2 trillion in 2016, compared to a U.S. figure of $18.6 trillion.⁵ Additionally, Beijing has made great strides in research and development (R&D), as its spending increased by 18 percent annually between 2000 and 2015; Chinese R&D now amounts to 2.1 percent of GDP, compared to 2.7 percent of GDP for the United States.⁶

China’s military spending is growing as well. The question of how best to measure the country’s military spending is somewhat controversial, depending on whether certain expenditures are included in the calculations (such as veterans’ benefits, off-budget R&D spending, and other costs). The CIA World Factbook estimated that China’s military budget was over $200 billion in 2016, nearly one-third of the U.S. annual defense budget that year.⁷ For many years, Beijing’s military budget grew at double-digit rates, but in recent years this growth has slowed down to the high single digits. That said, the underlying budgetary totals have obviously been higher in more recent years. What is less contested is the fact that China has greatly enhanced its military capabilities since the late 1990s, while undertaking significant modernization efforts especially since 2015 to transform its military’s traditional organizational structure, recruitment practices, and training regimen.

The U.S. armed forces have only just emerged from years of budget sequestration that negatively impacted military readiness and acquisitions (a challenge exacerbated by the expense of waging relatively low-technology but high-cost wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria). Meanwhile, Beijing has moved into new areas, adding power-projection capabilities to a military that was long focused on border defense and an oversized domestic stability force. In naval terms, China effectively scuttled its imperial fleet in the fourteenth century, but the country is now rapidly acquiring a modern 300-ship navy with new and more capable equipment and lethal weaponry, a navy third in size worldwide behind those of the United States and Russia.⁸

Notably, the U.S. National Security Strategy of December 2017 and the National Defense Strategy of January 2018 see Russia and China becoming great-power challengers, “rivals,” and potential threats. With regard to China, the National Security Strategy declares a new departure point that has since been echoed in numerous statements from the administration of President Donald Trump. It states:

For decades, U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and its integration in the post-war international order would liberalize China. Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others. China gathers and exploits data on an unrivaled scale and spreads features of its authoritarian system, including corruption and the use of surveillance. It is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own. Its nuclear arsenal is growing and diversifying. Part of China’s military modernization and economic expansion is due to its access to the U.S. innovation economy, including America’s world class universities.⁹

At the same time, the United States is reeling from prolonged political dysfunction among its elites and domestic economic challenges, such as unemployment, wealth inequality, and declining middle-class incomes. In the eyes of many Americans, the international security architecture and economic order Washington has nurtured since World War II increasingly seems to be working less for them and more for the benefit of others.

China has marched onto this stage. In general, the country’s macroeconomics are soundly managed and threats (such as excessive debt) are addressed swiftly as they arise. Beijing is promoting a grand industrial policy (known as Made in China 2025) that Americans see as a direct challenge to U.S. technological superiority, a policy predicated on what critics view as unfair Chinese practices such as intellectual property theft, espionage, and market-distorting subsidies. Moreover, in a world turning inward, China has propounded a grand international strategy focused on infrastructure investment billed as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the likes of which has not been seen since the Marshall Plan restored Europe.

At home, China is offering an illiberal alternative to the liberal development model for nations that are struggling between autocracy and democracy as they seek to modernize. Beijing is behaving in ways that are deeply unsettling and painfully reminiscent of the political repression and pervasive authoritarianism of the 1930s in Germany and the 1950s in the Soviet Union. The CCP is taking charge of every aspect of Chinese people’s lives, and the party’s leader—Xi Jinping—has been given seemingly unchecked authority without term limits. In a reversal of past practice, Xi has repeatedly displayed his leadership of the party, military, and government as well as his political dominance by appearing in uniform before parades of China’s newly modernized troops and ships, another custom unsettlingly reminiscent of the 1930s. Vast reeducation camps for the Uighurs, an ethnic minority in the region of Xinjiang in western China, have a similar 1930s-era, concentration camp–like quality.

In sum, a combination of American self-doubt and suspicions about Beijing’s intentions is fueling a fundamental rethinking of U.S. policy toward China. Simultaneously, a blend of Chinese self-assurance and resentment over past wrongs form a dangerous, volatile mixture that will require careful statesmanship for the countries to avoid disaster.

