The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2013, 1 of 24
doi:10.1093/cjip/pot003
China and the US: Comparable Cases
of ‘Peaceful Rise’?
Barry Buzan*y and Michael Coxy
Introduction
Competing great powers, and the potential for clashes among them when
there are changes of place at the top of the hierarchy, are an old story in
y
The authors would like to thank Luca Tardelli for research assistance, and two anonymous
reviewers for CJIP for their helpful comments. Barry Buzan is Emeritus Professor at
Department of International Relations in the LSE and a Fellow of the British
Academy. Michael Cox is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE.
He can be reached at [email protected]
*Corresponding author: E-mail: [email protected]
ß The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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Competing great powers, and the potential for clashes among
them when there are changes of place at the top of the hierarchy, are an old story in international relations. Against this
realist model of inevitably warlike power struggles stands
another idea: ‘peaceful rise’. China committed itself to this
policy a decade ago, and arguably adopted it as far back as
the shift to reform and opening up in the late 1970s. The only
other modern great power than can possibly claim to have risen
peacefully is the United States. Since there are only two cases of
attempted peaceful rise, it is worth asking what parallels can be
drawn between the United States and Chinese experiences.
Given their different placements in history, with the rise of the
United States having taken place between 1865 and 1945, a
century earlier than China’s current rise, what lessons, if any,
can be learned for China from the United States experience?
This article looks closely at both the meaning of ‘peaceful rise’
and the credibility of the United States and Chinese claims to it.
It surveys the key points of similarity and difference between the
United States and China during their process of rise, comparing
contemporary China with the United States of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, not with today’s United States. The
conclusion sets out six lessons for China and for international
society that can be drawn from comparing the two cases.
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Barry Buzan and Michael Cox
1
2
E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, Michael Cox, ed., (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001
[1946]); A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1958); Kenneth N.
Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading MA.: Addison Wesley, 1979); Robert
Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana, 1989);
Ronald L. Tammen, Jacek Kugler, Douglas Lemke, Carole Alsharabati and Brian Efird,
eds., Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century (New York: Seven Bridges Press,
2000); William C. Wohlforth, ‘Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War’,
World Politics, Vol. 61, No. 1 (2009), pp. 28–57.
For example: John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the
Cold War’, International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1990), pp. 5–56; John J. Mearsheimer,
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).
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international relations. Indeed, this story is central to the mainstream realist
approach to International Relations (IR) and it comes in various forms:
rising and declining great powers, hegemonic (in)stability theory, polarity
theory and power transition theory, among others.1 The historical record
offers a lot of support for the idea that war is a frequent accompaniment
when rising powers challenge incumbent ones for the top places in the international hierarchy. France rose to power by challenging Spain and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Britain rose to power by defeating the
Netherlands and France, and had to fight two challenges from Germany.
Germany rose to power by defeating Austria-Hungary and France. For a
time during the late 19th century Germany might have aligned with Britain
against Britain’s colonial rivals France and Russia. But this possibility
closed after 1898 with Germany’s decision to embark on a naval challenge
to Britain. Russia rose to power in many conflicts with Sweden, the
Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and France, and became a superpower
on the back of its major role in the defeat of Germany in 1945. Japan rose to
power by defeating China and Russia. Initially, Japan bandwagoned with
the leading power, Britain, but their 1902 alliance arrangements broke down
after the First World War, and Japan moved to a warlike rise. Most of these
rising powers actively sought the wars they fought as part of their strategy
for rising. For this reason it was quite common for rising powers to devote a
lot of their new wealth to acquiring military strength. The general assumption of inevitable tension between, on the one side, rising powers wanting to
change the status hierarchy and the rules, and on the other the established
status quo ones wanting to defend them, seems plausible. This is especially so
when such tensions are amplified by ideological differences, as they were
throughout the ‘short’ 20th century (1914–1989). This weight of history is
interpreted by some IR theorists as meaning that conflict is inevitable when
challengers and incumbents meet at the top of the great power hierarchy.2
The three world wars of the 20th century (First, Second, and Cold) seem to
underpin this view.
Against this model of inevitably warlike power struggles stands another
idea: ‘peaceful rise’. China committed itself to this policy a decade ago, and
China and the US
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Interpreting ‘Peaceful Rise’ and the United States
and Chinese Cases
We use the label ‘peaceful rise’ because it is a more accurate statement of
the issues than the more anodyne and diplomatic ‘peaceful development’.
But how, exactly, should peaceful rise be defined? What criteria need to be
met for the rise of a great power into the top ranks to count as peaceful?
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arguably adopted it as far back as the shift to reform and opening up in the
late 1970s. The only other great power than can possibly claim to have risen
peacefully is the United States. Since there are only two cases of attempted
peaceful rise, it is worth asking what parallels can be drawn between the
United States and Chinese experiences. Given their different placements in
history, what lessons, if any, can be learned for China from the US experience? These questions are made more interesting by two other factors.
Firstly, China’s rise is happening now, and its success or failure is therefore
of enormous interest and importance to contemporary world politics.
And secondly, the incumbent hegemonic power that China is trying to rise
peacefully against is the United States: the only other case of peaceful rise.
