The Contest of the Century (2 page)

Yet, sitting under the baking sun in Tiananmen Square that morning, I felt Hu Jintao was delivering a very different message—the words of a risen China, not a rising China. He was telling the country and the world not only that the Communist Party was still very much in charge, but that it was also pursuing a path that was moral and right. China, he suggested, was now an important nation with legitimate interests, and it would not be afraid to defend them. Nations do not change tack overnight, of course, but the parade brought to the surface powerful forces that had been building for some time. It represented a symbolic turning point in modern Chinese history, when it became hard to ignore the way the Deng Xiaoping formula of self-restraint was crumbling and the new era of geopolitical competition with the United States that was emerging. The socialist rock in the East wanted to escape from the shadow of the West.

——

This is a book about the new age of rivalry. It is about why China now wants to start exerting influence around the world and about the growing competition with the U.S. that will be the single most important factor in world politics over the coming decades. If globalization has been the driving force over the last few decades—in fact, since China embarked on its economic reforms in the late 1970s, after the death of Mao—then there is now a powerful force pulling in the opposite direction, an old-fashioned struggle for influence and power between China and the U.S., the two most important nations in the world.

The Contest of the Century
revolves around three central points.

The first is that China has started to make the crucial shift from a government that accepts the existing rules to one that seeks to shape the world according to its own national interests, from rule taker to rule maker. Beijing is starting to channel its inner great power. The book provides a portrait of the new Chinese mentality, the energies, ambitions, and tensions that are pushing China in this direction. Much of the discussion of modern China focuses on the nature of the Communist Party and its hold on power, and, indeed, it is impossible to detach ideology from the way China relates to the rest of the world. But China is also responding forcefully to the same sort of instincts that have animated new great powers in the past, with particularly strong echoes from both the U.S. and late-nineteenth-century Germany. “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” as Mark Twain is often quoted as saying—even though it is not clear that he ever did.

Second, to pursue those goals, China is inevitably finding itself pulled into a geopolitical competition with the U.S., the country in whose image much of the global order is fashioned. China and the U.S. are starting to contest the high ground of international politics, from control of the oceans in Asia to the currency that is used in international business. Forget their bland rhetoric: China’s leaders think very much in geopolitical terms and would like to gradually erode the bases of American power. Almost every important global issue will find itself colored by this rivalry. Yet it will not be the win-at-all-costs ideological struggle of the Cold War. Instead, this will be an older, more fluid form of rivalry that is based on balance of power and building coalitions of support.

Finally, I will argue that the U.S. is in a strong position to deflect this new Chinese challenge to its position in the world. Whether they have come to praise or to warn about China’s rise, most authors on China subscribe to an almost linear transfer of wealth and influence from West to East, from a U.S. in decline to an irrepressible China. There is an air of inevitability in the way China is presented. Yet the roots of American power are deeper than they seem and hard to overturn. If the U.S. can clean its own financial house and avoid the temptations of either confrontation or isolation, it will still hold many of the best cards in the twenty-first century.

——

“Great power” is a phrase with an old-fashioned, dusty feel to it, something from the history textbooks to do with the Schleswig-Holstein Question or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The age of the great power seemed to have passed with the Cold War and America’s unipolar dominance that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet the rise of China strikes many notes from a very different era.
“No nation has ever experienced such an increase in its power without seeking to translate it into global influence,” Henry Kissinger once wrote about the U.S. in the late nineteenth century. Today’s China is animated by the same energies that stirred in the U.S. from the 1890s, when it announced itself to the world. At home, new great powers are possessed by an economic dynamism and a zeal for grand engineering, by the construction of modern cities and the laying of vast railway networks across continents. Before long, that energy takes them overseas, where their companies develop trading posts and factories across the globe. They feel the need to use their new economic power to strengthen their own security, to fend off potential rivals, and to protect their overseas interests—a mixture of pride and fear that leads them to build grand navies. As their standing grows, they try to mold the political, military, and economic rules that govern the international system. Rising wealth creates rising expectations among a new middle class that wants its rulers to stand up for their country. The material benefits of a growing economy are never enough for aspiring great powers—they also want respect, recognition, and influence. Power changes countries, just as it changes people.

