Part 1 - Know Thyself
You will find below the first part of what will be an extended series, the Foreword and Introduction from my recent essay; Deconstructing the 30-year path of Chinese and American rivalry and its consequential, adverse effects on the International Rules-Based Order.
This will be followed by an additional section of the essay over each of the next 10 days. Once completed, I will then present a final section: a series of recommended policy prescriptions, initiatives and priorities.
Much as is highlighted in the Essay, the primary aim of this series of posts is to address the continued lack of meaningful introspection, both among the Washington foreign policy establishment and throughout the business community, into how American actions, directly or indirectly, led to the current strategic rivalry with China.
Any feedback or questions that you might have please send them through. And if you are in disagreement with any points raised do let me know as well.
FOREWORD: A PERSPECTIVE FROM 30 YEARS LIVING IN SHANGHAI
In a few short weeks, I will have officially lived in Shanghai for 30 years. China has undergone a seismic transformation over that time. When asked to discuss my experience, I simply quote Lucian Pye: “China is a civilization disguising itself as a nation-state.” The monumental change was surface level. China has remained, very much, the Middle Kingdom and in that regard nothing had changed.
What had become increasingly obvious though were notable, and consequential, adjustments in the attitudes among American’s – my fellow compatriots – towards China. When I first arrived, the general view was indifference. Three decades later, it is all consuming. The zeitgeist journey was a slow one but would fundamentally be disjointed at two important points of inflection.
The first came in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. As economies across the world faced heightened uncertainty, China seemed untouched by events. Granted, a few trillion deployed from the State coffers and wide-open bank lending spigots did much of the heavy lifting. Even still, I distinctly noticed a marked change in attitudes towards China. Speculation arose around how there could be no material economic suffering in a Communist-run country. It began as idle curiosity. It would, later, grow into resentment.
The next, and far more consequential, inflection point arrived with the 2016 US election and the drumbeat of “China, China, China”. For the very first time, an American administration, along with much of the Beltway, turned its full attention towards the Mainland. The ills of American society were, to a large degree, being placed at the feet of what had been labeled a rival and unfair competitor. China became a political lightning rod. Compounding the issue was the relatively recent omnipresence of social media platforms. The messages were amplified, and before too long the environment devolved into vitriolic animosity.
Nevertheless, throughout all of this, I made the very cognizant decision to not engage in any China-focused public debate. Even while agreeing with the majority of critiques leveled against China, it was always clear that the prevailing views were woefully incomplete. I’d learned many years before that China was perhaps the most emotive subject matter and one where opinions were hardened and unassailable – not to mention binary. Either China faced impeding collapse, or China would soon supplant American global primacy.
The truth, as the saying goes, would always lie somewhere in the middle. What must be stressed, though, is that China isn’t a matter which requires nuance. China, quite bluntly, is different. And, with that in mind, China isn’t the enemy of the United States. Rather she is the apex geoeconomic competitor.
So, what am I doing here? What’s changed? Why go through the maddening effort of creating a doctorate-sized essay detailing 30 years of Chinese and American rivalry? Well, the credit, if we want to call it that, goes to my wife. She has relentlessly pressed the point that my experience as an American living in China mattered and that I needed to bring a credible voice to the ever-rising, ever-concerning tensions. She made a very valid point; there was a civic duty owed.
My intention with this essay is to directly address the glaring absence of any introspection among America political and business leaders. The current China and American rivalry didn’t arise from any single point of origin. It was a process and the outcome of the impressive capabilities of the Chinese. It was also a short sightedness in American foreign (and domestic) policy decision making as well as the result of a corporate culture zealously obsessed with efficiencies over resiliency. China has risen and is a genuine peer rival. If America is to respond effectively, the first step is recognizing there’s a problem. This essay seeks to do just that with the proper context required to have efficacy.