Intriguingly, some of the behavior of China’s neighbors suggests that they are not yet alarmed about Beijing’s new capabilities. For example, one expert on Asian arms acquisitions has concluded that, “despite considerable journalistic and scholarly attention to the impact of China’s new capabilities and influence, the behavior of China’s neighbors suggests a lower level of alarm there than in Washington.”¹⁰ According to David C. Kang, the region’s spending on arms acquisitions has been growing more slowly than that of the states of Latin America, a region rarely associated with high military spending. He writes that “the evidence on military spending in East Asia leads to the conclusion that although the region does contain potential flashpoints, countries are seeking ways to manage relations with each other that emphasize institutional, diplomatic and economic solutions rather than purely military solutions.”¹¹

It should be noted that beyond former U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration’s pronouncement of the pivot to Asia, the United States has not yet significantly upgraded its military capabilities in the region. The U.S. military has had a dominant regional presence that may not in fact have required significant new investments before now, but that seems likely to change as China’s military modernization continues apace. China’s neighbors may then recalibrate their defense requirements in light of what Beijing and Washington decide to do.

The Terms of a Brewing U.S.-China Competition

As the United States summons itself to what some might term a new Cold War with China in Asia, what would be the best combination of strategies and policies to maintain and develop Washington’s long-term interests in the Asia Pacific (a region that the Trump administration prefers to call the Indo-Pacific)?¹² Furthermore, how can the United States best deploy its assets and resources in relation to China and its neighbors to advance its own interests? At the same time, how can China continue to grow, raise the standard of living of its people, and develop its regional and global influence without doing so at the direct expense of the United States and its friends and allies in the region?

To begin, it is necessary to lay out several assumptions underlying this analysis. First, zero-sum thinking of the Cold War variety is not really an option for the United States. China is not the former Soviet Union; over the last thirty years, China has integrated with the rest of the world, not isolated itself. It is the world’s second-largest economy, top trading nation, and most populous country. It is one of the world’s leading exporters of high technology, much of which is American-designed and provides large profits for U.S. firms.¹³ Investment firms are betting U.S. pensions on the success of Chinese firms, many of which are registered on the New York Stock Exchange. Interdependence is deeply embedded in supply chains, in markets, and (increasingly) in the more remote domains of outer space and cyberspace. Delinking the two countries’ economies is not a realistic option. Neither can China be contained. Even if the United States tried to do so, China’s neighbors would not cooperate in the absence of a much greater threat to their own interests than has been evident so far.

Second, it must be noted that trying to change China to make it more like the United States is nothing more than wishful thinking. It is a complex country with complicated people and deep traditions that have served it well for centuries, even if some of those attributes are ones that Americans would not accept. Those authoritarian traditions are increasingly in conflict with the needs of a drastically modernizing economy and a fast-rising middle class; after all, if China were to try again to close the door on the rest of the world to retain control, that would also mean shutting the country off from the creativity required to compete. As historian Jonathan Spence wrote decades ago, many a foreigner has fallen short trying to plant foreign values in Chinese soil.¹⁴ That is not to say that outsiders are without influence or have no friends (or enemies) in China, or that the country never changes. Rather, it is a matter of harboring realistic expectations.

Third, China’s complex relationships at home as well as those with its neighbors and its far-flung trading and investment partners mean that the country often aims to shape policymaking so as to meet multiple objectives and to avoid setbacks to its interests. While the country clearly has an expanding range of external interests and activities, its primary concerns, as evidenced in every major Communist Party meeting, are domestic, as seen in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Party Congress work reports.¹⁵ Washington should seek to help Beijing shape its choices by using military, diplomatic, and economic tools to affect China’s calculations of benefits and risks with relation to its domestic and international environment. In this respect, the United States’ demonstrated capacity for coalition building gives it a special advantage over a frequently isolated and awkwardly led China.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been primarily a maritime power in Asia. Over time, its air power developed a similar dominance. It has enjoyed an unchallenged ascendancy, or what some call primacy, in these domains. After the partial settlement of the conflict on the Korean Peninsula, and then the withdrawal from Vietnam, Washington has relied on a network of alliances and arrangements with friendly powers to support its maritime and air presence in the region. For the most part, except for major deployments in South Korea and token deployments in Thailand, these arrangements have not focused on the Asian mainland but have been made with islands (Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan) that make up what China often calls the First Island Chain.

