Treating China as an Existential Threat to America May Lead to a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Key Highlights :
The United States is increasingly viewing China as an existential threat and is taking steps to counter its growing influence. This is a dangerous path that could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy and create an unnecessary conflict between the world’s two most powerful countries.
China has certainly fed these fears by building up its military, pressing disputed territorial claims, partnering with a revanchist Russia and with its own rhetoric. President Xi Jinping of China has vowed to thwart what he views as U.S.-led efforts to contain China’s rise, and has said the nation’s “great rejuvenation” will be the “greatest contribution to mankind.” But such ideological proclamations are in part motivated by insecurity — most Communist states have collapsed, and the Chinese leadership is acutely aware of this — and are meant more to rally the public and to shore up the party than to reflect actual policy or fixed beliefs. Ideology in China is itself malleable, rather than a rigid cage that determines policy and has been continually tweaked to justify the maintenance of one-party rule through decades of great change.
Under Mao, for instance, capitalists were persecuted as “counterrevolutionaries.” But under President Jiang Zemin the Chinese Communist Party abandoned a core Marxist belief in 2001 by allowing private entrepreneurs to become party members. China’s economy today is more capitalist than Marxist and highly dependent on access to world markets. Assessments of China based on cherry-picked phrases from party propaganda overlook the frequent gap between rhetoric and reality.
In 2018, for example, China cracked down on Marxist student groups and labor organizers, possibly because — as the labor scholar and sociologist Ching Kwan Lee has noted — the young activists embodied “the Marxist principles the C.C.P. has long since abandoned in practice.” Likewise, Beijing has for years emphasized the sanctity of national sovereignty and noninterference in a country’s domestic affairs, yet has provided diplomatic cover for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Leading Chinese intellectuals openly acknowledge the difficulty of reconciling what China says with what it does. “Even we don’t believe much of what we say,” the Chinese economist Yao Yang, who is known for his pragmatic views, has said. “Our goal is not to defeat liberalism, but instead to say that what we have can be as good as what you have.” Jiang Shigong, a legal scholar and apologist for Mr. Xi’s “China dream,” has written that “‘Socialism’ is not ossified dogma, but instead an open concept awaiting exploration and definition.”
China’s long-term ambitions are difficult to know with certainty, and they can change. But it is presently unlikely that it can — or wants to — replace the United States as the world’s dominant power. Mr. Xi and the C.C.P. apparently see the United States as trying to keep China perpetually subordinate and vulnerable, opposing it in an international system that Beijing believes favors the United States and developed democracies. But, at a minimum, China seems more intent on reforming and reshaping a system under which it has prospered — making it safer for autocracy — rather than replacing it. Mr. Xi often couches this effort in his political slogans like the “China dream” and a “shared future for humankind.” But there is much debate over what these visions really mean and what costs and risks China should accept in seeking global leadership.
China’s overseas development largess, for example, is limited by the imperative of addressing its own persistent development needs at home, research by the scholar Yan Sun has shown. Same for other key Chinese strategies for widening its influence: Its efforts to internationalize the renminbi and reduce dollar dominance are constrained by the tight grip it keeps on the currency’s value, as well as other capital controls. These policies help stabilize its economy and prevent capital flight, but they limit the renminbi’s global appeal.
U.S. concerns often center on the possibility that China could attack Taiwan. But despite menacing Chinese military exercises meant to deter the self-ruled island from moving closer to formal independence, many experts believe that Beijing still prefers to achieve its longstanding objective of “peaceful reunification” through measures short of war. China could lose in a war and face international sanctions and supply chain disruptions. These would be economically and politically devastating, jeopardizing Mr. Xi’s prime objectives of regime security, domestic stability and national rejuvenation.
Facing economic headwinds and a narrowing window to realize its ambitions, China is increasingly aware of the limitations of what it can achieve in terms of surpassing the United States as the world’s largest economy, let alone its aspirations of global leadership. There is broad recognition within China that it remains technologically, militarily and economically weaker than the United States and that further modernization depends upon continued access to international technology, capital and markets within a stable economic order. “It is impossible for America to contain the rise of China,” the influential Chinese scholar Huang Renwei has written, “and it is equally impossible for China to quickly surpass America.”
Chinese rhetoric about global governance reform has resonated in many developing countries that also see international institutions as tilted against them. But there is little reason to believe that the C.C.P.’s self-serving, nationalist ideology will captivate the world, especially as Mr. Xi feeds authoritarianism with his coercive tactics against foreign and domestic critics and that increasingly
