China Rises
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| Battle at the River Phu-luong, a scene of the Chinese Campaign against Annam (Vietnam) 1788 - 1789 http://www.battle-of-qurman.com.cn/e/hist.htm via Wikimedia Commons |
The theory of comparative advantage, which is both elegant and frequently misunderstood, undergirds economists' uniform support of free trade. It is also why China's booming commerce with the rest of the world is a good thing. As everyone knows, China's vast pool of labor currently gives it an advantage in labor-intensive, low value-added manufacturing. Consumers have benefited enormously from cheap shoes, clothes, and electronics. The "China Price" has even supported the real incomes of workers in the United States who may have lost their jobs to increasing automation or factories abroad.
China is already the largest exporter. In 2014, it will become the biggest importer. Its demand for raw materials, goods, technology, and services will raise the incomes of people across the world. The value of China's business with Africa already exceeds a hundred billion dollars. It will eventually dwarf charitable inflows. The stately barge of Chinese trade may thus do more to end poverty in the continent than well-intentioned foreign aid.
Many fear that the hundreds of millions of people entering China's burgeoning middle class will contribute to resource scarcity, pollution, and climate change. The country's growth has indeed come at a steep price to the environment. But China's growing wealth will enable it to school its people and thereby galvanize a tremendous reservoir of human potential. Many of the world's most pressing problems have their solutions in the minds of scientists and engineers who will have a shot at an education purely because of the country’s rising prosperity. China’s rise should be welcomed.
And yet. China’s advance to affluence will go hand in hand with a quest to become the preponderant military power in Asia and the world. Its contest for primacy with the United States poses the greatest threat to peace in our time.
The realist branch of international relations starts from the premise that states in the international system exist in a condition of anarchy. This simply means that no world government stands above states, and they must guarantee their own survival by maximizing their share of power. The realist worldview is grim, and its adherents believe that international cooperation should be rare and limited. In practice, countries cooperate extensively in areas as different as trade and resource allocation, a phenomenon that scholars in the neoliberal school have sought to explain through institutions. Both sets of theories have some truth to them, and my view is that they explain different things in different issue areas.
The Chinese, at any rate, seem comfortable with theoretical diversity. China is a member of the WTO. But it has simultaneously recorded double digit growth in its military spending almost every year for the past two decades. Its military expenditures now exceed those of every country except the United States, and they will continue to grow.
Like any Great Power, China understands that the “strong do what they can and the weak do what they must.” Virtue and international agreements are flimsy protection in security affairs. No impartial night watchman polices the international order. Leaders and political regimes change. Even the closest allies can’t trust one another absolutely, so why would potential competitors?
At present, China’s main strategic goals are limited. It seeks to secure its energy supplies, trade, and territorial integrity. But the definition of its core interests will only broaden. Over the long term, China will strive to make the reintegration of Taiwan a fait accompli, consolidate its control over disputed territories and energy off its coasts, and resolve various border disputes with its neighbors to its advantage. As China’s appetite for resources grows ever larger, it will project its power in Africa and the Middle East. Perhaps one day, very far in the future, it will even probe US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
China has already invested massive resources in firming up its “antiaccess, area denial” strategy. The goal of the strategy is to squarely target the United States’ powerful carrier groups, and prevent them from dominating the seas off the coast of China. It is also in the process of building its own aircraft carrier and new nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, researching stealth technology, and beefing up its space and cyber warfare capabilities. China’s actions are a biting rejoinder to those that believe, or hope, that China will be content to grow rich without possessing a powerful military.
Countries in Asia are taking no chances. They too are ramping up their spending on arms. India has rushed troops and equipment to Arunachal Pradesh as China sounds an increasingly strident tone on the disputed territory. India is also trying to mend its perennially bad relations with its neighbors. Last year, Vietnam conducted live fire exercises off its coast in response to China’s alleged harassment of a Vietnamese seismic survey boat.
Russia nervously watches more than a billion people grow rich and powerful beyond its long boundary with China. Only six million Russians live across from ninety million Chinese in the immense borderlands of Siberia, huge chunks of which were seized by the czars from a declining Qing empire. Even pacific Japan is slowly altering its post-World War II military stance in the wake of a ferocious diplomatic dispute over a chain of islands claimed by both countries. China’s noisy bickering with its neighbors is a harbinger of things to come.
The United States has stated that it will be an Asian power well into the twenty-first century. It recently committed to basing twenty-five hundred troops in Australia, and it has sought to bolster its alliances in Asia. The US currently spends five times more on its military than China. It remains the sole superpower. Given the country’s track record of springing back from crises, breathless projections of American decline are unlikely to come to pass.
But the US military faces steep budget cuts in the coming decade. More importantly, China’s own economic expansion means that it will be able to outspend the United States on military hardware regardless of what happens within the US, and it will likely do so as soon as 2025.
The United States will pursue containment in concert with Asian allies seeking to balance against China’s growing heft. This course of action will undoubtedly lead to deep security competition, but it is the only option available to the US. China’s economic ties with states in Asia will make this policy hard to implement in practice, and it will respond forcefully to prevent strategic encirclement by keeping its periphery weak and divided.
Fortunately, many factors reduce the chance of outright war between these titans. The US and China are nuclear powers separated by an ocean. China is too far away from Europe to threaten or dominate it. The ideological competition that marked the Cold War does not exist between these states. The Chinese are hard boiled realists who see little value in exporting their beliefs abroad.
The two countries are also bound by their massive trade and China’s trillion dollar holdings of Treasury bonds. Even more fundamentally, we may live in a world that has seen the end of Great Power war. On this view, interdependence and globalization have made the nation-state irrelevant and war an impossible event. My opinion is that this assessment is too optimistic. It is patently incompatible with the behavior of states that continue to arm themselves to the teeth.
Thucydides believed that the main cause of the Peloponnesian War was “the growth in power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta.” The United States and China will need to think strategically and make wise choices to avoid a similar fate. The story of China’s rise holds both marvelous promise and great peril.