Referring to the latest Olympics, Graham Allison — founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and author of the highly acclaimed 2017 tome Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? — wrote about the US-China Olympic rivalry in the Washington, DC-based The National Interest on Aug 9. The two nations’ near-tie in Olympic medal rankings, according to Allison, serves to reinforce the bipartisan conviction that China has now become more than the United States’ near-peer competitor, with substantial leads in some metrics in five core arenas: economic, technological, military, diplomatic, and ideological.
Allison penned his piece before the Olympics’ finale. By now, he might well have added that instead of a tie, China’s gold medal total, if including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s two golds (celebrated with China’s national anthem), has once again exceeded that of the US (following China’s historic tally of 48 gold medals in the 2008 Olympics).
Mindful of zero-sum “win-or-lose” realities of geopolitics, Allison hopes that President Joe Biden’s concept of “competitive coexistence” with the three C’s — competition, communication and cooperation — could outlive the seemingly inevitability of springing the US-China “Thucydides Trap”.
However, the reference to “competition” and “coexistence” increasingly sounds hollow and hypocritical across the five core competitive arenas. Rather than relying on its own strength and abilities to compete as in the Olympics, the US has increasingly placed obstacles and banana skins in China’s way, trying to slow, if not derail, China’s national advancement, official denials notwithstanding.
For example, in May, following a “Section 301 Review”, America imposed a large series of tariff hikes on a wide range of Chinese goods, including semiconductors, batteries, solar cells and critical minerals. The existing tariff level against imports of Chinese electric vehicles has been quadrupled, at the expense of not only US consumers and its renewable-energy transition, but also huge disruptions to the global supply and value chain, with extensive inflationary consequences.
Worsening these disruptive consequences, the US has also been doubling down on its extremely severe stranglehold on China’s access to high-end semiconductor chips, including reportedly a specific chip architecture known as “gate all around”, or GAA, which large chipmakers, including AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Samsung, are planning to mass-produce next year.
Militarily, the US has surrounded China with pacts including the Quad alliance (the US, Japan, India, Australia), the AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom, the US) nuclear-powered submarine pact, stepped-up defense ties with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, increased naval patrols and military exercises in and around the South China Sea, and quietly armed Taiwan to the teeth under a “military porcupine” strategy, cognizant of its strategic geographical value and global high-end semiconductor-chip dominance.
Diplomatically and ideologically, while maintaining communication channels with Beijing, Washington has been corralling allies across the globe to isolate and confront China, hyping the “China threat” and blackening China with twisted rhetoric of “democracy against autocracy”.
Nor would US-China relations improve if Donald Trump returns to the White House. His MAGA (“make America great again”) mantra is known for unpredictable maximalist tactics. He has touted an intention to tax 10 times as many imports, mainly targeting China. With robust bipartisan consensus on the perceived “China threat”, he is unlikely to want to appear “soft” or “weak” on China.
Indeed, in matters of state, Washington appears willing to stoop to conquer, as Trump’s former secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s Freudian slip “We lied. We cheated. We stole” seems to suggest.
However, it begs the question whether an all-out campaign to isolate and segregate China is likely to be successful in a digital age of the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions. A turbocharged interconnected and interdependent world has China extensively and deeply embedded.
Meanwhile, the no-holds-barred mindset to maintain US global hegemony has hurt the economies and livelihoods of a large part of the Global South, which is rising in national capacity to hedge against or pay lip service to the US bullying in all but name. More countries do not want to be forced to take sides. More want to join BRICS (originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization groupings, where China holds sway as the world’s largest trader, manufacturer, and supply-and-value-chain central hub.
Additionally, by continuing support of Israel over its inhumane Gaza war, America is sapping its global moral authority when China’s soft power is on the ascendant. Witness Beijing’s success in brokering a historic rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia and delivering a “Beijing Declaration” by corralling opposing Palestinian factions in support of a unified authority for a formal Palestinian state.
In any case, much of America’s global strengths remains unrivaled. Its military’s global reach, readiness and technological sophistication remain a huge cut above the rest. It continues to produce the world’s largest number of Nobel laureates. It has enviable geography with a cornucopia of natural resources. It is protected by two vast oceans. It borders friendly and much weaker neighboring countries. Deeply entrenched in the global financial market, the dollar’s dominance is unlikely to be unseated anytime soon. Moreover, the US maintains outsized leadership of the World Bank and many other international financial institutions.
Even as China’s global influence is rising, it seems a little far-fetched to assume that it has the ability, or the inclination, to replicate America’s global leadership or to overturn the existing world order that has benefited China’s rise for decades.
Looking deeper, it is questionable whether a “win-or-lose”, zero-sum mindset remains productive. There can be winners in many different fields. As perhaps an extreme analogy, why should Albert Einstein compete with William Shakespeare? This seems to be the essence of Beijing’s “win-win” philosophy.
Instead of squeezing its perceived “existential challenger” in every turn, would not a reasonably secure US win back much of its soft power by competing with China more in the spirit of the Olympics?
Nevertheless, as China’s global gravitas continues to grow, the US, unsure of China’s ultimate intentions, is likely to remain combative and hostile toward China. This squares with John Mearsheimer’s theory of “offensive realism” in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
This lack of mutual strategic trust can be ameliorated by deepening and expanding the cooperation part of the previously mentioned three C’s. Currently, this is largely limited to fighting the spread of fentanyl into the US and discussions on climate change. There is no reason cooperation or coordination cannot be expanded, for example, in areas of space research, green energy innovation, market access in China for American-brand consumer products, development projects in the Global South, and regional conflict resolution such as the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. More joint efforts would ultimately breed greater mutual understanding and mutual trust, minimizing the priority of zero-sum calculations.
In the final analysis, as China seeks to pivot toward growing its global soft power, including the creation of accommodating circumstances for Taiwan’s peaceful unification, this may set in motion a momentum toward relatively more US-China soft-power rivalry, offsetting some of the ill effects of no-holds-barred hard-power hostility.
Should this scenario come to pass, the US may well find competing with China more in the Olympic spirit to be in its own best interest.
The author is an international independent China strategist, and was previously the director-general of social welfare and Hong Kong’s official chief representative for the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, Russia, Norway, and Switzerland.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
