 |
| Credit: Wikipedia Img: John Mearsheimer |
As the world looks to the recent developments in China-U.S relations for de-escalating tensions and retrieving their initial friendship ping-ponged up 50 years ago. International scholars have been studying for decades whether China's rise will be peaceful or confrontational; some have made reliable analyses and predictions. Professor John Mearsheimer is one of them from the department of political science at the University of Chicago.
Professor John Mearsheimer predicted two decades
ago that there would be a conflict between China and the United States. Was he largely right what he
predicts on the future of U.S China competition both in the short term and in
the long run?
Military might: competition inevitable?
According to Mearsheimer, the conflict would
continue for the foreseeable future. There's no way that they can both be the
dominant military power in the region with regard to sophisticated technologies
which really matter in today's world. Either the United States is the dominant
country in terms of developing sophisticated technologies or China is the
dominant country, and these two countries are in a competition. The United
States has been number one for a long period of time and we're now in a world
where the Chinese are capable of catching up with if not overtake the United
States, and obviously, the United States doesn't want that to happen and the
Chinese, on the other hand, do want it to happen. And who wins this competition
over the decades ahead is probably the most important question involving the
international system.
It will become more intense with the passage of
time in large part because China will become more powerful and it will become
more assertive, and at the same time the United States will go to greater
lengths to contain China and even think about rolling back Chinese power. So as bad as things are today, they're likely
to get worse in the future.
Read more: US-China rivalry: Who will lead the world?
Allies: Who will support whom?
Is it necessarily a zero-sum game or proposition
for Asian countries? Do they have to pick and choose either China or the United
States?
There's no question that East Asian countries
like Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, and so forth, and so on at some point they're going to have to clearly choose one side or the
other. And in almost all of those cases, they will side with the United States
against China. However, there will continue to be significant trade and
investment involving China and Japan or China and Australia and China and the
United States. So all economic intercourse is not going to shut down. Hence,
the choice facing these East Asian countries is not quite as black and white as
it seems to be. Under one global village and under this economic globalization
it's not so simple to take a clear-cut stance.
US-China cooperation: A prospect:
There's no doubt that there are certain areas in
which China and the United States will cooperate. Nuclear proliferation is one
of those issues, for example, the Chinese and the Americans, and the Russians will
all cooperate to limit nuclear proliferation. With regard to climate change and
pandemics, there is likely to be significant cooperation on those fronts as
well. But the key point is that the overall relationship between the United
States and China will be one of competition, strategic competition. And that
will be a dangerous contest because there will always be the prospect that this
competition will morph into a war. So there will be some cooperation but it
will be part and parcel of intense security competition.
Biden's policy: an ideological or political
competition?
When it comes to Joe Biden’s China policy, many
liberals including some in the Biden administration would say that the
necessity to contain a rising China is because they clash in liberal ideas and
values. They point out the so-called human rights abuses in Xinjiang. They
called out the issue of Hong Kong and Taiwan and also what they call the
authoritarian model of governance. Is it really the case that America is afraid
of China because of values?
There's no question that rhetorically American
policymakers and American elites, in general, will emphasize that the
competition between the United States and China is about ideology. It's about
two different political systems competing with each other and this is analogous
to what happened in the cold war when we talked about the Soviet
Union as a communist state and the United States as a capitalist democracy.
Ideology was very important rhetorically in the cold war as it will be in the
U.S China competition. This is not an ideological competition that is
vindicated further by the US-China historical relations. The United States had
enjoyed smooth relations with China for a long period of time for many decades.
The United States in 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015 had no difficulty dealing with
this authoritarian or communist state. There's been no change in the political
system in China. So what's going on here is that to mobilize political support
in the west against China and even in East Asia against China but that's not
what's driving the train here. What's driving the train is power politics. So
it's that power competition and not an ideological competition. That is the
root cause of the situation today.
Read more: The US has a strong opponent this time: How new cold war is a bigger challenge for Uncle Sam?
Way out for competition:
How can the U.S China competition be coped with?
How can the two countries really cope with the negative consequences of their
future competition?
Well, it’s one thing to have an intense security
competition. It’s another thing to actually have a war between China and the
United States and we want to go to great lengths to make sure that that doesn't
happen. And it's going to be very difficult to do because again China is bent
on changing the status quo. And if it is believed that China is going to
continue to grow economically and it's going to continue to grow militarily,
China is going to think seriously about using military force to change the
status quo to its advantage. Hence, the United States will go to great lengths
to prevent that from happening.
China's success: the strategic competition:
China eradicated poverty last year according to official data and also it is launching the 14th five-year plan, a guiding road map guiding China's economy and social-political development. These domestic Chinese programs have been largely successful. There’s no question that huge numbers of people have been lifted out of poverty in China over the past four or five decades and from a Chinese perspective, this is a wonderful thing. The Chinese government will go to the maximum extent to sustain those gains and to bring those people who are left in poverty out of poverty. So this is an extraordinary victory. And in terms of running the economy, few countries in the history of the world have done better than Chinese leaders to grow their economies, to say, they have been wildly successful. That's why, in Mearsheimer's opinion, this is strategic competition.
Confucianism and Realism: The foreign policy of
China:
John Mearsheimer believed that China is a deep
realist state. He had read Chinese classics such as those of Confucius and also
the art of war by Sun Tzu.
In his opinion, those Chinese books are very
interesting, especially Sun Tzu but realists believe that when you look at
great powers and you try to understand how they act. It's almost always the
case that they act in similar ways because the structure of the international
system just does not leave them much choice. So when you look at Chinese
behavior, Confucianism tells you very little about how China will behave. What
really tells you a great deal about Chinese foreign policy behavior is basic
realist logic. Chinese are realists to the core. Confucianism is an ideology
that in fundamental ways is at odds with basic realist logic. China is a
realist country to the core and Confucianism matters little for its foreign
policy.
These are the ideas of Mearsheimer taken from its interview given to CGTN
0 Comments