INTRODUCTION: THE GLARING ABSENCE OF INTROSPECTION
The veil has fallen. America has discarded the charade that its primacy was held to account by the very international rules-based order it built 80 years ago. This realpolitik dichotomy has been known throughout most of the world and for quite some time. What actually transpired over the past several weeks is a realization – a loss of naïveté – among the American populace and the citizenry of post-1945 allied nations that America would act as it saw fit in the pursuit of self-interest and will do so, whenever necessary, fully unencumbered.
America has deployed uber-primacy and the raw projection of power from the very moment the Cold War ended, and the unipolar world commenced. These actions are just no longer concealed by diplomatic subterfuge. From the Iraq War to the Global Financial Crisis policy responses and myriad other instances, the very “international rules” forced upon others has always been deemed inconvenient by Washington and, thusly, ignored when those “rules” conflicted with self-interest.
Throughout the unipolar moment, the non-American allied world was acutely aware of American intentions. Those nation-states accepted, with reticence, the power bestowed upon this hegemon. China, and Russia for that matter, also accepted that the world was to be dominated by a single superpower. Both nations, however, knew their world histories and in 1997 began planning for that inevitable day when America’s reach would finally exceed its grasp.
That day has long since arrived and there is now a broad agreement that a realignment in the world order is underway. The only debate present is found in the international relations community and its zealous quest for labels: Multipolarity, G2, the Global South and even, more recently, the Core Five. Amongst them are the ubiquitous and overly simplistic comparisons made to the Cold War. For those seeking historical comparisons, there’s arguably far more compelling evidence to measure current events against the backdrop of those occurring in and around 1904. No matter one’s outlook or perspective, the only real conclusion which can be drawn is that the present moment is a unique point of departure from the previous century. History has not ended.
And yet, there remains an obsession over labels and constructs, an exercise – importantly to be stressed – which is Western led and Western promoted. China eschews such framing. Where others find comfort in taxonomy and historical comparisons, Beijing views such exercises, while providing some value, as unnecessarily restrictive and, ultimately, misguided. And then there’s the fact that China is the “Middle Kingdom”. An important cultural point of reference as it is a defining element for understanding Beijing’s view of the world and how it goes about engaging with all sovereign actors.
Stripped to first principles, the central issue is unmistakable: the emergence of a deepening – and many would even say concerning – rivalry between China and the United States. This reality is now so embedded in daily commentary across all mediums and throughout policy circles as to appear self-evident. And yet, what hasn’t been properly addressed is the glaring absence of any genuine analytical rigor into assessing how it is the United States has arrived at a station where it now faces – for the first time – a genuine geopolitical peer.
This gap exists largely because the rivalry did not arise from any single inflection point. It emerged gradually, through an evolutionary process spanning roughly three decades. It has been a process shaped by a series of actions, reactions and, as will be highlighted throughout this Essay, highly consequential miscalculations made on the part of American policy makers and business leaders. Errors in geopolitical judgement which continue to be made to this very day.
Much of the contemporary China discourse, at least when it comes to the daily treadmill of social media content creation, relies on the promotion of reductive explanations. Perhaps the best example of this is the ongoing narrative which locates the origin of this new global dynamic to a host of malicious actions taken by China following its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Be it intellectual property theft, currency manipulation, mercantilist tendencies or even wage-labor suppression.
Notwithstanding the legitimacy of the actions described above, the entire WTO entry argument should be viewed as a manufactured point of origin. The argument is presented in isolation, and it fails to take into account any critical assessment of the broader strategic context or cumulative dynamics at play.
There is, however, an additional errant perspective which is presented, and at all times, in vehement prose to explain China’s rise and rivalry with the United States: the elevation of Xi Jinping.