When America started staking its claim in the world in the 1890s, it was propelled in part by a growing centralization of power in the presidency. The horrors of the Civil War had given way to a fragmented political environment in the 1870s and 1880s, with neither the executive nor Congress able to establish control of foreign policy. America’s international role only started to be transformed when the White House began to exert more decisive influence in the 1890s. In China, something close to the opposite has happened. The last decade has seen what might be described as a fracturing of power in China in ways that have begun to have a decisive influence over the country’s foreign policy. China’s leaders have not abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s advice to keep a low profile—on the contrary, they regularly insist that it remains their guiding principle. Instead, the Deng consensus is being gradually overwhelmed by the reality of modern-day China and its society. Deng’s cautious strategy is slowly fraying. Fragmentation of power is not the same as political liberalization, of course, but, rather, a dispersal of influence within the elite. It means that China’s senior leaders do not enjoy the almost untrammeled authority that Deng once enjoyed. They face powerful vested interests within the party-state, and an officer class that has its own hawkish take on global affairs. They also have to keep an anxious eye on the nationalist views of a rising middle class. On airport bookshelves in China these days, alongside the Jack Welch and Bill Gates biographies, you can now find titles such as Xue Yong’s
How to Be a Great Power
, a sort of Cliff Notes for modern geopolitics. All these voices are pushing China to be more ambitious overseas. China remains resolutely authoritarian, but these days, it also has a lot more politics.

To think about China as a great power might seem obvious to readers who have watched the swagger and military buildup of recent years, but it goes against the two most dominant interpretations of what really drives modern China.

The first is what one might call the Davos view, after the home of the World Economic Forum, the contention that China’s leaders are so obsessed with economic development at home that they have little time for or real interest in getting too involved in the affairs of the world. Even if they did want to push harder against the U.S., so the argument goes, they would soon be confronted with the reality of the enormous
economic interdependence between the two countries. It is easy to see why such a view would take hold. Achieving high rates of growth has been the singular achievement of China’s Communist leaders over the last two decades and their principal justification for maintaining an iron grip on power. And for Davos optimists, globalization has transformed international politics, creating a web of economic connections and dependencies that prevent any country from rocking the boat. Geopolitics, with its emphasis on competition and struggle between nations, has been rendered unnecessary by the multinational global economy. In China, there is a cottage industry of scribes developing slogans to impress the rest of the world with how unthreatening its rise really is—from the “Shanghai smile” and “win-win” economic cooperation to “peaceful development.” (“Peaceful rise” was taken up at one stage, but then dropped when it was deemed to be too threatening.) In
The Post-American World
, which is in some ways the most influential international-relations book of recent years in the West, Fareed Zakaria writes that the Chinese are too pragmatic to let the vanities of power politics damage their economic interests.
“The veneration of an abstract idea is somewhat alien to China’s practical mind-set,” he writes.

Yet, when even the most materialistic countries arrive at a certain scale and economic reach, they feel they have no choice but to try and influence events beyond their shores. China’s epic urbanization push is being fueled by goods from the four corners of the earth—by oil from Saudi Arabia, by coal from Indonesia, by iron ore from Brazil, and by copper from the Congo. For the first time in its millennial history, China’s economic interests are genuinely global, and it needs a foreign policy to match them. Deng Xiaoping’s “hiding the brightness” is no longer sufficient. To keep its economy humming, China feels it needs to start molding the world it is operating in. China’s economy relies on the continued safety of seaborne trade—something which has been guaranteed since the end of the Second World War by the navy of the United States, the country which the Chinese elite mistrusts the most (with the possible exception of Japan). Like other great powers before it, China is building a navy to take to the high seas because it does not want to outsource the security of its economic lifelines to someone else. The problem-solving China so heralded at Davos is being replaced by something with much harder edges. In short, geopolitics is back.