China is developing blue-water naval capabilities that can challenge the U.S. and allied military presence in the region. In 2012, then CCP general secretary Hu Jintao proclaimed that China would become a “maritime power.”¹⁶ As Admiral Mike McDevitt has argued, this was the culmination of a decade of examination and planning to secure China’s extensive vulnerable maritime approaches and the coastal provinces where the country is most economically developed.¹⁷ The policy aim was also to support China’s long-standing but legally questionable claims associated with the so-called nine-dash line, an area that encompasses about 80 percent of the South China Sea and overlapping claims by other littoral nations based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This new point of emphasis was graphically underscored by China’s decision to create several artificial islands on rocks, reefs, and low-tide elevations in the Spratly archipelago in the South China Sea in 2014 and 2015. China has gradually built facilities on these islands that could quickly be adopted for military use.¹⁸

This development is playing out in close proximity to important U.S. regional partners. To the east of the South China Sea lies the Philippines, a long-standing U.S. ally. Under the terms of a mutual defense treaty, a succession of basing agreements kept U.S. forces in the country until 1992, when the Philippine Senate rejected the last such agreement. In light of China’s growing level of activity in the South China Sea, Manila agreed to a new ten-year Visiting Forces Agreement with Washington in 2014.¹⁹ The agreement persists, but its implementation slowed with the 2016 election of President Rodrigo Duterte, who has focused on avoiding friction with Beijing and seeking bilateral assistance from China.

Farther north in the First Island Chain is Taiwan. It is also a claimant to rights in the South China Sea, but it figures more importantly as a former ally of the United States over which mainland China claims sovereignty. In the course of developing its relationship with mainland China in the 1970s, the United States acknowledged Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty over Taiwan, but Washington also developed a deliberately ambiguous relationship with the island. Under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the United States provides “defensive arms and services” to the island’s armed forces, an arrangement that is a frequent source of tensions between Washington and Beijing.²⁰

Still farther north, the Japanese archipelago constitutes the most formidable part of the First Island Chain, extending northward to the Kuril Islands that lead to Russia’s Far East. Japan and China contest sovereignty over a small island group between the mainland and Japan: the Senkaku Islands (known in Chinese as the Diaoyu Islands). The United States considers Japan to be the administrator of the disputed islands, and successive administrations have asserted that they are therefore covered by the U.S.-Japan mutual defense treaty. China nonetheless routinely patrols the waters around and contingent to the unpopulated islands to undermine claims that Japan effectively controls them.

In sum, a China that is increasingly dependent on maritime trade faces potential choke points from the Straits of Malacca near Singapore to the Kuril Islands north of Japan. Beijing’s development of a blue-water navy to protect its increasingly far-flung interests and to supplement its traditional brown-water coastal fleet raises the prospect of guaranteeing access to the world’s oceans in the waters along China’s coastal provinces and within the First Island Chain. This development has invited comparisons to the United States’ articulation of the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century to prevent European powers from challenging its interests in the Western Hemisphere. Many realists envision inevitable conflict between the United States and its allies and China as the latter develops into a regional hegemon.²¹

As time passes, China’s concerns about developing a security buffer as well as its irredentist claims over Taiwan, Japanese-controlled islands, and the South China Sea will continue to morph beyond ambitions to develop conventional sea- and air-based military capabilities and extend to the cyber, space, and strategic domains. This will force the United States and China’s neighbors to make choices about how to protect their interests from new threats in those domains.

Conceptual Frameworks

There is an extensive and growing body of literature on how to manage the challenge from China in the Asia Pacific. This literature contains a few widely used historical and conceptual frameworks designed to help analysts understand U.S.-China relations. Different branches of the realist school of international relations provide useful lenses to understand this relationship. These conceptual frameworks and schools of thought have been a major feature of the ongoing conversation about how the United States and its allies should respond to China’s reemergence.

One of the most prominent such frameworks is the Thucydides Trap, which refers to the almost inevitable tendency for relations between an established power and a rising one to devolve into competition and conflict. Numerous scholars have studied historical examples of the Thucydides Trap to assess whether it applies to the contemporary situation between the United States and China.²² Most prominently, Graham Allison views the Thucydides Trap as a useful way of understanding U.S.-China relations.²³ However, instead of focusing on the perceived inevitability of conflict, he defines the Thucydides Trap as the inevitable unease that accompanies a sharp shift in the relative power of potential competitors. For Allison, the unease and tensions in U.S.-China relations are real as much as they were in Athenian-Spartan relations, but a conflict between the two countries is much less likely today. Numerous crisis-management mechanisms between Beijing and Washington reduce the likelihood that a crisis would evolve into a full-blown war.