Could it be that IR has crossed some sort of threshold, leaving behind the
realist history and opening up something new? Looking ahead, might India
be the third great power in a sequence of peaceful rise? For the purposes of
this comparison we will take the period of United States rise as running from
1865 (the end of the Civil War) to 1945 (its emergence as the pre-eminent
world power). The United States therefore presents a complete case study
with a well-defined end point after which the United States is definitely
‘risen’ rather than ‘rising’. China’s peaceful rise begins in 1978 with the
big turn in policy to reform and opening up, and remains a work in progress.
China might therefore still abandon peaceful rise and revert to the traditional realist formula. If it stays the course, the question arises as to
when, and by what criteria, we might think of China as having moved
from ‘rising’ to ‘risen’. One possible benchmark for this would be acceptance
by the United States of China as a peer, as it did with the Soviet Union on
the basis of nuclear parity during the 1960s and 70s.
The next section looks more closely at both the meaning of ‘peaceful rise’
and the credibility of United States and Chinese claims to it. Section 3 surveys the key points of similarity between the United States and China during
their process of rise. Section 4 does the same with the key points of difference. The concluding section sets out the lessons for China and for international society that can be drawn from comparing the two cases. Readers
should keep in mind that we are comparing contemporary China with the
United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not with today’s
United States.
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3
4
5
Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, ‘Reflections on the Discussion: The Evolution of
International Security Studies and Non-Traditional Security Studies in China’, Guoji
zhengzhi yanjiu (International Politics Quarterly), No. 1 (2012), pp. 49–62; Johan
Galtung, ‘Foreign Policy Opinion as a Function of Social Position’, Journal of Peace
Research, Vol. 1, No. 3/4 (1964), pp. 206–31; Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace and
Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1969), pp. 167–91.
Feng Yongping, ‘The Peaceful Transition of Power from the UK to the US’, Chinese
Journal of International Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006), pp. 83–108.
Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from the Earliest Days to the
Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 2006).
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As Buzan drawing on Galtung,3 argues, one can think about this in terms of
three models: warlike rise (meeting the realist expectations of the rising
power precipitating a great power war); cold or negative peaceful rise (no
great power war, but an environment of threat and suspicion); and warm or
positive peaceful rise (a friendly environment with a low sense of threat). This
suggests two general models for peaceful rise: cold and warm. With the
realist criteria in mind, we might thus say that the minimum condition for
peaceful rise is that a growing power is able to make both absolute and
relative gains in both its material and its status positions, in relation to
the other great powers in the international system without precipitating
major hostilities between itself and other great powers. Peaceful rise involves
a two-way process in which the rising power accommodates itself to the rules
and structures of international society, while at the same time other great
powers accommodate some changes in those rules and structures by way of
adjusting to the new disposition of power and status. The empirical plausibility of peaceful rise rests on two cases: the United States, which arguably
achieved it during the 20th century, and China, which says it wants to
achieve it during the 21st.
The United States is the only great power that has attempted and accomplished peaceful rise by succeeding in replacing the hegemon, Britain, without going to war with it during the period of power transition.4 From the
late 19th century onward, when the United States was becoming the biggest
great power in the system, its relations with Britain were good enough to
qualify for a warm peaceful rise. But this is not the whole picture, and it
might be objected that the rise of the United States in a wider sense was
hardly peaceful. In fact, one writer has even talked of the United States
during the 19th century as being a most ‘dangerous nation’ becoming
involved in some early clashes with Britain (and Canada) before and after
independence, wars against the native peoples of North America, and during
the 19th century wars against Mexico and Spain.5 Rising America also was,
and remains still, a highly interventionist power in relationship to Central
and Latin America. The rise of the United States was moreover much facilitated by the First and Second World Wars in both of which the United
States was a late and reluctant entrant but a major beneficiary of the
peace settlement. In this sense the United States had the good fortune to
China and the US
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6
7
8
By the time of the Cold War, the United States already was the leading power, and
therefore the controversy over how responsible or not it was for initiating that ‘war’ is
not relevant to the question of peaceful rise.
Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (New York:
Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1990).
Christopher R. Hughes, Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era (Abingdon: Routledge,
2006, Kindle edn.), locs. 3042-3201; Bonnie S. Glaser and Evan S. Medeiros, ‘The
Changing Ecology of Foreign Policy-Making in China: The Ascension and Demise of
the Theory of ‘‘Peaceful Rise’’ ’, The China Quarterly, No. 190 (2007), pp. 291–310;
Dominik Mierzejewski, ‘Public Discourse on the ‘‘PeacefulRise’’ Concept in Mainland
China’, Discussion Paper 42, China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham, 2009,
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cpi/documents/discussion-papers/discussion-paper-42mierzejewski-power-rise-discourse.pdf.