Prior to the year 2012, China was viewed as a broadly well-meaning – if imperfect – actor in global affairs beginning with the normalization of US-China relations in 1972. Over the next 40 years, the global community of nations eagerly welcomed and actively engaged with China. Over that period of time, it was readily agreed that there was genuine mutual benefit among all parties even if there was disillusionment that engagement never delivered on the prospect that China would ultimately pursue political liberalization. This consensus began to fray, however, shortly after the 2012 formal appointment of Xi Jinping to the role of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and, in the following year, formally as President of what had become the world’s second largest economy. The “China” known to the foreign community, so says the punditry, fundamentally changed from that point forward.
Institutional norms which had underpinned China’s entire reform and opening program were no longer viewed as sacrosanct, this would go on to include a more assertive posturing by the leadership in Beijing in its bilateral and multilateral dealings with “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” but one example. What had become clear was an unmistakable shift towards a policy of engagement which centered more in favor of China’s own sovereign self-interests and a hardening of lines on various positions in dealings with the United States and its post-1945 allies. China was, it was argued, finally showing its true colors: a hegemon in wanting. Those in the American and European foreign policy communities, and well beyond, who’d engaged with China and who had built deep relationships over decades, were astounded by the change in behavior.
The conclusion which was ultimately drawn – one that persists to this day – is that this shift in the direction of travel by China was being orchestrated by the misguided leadership of a strongman “emperor for life” executing a radical – not to mention sudden – shift in a 40-year geopolitical strategy. In this telling, it is Xi, the man, who was responsible for unnecessarily dismantling the very structure that had been responsible for China’s success. This conclusion drawn, as will be made abundantly clear throughout this Essay, was a gross – and quite foundational – analytical error.
This (errant) view held by the “Senior Fellow” ecosystem rested heavily on the assumption that China, having benefited so extensively from the “international rules-based order”, would have no rational incentive, given historic gains achieved, to deviate from a policy of engagement which centered on multilateralism. Once evidence did arrive to demonstrate a deviation from past diplomatic and economic engagement the described “reckless action” was fully attributed to Xi Jinping.
Once again, such are merely surface level perspectives.
The flaw in the analysis lies in the absence of any consideration of how a series of events over a period of three decades which, when compounded, had fundamentally changed the geopolitical dynamic and, with it, affected Beijing’s holistic view of the tradeoffs from maintaining a static policy of engagement. To the point, China recognized that the applicability of the international rules-based order in 2012 stood in very stark contrast to that very same system of 1972. There was another rather foreboding reason for the policy shift, again absent from the world of Beltway think tank analysis.
For Beijing, there was a growing consensus view that China’s rise, not to mention the unprecedented speed of its (re)emergence into a formidable global competitor, would inevitably invite the unwelcomed attention of America. Attention, it was concluded, would then lead to confrontation and it was a highly rational conclusion to be drawn. If confrontation was the most likely outcome, then for Beijing it would be preferable that conflict happen on China’s own terms rather than to idly wait for the day when America decided to designate it a threat as had been the case for a host of previous geopolitical challenges (real or imagined) to hegemony.
This then begs further inquiry: what catalyst(s) would have resulted in these rather stark changes in China’s multilateral views and of the geopolitical landscape more broadly.
These are the most important questions which must be asked and yet these are also the very questions which have remained absent from the entire China conversation and, quite specifically, an unwillingness borne from hubris to engage in meaningful introspection on the part of American policy makers. This should not come as a surprise to anyone as even the idea of self-reflection hasn’t been an American strength at any point during the unipolar period up to and including events transpiring to this very day. America stepped into its role of the world’s sole superpower blithely unaware, or perhaps better put unconcerned, with external perceptions. Under such conditions, it would only be a matter of time before such hubristic tendencies were put to the test.
Throughout this Essay, there are two key points which will be directly addressed.
- First, a series of American foreign (and even domestic) policy errors which have brought about today’s rivalry with China. Many of the examples included have already been well documented. Yet even where agreement exists, there remains scant recognition of existence critical connective tissue.
- Second, a linking of first-order American decisions to the second- and third-order consequences and, in China’s case, the extended higher-order effects during the entire unipolar moment.