The second brand of conventional wisdom holds that the regime in Beijing is too insecure about its hold on power at home to think seriously about challenging the U.S. The brittleness is everywhere to be seen, from the heavy-handed security at the 2009 National Day parade to the periodic arrests of dissidents to the opacity of the political process. One of the most commonly cited factoids about modern China is that Beijing actually spends more money on internal security than it does on its defense budget, even though military spending has been rising sharply. But what this explanation misses is that domestic insecurity is feeding, not inhibiting, the desire to stand tall overseas. In one way or another, the Chinese Communist Party has been suffering a legitimacy crisis since it abandoned Marx and embraced the market in the late 1970s, and that crisis has been more acute since the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. The party has tried to fill this gap in all sorts of ways. Economic growth and a reputation for competent governance have been the main props. But China’s leaders have also buttressed their legitimacy with an appeal to a nationalism that is tinged with a sense of victimhood. Brittle politics at home are stimulating a more assertive voice abroad.

In the end, thinking of China as an aspiring great power is the best way to demystify the country, to resist the temptation to either demonize or exoticize. China is neither an anti-democratic hegemon launching a new Cold War, as its more conservative critics suggest, nor the postmodern, Confucian meritocracy that some supporters imagine. China is, instead, a state which is behaving in many of the same ways that other states have behaved when they started to become very powerful.

——

It is an indication of the influence of Deng Xiaoping’s
taoguang yanhui
formula that it has simultaneously been attacked by hard-liners at home and inspired fear abroad. The advice was kept secret at first, and to this day, there are differing accounts of the full text that he wrote. In the 1990s, the phrase was heavily criticized by Chinese leftists who thought it a sop to the U.S. Yet for many foreign audiences, it had a different feel. The official translation in China is “hide the brightness and nourish obscurity”; however, in the U.S., the same words have often been translated as “bide one’s time,” a phrase that contains a certain menace about future intentions. For Deng, the ambiguity was a way of keeping
different groups happy. He always knew that a powerful China would start competing for power and influence with the U.S. He just wanted to put off the rivalry for as long as possible.

Such self-restraint has become harder to sell since 2008. A year before Hu Jintao stood up to speak in Tiananmen at the parade, Lehman Brothers had collapsed. The psychological fallout from the global financial crisis was particularly important in China, where predictions about inevitable American decline have taken deep root. Within the Chinese elite, there has been a long-standing argument about how China should behave toward the U.S. when China became a powerful nation: the doves said that China would be best served by playing along with the U.S.-led international system, while the hawks said China would need to stand up to the U.S. Yet it was a debate held in suspended animation. Everyone knew that Beijing would have to answer this question one day, but the priority for the time being was to focus on the building up of what Chinese officials call “Comprehensive National Power.” Just as 9/11 empowered American neoconservatives, the financial crisis ended the shadow boxing in Beijing and unleashed powerful demands within parts of the elite to begin taking on the U.S. The time to answer the question, the hawks demanded, was now.

To warn about growing competition, however, is not to predict conflict, especially in an era when nuclear deterrence provides a powerful brake on both nations. There are no Chinese plans for the sort of territorial expansion that scarred Europe in the late nineteenth century, or for a project of global domination. Instead, Beijing has more subtle, long-term instincts about gradually undermining the foundations of American power and influence, starting in Asia and moving outward. International-relations scholars like to ask whether new powers will rise within the existing order or try to overthrow it. But neither explanation captures China’s behavior. Instead, Beijing is beginning a process of gradually trying to mold the system in its own direction, to shape rather than tear down. Chinese leaders understand the limitations that globalization places on them, and the benefits that thirty years of trading with the U.S. have brought, but they are also far more skeptical and resentful about American influence than most in Washington realize. There is nothing surprising about what China is now doing. If anything, the surprise is that it did not start sooner.