US-China competition exacerbated by suspicion - Stratint Review, 21 February 2008

One of Stratint’s sister publications – AsiaInt North Asia Review – reviewed this month an article on China-US relations published by Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. The central thesis of the article - “The Rise of China and the Future of the West” - is that while the US on its own looks vulnerable to increasing Chinese power, the West as a whole is not – and the secret to dealing with China, according to Professor G John Ikenberry of Princeton University, is to give China every incentive for integrating with Western-created and Western-dominated trans-global institutions. The review of this article in the February issue of AsiaInt North Asia Review was sceptical about this proposition. This week, China’s reaction to President George Bush’s five-nation Africa tour provides a small but nonetheless telling illustration of why such scepticism is justified.

Ikenberry’s thesis starts with the uncontroversial proposition that periods of “wrenching hegemonic transition” are acutely dangerous. However, he argues, this time there are two major mitigating factors that should prevent the kind of conflict that has defined earlier such transitions. The first is the fact that nuclear weapons have made war between great powers unlikely, all but eliminating “the major tool that rising powers have used to overturn international systems defended by declining hegemonic states”. The second is that while the US’s “unipolar moment” will end, China only has the advantage if the struggle is between China and the US alone. “If”, Ikenberry argues, “the defining struggle is between China and a revived Western system, the West will triumph.”

Western power
Ikenberry provides figures to support this contention. China currently has a GDP measured in a purchasing-power-parity basis of US$9tr against the US’s US$12tr. By 2020, China will have a US$30tr to US$28tr advantage, and by 2030 this advantage will be US$63tr against the US’s US$49tr. The OECD as a whole, however, will still considerably outrank China even by 2030, when its combined GDP will be US$105tr. As for defence expenditure, by 2030 China (on US$238bn) will still be spending less than 30% of the US on its own (US$808bn) and only 17% of the OECD’s combined figure (US$1,398bn).

We will not go into the question as to whether nuclear weapons really have made war between great powers a thing of the past (the great British historian AJP Taylor became a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament because of his conclusion that statesmen are too prone to making errors, even catastrophic errors such as those that led to World War I). It is Ikenberry’s second point that we are interested in this week.

Ikenberry argues the US needs to understand that its most powerful strategic weapon is the ability to decide what sort of international order will be in place “to receive” China. The first thing the US must do, the professor argues, is “re-establish itself as the foremost supporter of the global system of governance that underpins the Western order”. And he concludes that while the US can’t thwart China’s rise, it can “help to ensure that China’s power is exercised within the rules and institutions that the United States and its partners have crafted over the last century…The United States’ global position may be weakening, but the international system the United States leads can remain the dominant order of the twenty-first century.”

US self-interest
This may be an idealistic vision, but it is not in our view a realistic one. One major reason for this assessment is that the US remains reluctant to subject itself to the rules that it wrote for lesser powers. Evidence for this ranges from its opposition to subjecting its citizens to international jurisdiction to its continuing determination to define its own interests and to act upon them, using military force if necessary, with or without international sanction. Secondly, there is little sign that the US is willing to give a rising China any but the barest elbow room, as the debate over China’s military power exemplifies. Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others have argued that China has no need to increase its military capabilities because it is threatened by no one. There is no acceptance that seeking to match military power to economic power could be a legitimate development for a power such as China.

The hearings in front of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which Stratint tracks closely, including the latest hearings on “The Implications of Sovereign Wealth Fund Investments for National Security”, amply demonstrate the US’s underlying suspicion of China and its determination not to cede relative power without a struggle.

Even if China’s internal political development were to make it a suitable candidate for full embracing by a Western system in which democracy and the rule of law are fundamental (and there is no sign of that yet), the US’s resistance to China’s rise is as natural as China’s desire to match its military power to its growing economic power. There is an inevitability about both that Ikenberry’s idealism cannot override.

Bush in Africa
The small illustration of this that caught our eye this week was China’s reaction to President Bush’s trip to Africa. Bush’s trip took him to five countries: Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia, and the portrayal of the trip was that the five countries had been chosen to showcase a different Africa from poverty-stricken and conflict-prone Africa that dominates the world’s media. All five are now relatively stable countries whose presidents have democratic credentials, and White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley described them as “the kinds of government that we want to partner with”. The trip was also used to highlight US projects that support hospitals, schools, and anti-Aids and anti-malaria initiatives.

The subliminal message was that the US is a better partner for Africa than China, and this message was hardly concealed at all when Bush came to speak about Darfur while in Rwanda. Before leaving for Africa, the president had called for a greater international military effort to end what he referred to as “genocide”. Speaking on 19 February while in Rwanda, he warned countries which are reluctant to impose sanctions on Sudanese leaders that “human suffering ought to pre-empt commercial interests”. No one doubted that he was referring to China, which has invested £8bn in Sudan’s oil industry.

China’s suspicions
But China also has a wary view of the US’s interests in Africa. The official Xinhua news agency identified “two major characteristics” of Bush’s visit. The first was that four out of the five countries visited are coastal, and according to Xinhua the US is concentrating on “developing relations with coastal countries to facilitate going in and out of the continent”. Secondly, the news agency said, “the countries to be visited are either on important strategic locations or countries with war-ridden regions”, which, Xinhua said, showed that the US “is trying to seek opportunities from the war-ridden regions to get involved in African affairs”.

Xinhua concluded: “The United States has a strong interest in Africa because, in the final analysis, it wants to consider its strategic interests…Now more than 10% of US oil imports come from Africa…[and] Africa will account for one-fourth of its total oil imports in 2015. Bush’s Africa tour signifies a new effort of the United States entering Africa…”

Even if one would not want to go as far as Ikenberry with his new-world-order style vision, few would argue that a US-China relationship in which competition is mitigated by cooperation would be preferable to one in which competition is exacerbated by suspicion. But for the moment the latter is clearly the more likely evolution than the latter.