Meanwhile, David Richards argues that the Thucydides Trap is a tempting conceptual framework but an imperfect one.²⁴ He offers several important differences between U.S.-China relations and other case studies on which the Thucydides Trap is based, particularly Athenian-Spartan relations before the Peloponnesian War and Anglo-German relations before World War I. He asserts that the Chinese and U.S. nuclear arsenals significantly reduce the likelihood of war between the two countries. He also views the political leadership in Beijing and Washington as much more mature and stable than that in monarchic Europe. Furthermore, Richards sees the globalized economy and intricate international commercial links as major impediments to China and the United States waging war against each other.

In addition to historical frameworks and comparisons, some scholars offer other theoretical models for understanding contemporary U.S.-China relations. For example, John Mearsheimer argues that his theory of offensive realism is the ideal lens through which to understand the relationship.²⁵ Offensive realism posits that under an anarchic, decentralized international system, states are inherently unsure of each other’s motives and inevitably seek to maximize their relative power to ensure their own survival. In such an environment, conflict becomes inevitable between an established power that seeks to maintain its relative strength and a rising one that seeks to increase its relative strength. According to Mearsheimer, the rise of China and the resulting security competition between Beijing and Washington will eventually result in war.

The theory of defensive realism also acknowledges the possibility of conflict between the United States and China, but it views this outcome as much less likely. According to Charles Glaser, for instance, defensive realism takes into account the moderating influence of the international system on the security dilemma between the two great powers.²⁶ Given that the United States and China are deeply integrated into the current system, Glaser argues, defensive realism is a better framework for understanding the ties between Beijing and Washington.

Meanwhile, former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has proposed a constructive realist view of U.S.-China relations.²⁷ His position is realist in the sense that it recognizes that some kind of confrontation between the two countries is likely inevitable, but at the same time his perspective is constructive in the sense that it urges the two countries to identify regional flashpoints that could become a source of conflict and preemptively manage them so as to avoid an inadvertent escalation to war.

Assessing China’s Current Capabilities

The aforementioned conceptual models and schools of thought offer an array of ways that scholars and practitioners have thought about the competitive dynamics between China and the United States. Each of them, in their own way, addresses the question of how much power Beijing will accrue and how this will shape U.S.-China relations.

There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought when it comes to assessing how powerful China is. One emphasizes the country’s growth and argues that the rise of China is significant enough to pose a serious challenge to U.S. primacy in the Asia Pacific. Alternatively, the second school of thought highlights the limits of Beijing’s power and argues that China’s influence is still far below that of the United States, which is argued to still have the means to restrain excessive Chinese behavior and shape Beijing’s rise.

China’s Growing Power: Numerous scholars argue that China’s economic influence and military capabilities will make the country strong enough to disrupt or even undermine U.S. primacy in the Asia Pacific. For example, Aaron Friedberg and Hugh White are united in their assessment that the rise of China will pose an unprecedented strategic challenge for the United States.²⁸ Friedberg explains that the size of China’s population and its growing role in the global economy offer Beijing enormous power and influence over other countries.²⁹ White argues that China’s wealth will become an essential source of power and help elevate the country’s status in the Asia Pacific and relative to the rest of the world.³⁰ He assesses China’s strategic and political strength as greater than that of any other rival the United States has faced. Similarly, Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis also define Beijing as the most significant competitor Washington will contend with in the decades to come.³¹

Like these other analysts, Michael Swaine argues that the Asia Pacific is undergoing an undeniable shift in the balance of power between the United States and China.³² In the long run, he observes that this transition is most likely to intensify to the extent that, by 2040, China’s economic and military capabilities could very well be on par with those of the United States. Given present trends, Swaine predicts that the United States’ predominant position in the Asia Pacific will disappear over time as its economic growth continues to falter and constrains its defense spending. Meanwhile, he expects China’s economic growth to remain robust and to cause proportionate increases in Beijing’s defense spending. Swaine concludes that China may not have the capabilities to pursue dominance, but that it will most likely be on equal footing with the United States.

These trends toward competition and possible parity notwit