China’s Unlikely Rise

China’s emergence as a world power seemed a distant possibility prior to the end of the Cold War. Until the 1980s, China was a poor, agrarian country. Forced famines during the Great Leap Forward, and years of violent political turmoil during the Cultural Revolution, left the country in a precarious economic position. GDP growth stagnated in the 1960s and rose only steadily until Mao’s death in 1976.

The “opening” of China in 1972 under President Richard Nixon led to China developing economic ties with the United States. Nixon resumed relations with the People’s Republic (PRC) for geostrategic reasons, led by policymakers who viewed China’s rise through the prism of the Cold War. Strong economic ties to the United States would further pull China away from the Soviet orbit — intensifying the Sino-Soviet split that had begun in the 1950s — and bring down communism. By opening Chinese markets to Western investment, the Soviets would have to double down on autarky.

The strategy also depended upon Chinese leadership that embraced global markets. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, instituted a series of capitalist reforms that expanded Chinese investment into Europe and the United States. China’s effort to avoid “shock therapy” led it to adopt a model of state-planned capitalism. The normalization of US-China relations under President Jimmy Carter, coupled with Deng’s reforms, further solidified China’s access to trade with the United States, Europe, and Japan, paving the way to the Communist state to achieve average annual growth rates of 9 percent throughout the 1980s.

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the United States became an unrivaled superpower. American policymakers thought China would strive for political and economic liberalization, nesting comfortably within an American imperium. George H. W. Bush, an ambassador to the PRC in the 1970s, believed that trade with the West would produce a more democratic China. President Bill Clinton, too, thought China’s rise to be an inexorable good for the world. Clinton had harsh rhetoric for China on the 1992 campaign trail and was particularly critical of its human rights record. In office, however, he toed the line of his predecessors and pushed for a conciliatory relationship to the People’s Republic. The United States renewed a Most Favored Nation status for China and sought to strengthen economic ties between the two countries, which succeeded magnificently: US trade with China when Clinton came to office totaled $33.1 billion; by the time of his final year in office, it had more than tripled, to $116.2 billion.

George W. Bush viewed China with greater suspicion during the early months of his presidency, but the 9/11 terrorist attacks derailed efforts to adopt a harsher approach toward China. Rather than renewing the Cold War, Bush called the PRC and other Asian nations “important partners in the global coalition against terror.” The United States even became complicit in the surveillance, detainment, and labor repression of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which it depicted as a contribution to the “war on terror.”

Nevertheless, while Bush’s staff criticized China’s manipulation of the yuan and watched China’s military and technological advances warily, they envisioned a world in which diplomatic cooperation with the PRC would maintain US primacy. Preoccupied with Iraq, Afghanistan, and a broader war on terror, the Bush administration did not concern itself too much with China. As the Bush administration exited the White House in 2009, the National Security Council warned that “the inextricable interdependence of China’s growth and that of the global economy requires a policy of engagement.”

But America strategy of primacy depended on retaining a favorable imbalance of power that was inexorably shifting with China’s rise. A rebalancing of global power distributions would not have mattered were it not the case that many policymakers — doomsayers in the Pentagon and at think tanks — assumed China would be unsatisfied accruing economic power without commensurate military dominance. So while the national security state remained consumed by counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, intellectuals focused on geopolitics like Robert Kaplan prophesized as early as 2005 that “the American military contest with China . . . will define the twenty-first century.”

These assessments were based on expectations without empirical evidence — they presumed that economic growth would spur China to challenge American military primacy in East Asia, where China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has a massive geographical advantage over US forces. As primacy remained America’s approach, the natural response to the growth of Chinese power was to do more of the same: increase forward basing in the region, build more ships, modernize America’s nuclear arsenal, and invest in precision-guided missiles, drones, and advanced platforms like the F-22.

Renewing the New Deal, Renewing the Cold War

Still, the bulk of policymakers in China and the United States saw themselves as part of a new capitalist order: global markets and the financialization of the world economy would be a net good for both countries. Then came the 2008 financial crisis.

While America was focused on coordinating emergency swap lines with central banks, China authorized a $586 billion stimulus, much of it going to infrastructure building, real estate markets, and development financing across East Asia. As the United States underwent a prolonged recession, China consolidated its position as East Asia’s preeminent growth engine, albeit one with a highly unbalanced economy riddled by corruption, too much bad debt, and too little consumption relative to production.

China also began to look inward, taking steps to insulate its economy from both future market bubbles and attempts by the West to constrain its technological development. In this context, skepticism of China’s larger motives began to grow. Anti-China militarism incubated in national security circles during the Obama years but did not gain traction until Trump’s presidency. Obama needed China to help keep neoliberal globalization stable, so even while the Pentagon pursued military supremacy in Asia (and around the world), his overall approach was rooted in the US-China détente dating to the 1970s.

Obama downplayed rather than acted on warnings from China hawks. By February 2016, the White House futilely directed the Pentagon to stop talking about “competition,” wary that naturalizing a clash between a rising power and a declining hegemon would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Then Americans elected Trump in 2016. The Trump presidency emboldened the China hawks and replaced Obama’s imperative to preserve Sino-US cooperation with a nationalist economic war against China. National security think tanks like the Hudson Institute, which led the pivot to preparing for a war with China, found the Trump administration a willing consumer of its glossy policy briefs and war games.

With funding from defense contractors and the Hewlett Foundation, policy wonks began imagining a project of American renewal through great-power rivalry.

Trump’s national security strategy argued that China seeks “to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests” and that “China seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region.” The then president’s national security team enshrined “great-power competition” with China as the predominant focus of US grand strategy because it appeared to pose the most acute threat to US primacy.

Believing that Democrats can do great-power rivalry the “smart” way, the Biden administration expanded Trump’s China policy rather than rejecting it. Biden kept many of Trump’s tariffs in place while imposing new ones, expanded export controls of US technology to China, reasserted American strength in the South China Sea, and reaffirmed the necessity of military primacy. But in contrast to the Trump administration, staff like Jake Sullivan — Biden’s national security adviser — believed China rivalry could sustain a twenty-first century New Deal — one premised on infrastructure spending, investment in semiconductors, and climate technology to outcompete China in its efforts to mitigate emission of greenhouse gases. The Biden administration was awash with Cold War nostalgia, its staff genuinely believing that US military power delivered prosperity at home and abroad during the Cold War and could do so again.

The effects of Biden’s anti-China posturing has been the opposite of its intended aims. At home, the China threat has not brought national cohesion — it divides us, as politicians inflate the China threat to score political points. It was also the principal excuse that politicians used to convert social projects of climate change and job creation into a corporate giveaway that fails to discipline capital while “greenwashing” economic nationalism.

Abroad, Washington’s anti-China obsession has justified US support for authoritarian regimes abroad. Washington politely ignores the shortcomings of India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party while it sells the country billions in weapons and fetes Narendra Modi with state dinners, even as he orders assassinations of political rivals next door in Canada. Most worryingly, rivalry is the reason for arms-racing and jingoistic posturing over the fate of Taiwan. China has always impeded Taiwan’s ability to be a “normal” nation in international society, but for most of the twenty-first century, the threat of a war over Taiwan was low. Until, that is, the onset of great-power competition. Now, China and the United States really are locked in a military confrontation that has been defined in starkly zero-sum terms.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The twenty-first century will not be ruled by any single great power. Primacy is unrealistic, unnecessary, and avoidable. And great-power cooperation on development financing, sovereign debt relief, and a just green transition in the Global South should become the basis for not only a new Sino-US détente, but a new global economic order as well.