Are the U.S. and China inevitable adversaries, stuck on a collision course as one rises and the other aims to maintain its super-power status?
Apparently, it depends on whom you ask, how you frame the question and which country you’re from.
Four scholars exploring the issue diverged on lines of nationality at a Carter Center Young Scholars Forum, which brought budding foreign-affairs students together with established experts on Jan. 30-31 at Emory University.
The questions framing the discussion were whether China is a “strategic rival” as described in the latest U.S. national security strategy document, and whether China’s entry into the World Trade Organization was a massive mistake, as asserted by President Donald Trump.
How scholars responded to the question of rivalry seemed largely dependent on how they dealt with the semantics.
For Zhu Feng, a renowned scholar and director of the Institute of International Studies at Nanjing University, China couldn’t possibly be a rival to the U.S., since their power disparity — both in sheer military might and in terms of their global security alliances — is still too great.
In other words, “rivalry” connotes the ability to muster a real challenge. China may be a “balance” to the sole superpower, but it’s not a threat — at least in the near future, Dr. Zhu said.
“There is no way China could catch up,” he said.
Ding Gang, an opinion writer at the Global Times, a state-run international newspaper and co-organizer of the forum, similarly believes that the China threat is overstated in the U.S.
“American media takes advantage of opportunities to agitate the public over China’s rise,” Mr. Ding said, with Mr. Trump being the prime suspect in his view.
The countries’ seemingly incompatible visions for global governance could be reconciled — or at least managed — with the right mechanisms for dialogue, he said.
Hu Xijin, editor in chief of the newspaper and also a panelist, had a similar view. Americans skittish over supposed examples of China’s newfound assertiveness are overthinking issues like China’s Belt and Road infrastructure plan or its ambitions in the South China Sea.
“If we want to develop, we must have harmony with other countries, with the outside world, because we can’t develop by ourselves,” Mr. Hu said.
But Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center, believes that there is much more at work.
It’s clear that China is the “greatest long-term strategic rival” to the U.S., largely because their views on Asia’s future and global governance are so incongruous. And China is now actively shaping the world order to its ends, especially as the U.S. pulls back from the global economy. But China isn’t to be “blamed” for that, he said.
“China is doing what any large, wealthy, continental power would do,” he said. “We end up speaking as if China’s rise is aimed at us. It’s not at us at all, it’s for them. It’s about human flourishing, and they’ve been very successful with that.”
That’s an important point in a relationship where intentions can be hard to parse out. Americans are at times doomed to short-termism and can be ill-equipped to read nuance, Mr. Daly said.
And China has undertaken efforts to exert influence in the U.S. in both overt ways — like inbound investment, educational exchange and public diplomacy — and in unacknowledged ways, such as economic manipulation and covert espionage.
“This is a tricky, unprecedented complex challenge,” Mr. Daly said, but it’s “manageable” with the right level of understanding on the American side. That means the country needs more expertise in Chinese language and culture, he added, exhorting young people in the crowd to live and work in China.
The other American on the panel gave “emphatic yes” on the rivalry question, but he sees it more as a competitive “sibling rivalry” than an inherently adversarial relationship.
David Firestein, founding executive director of the China Public Policy Center at the University of Texas, doesn’t believe that China’s intentions are to replace the U.S. as the world’s only superpower; its aim is to create a multipolar world in which its position is better respected.
But there are “complicating factors” in their relationship, namely that they both see themselves as “exceptional” countries facing a dual-sided “inconvenient truth”: The U.S. thinks China is the only country that has the capability and perhaps intention to “fundamentally change our way of life.” China, meanwhile, sees the U.S. as the only threat to the longevity of the Communist Party of China.
Dr. Firestein still doesn’t put stock in the so-called “Thucydides trap,” a theory that rising and established powers are destined to come into conflict. The idea lost its power with the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, he said.
“I don’t buy it for a second, because you have to believe that the U.S. and China are willing to go into a mutually annihilating nuclear war to settle whatever differences they have, and I simply don’t believe that will happen,” he said.
The issue of “fairness” on both sides of the relationship will continue to be a challenge as well, Mr. Firestein said, with China believing that the world order has been stacked against it after its “century of humiliation.”
But China could make strides in curbing American perceptions of unfairness by opening its markets further to American goods and services, he added. Letting China in the WTO wasn’t an outright mistake, but there have been bumps along the way.
“On balance I think it was the right thing to do,” he said.
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