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be the big winner in great power wars started by others. It could, in a sense,
free ride on the parallel warlike rise of Germany, which did challenge Britain
and precipitate great power wars.6
We are left, therefore, with a rather complicated picture in which the
United States rise takes on a different character in relation to the existing
hegemon (Britain) the other great powers, and the neighbours of the United
States in the Americas. In relation to Britain as the reigning hegemon, the
United States rise fits the warm peace model. The United States rose
through the 19th century, and then assumed a hegemonic position in the
20th, without having to engage in a serious or extended war with Britain. On
the contrary, it rose (as we shall see later) in concert with—and at key points
in alliance—with Britain and the British. Indeed, long before Churchill
officially referred to the relationship as being distinct and special after the
Second World War, it had in fact already become so.7 In relation to other
great powers the picture is mixed between warm and cold peace, with the
United States being twice drawn into great powers wars precipitated by the
rise of great powers other than itself. But it did not initiate these wars, joined
them very late, and sided in both cases with Britain. In relation to its neighbours the picture is again mixed. The United States fairly quickly developed
a warm peace with Canada, but in relation to Mexico, Central America, and
the Caribbean its rise was a mixture of warlike, cold and warm. The United
States record thus raises some difficult questions for defining a rise as peaceful or not. By narrow realist criteria confined to great power relations,
a plausible case can be made that the United States did rise peacefully.
But from the perspective of its neighbours to the south, its rise might well
look to be on the more warlike end of the spectrum.
What about the case of China? China began its own peaceful rise after
having adopted its policy of economic reform at home while opening up to
the West in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Various rhetorics have
surrounded this attempt, with the phrase ‘peaceful rise’ being only briefly
in vogue in 2003–2004.8 But the general logic behind the policy was clear.
China’s leadership decided that the country needed to modernize, become
wealthy and powerful, and recover from the excesses and chaos of the
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10
Yongjin Zhang, China in International Society since 1949 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998),
pp. 102–25, 194–243.
Yaqing Qin, ‘Nation Identity, Strategic Culture and Security Interests: Three Hypotheses
on the Interaction between China and International Society’, SIIS Journal, No. 2 (2003),
http://irchina.org/en/xueren/china/view.asp?id¼863; Yaqing Qin, ‘China’s Security
Strategy with a Special Focus on East Asia’, transcript of a talk and discussion for the
Sasakawa Peace Foundation, July 7 2004, http://www.spf.org/e/report/040707.html. The
question of whether pre-modern China was a notably peaceful hegemon, and whether or
how this might matter for contemporary China, is beyond the scope of this article. See
David C. Kang, ‘Civilization and State Formation in the Shadow of China’, in Peter J.
Katzenstein, ed., Civilizations in World Politics (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 91–113.
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Maoists years culminating in the cultural revolution. They understood that
it could only do this if it abandoned total state control over the economy,
and created significant space for the market to operate. This move in turn
required that China engage economically with both its neighbours and the
world, and become part of the global systems of trade, investment, and
finance. China’s commitment to peaceful rise was thus instrumental, but
deep. As Zhang argues, China put its own economic development as top
priority, and deduced from that the need for stability in its international
relations both regionally and globally.9 This change was driven by internal
developments in China during the late 1970s and early 1980s in which the
country underwent a quite profound change of national identity, strategic
culture, and definition of its security interests, all of which transformed its
relationship with international society.10
China’s rhetoric of peaceful rise is ongoing, but what does its record for
the past three decades look like in terms of the three models? So far there has
been no warlike rise either against other great powers or China’s neighbours.
China’s relations with the United States as the prevailing hegemon are
mainly cold peace, as are its relations with two of its major power neighbours, Japan and India. Even China’s strategic partnership with Russia can
hardly be described as warm, and its relations with Europe are more about
indifference than either cold or warm. China has failed to make any great
power friends. China’s relations with its smaller neighbours have been
mixed. For the first 25 years there was a slow but quite steady trend towards
warming relations with Southeast Asia. But since 2008 China has taken a
more aggressive line, pushing most of its relations with Southeast Asia into
the cold peace model. This policy shift, along with rising nationalism, and
by 2012–2013 open talk of war between China and Japan over the islands
dispute between them, raised the possibility that China would exit from
peaceful rise and revert to a more realist model. China’s peaceful rise thus
shares with the United States the complexity of operating in three domains.
Like the United States, it could in theory achieve a peaceful rise in relation
to the prevailing hegemon, while having elements of warlike rise in relation
to other great powers and its neighbours. That option is more difficult for
China and the US
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Key Points of Similarity During the Process of Rise
Perhaps the most obvious similarity between the United States and China is
that in geographical, demographic, and economic terms both are relatively
big actors in the international system. In terms of land area, they are nearly
the same size at a bit over 3.5 million square miles, currently ranking 3rd
(United States) and 4th (China) in the world. During the period of its rise the
United States was also relatively big. In 1900, it ranked 3rd (after Russia and
China) or 4th (if one counts the British Empire as a single unit). In terms of
population, China has for long been number one, and currently has close to
20% of the world’s population, compared to the United States’s 4.5%, which
ranks it 3rd after India. During its period of rise the United States benefitted
from mass immigration during the 19th century. Fifty million Europeans
emigrated between 1800 and 1914, most of them to the United States, helping
11
Jisi Wang, ‘China’s Search for a Grand Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 90, No. 2 (2011),
pp. 68–79.
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China than for the United States, because the United States is allied both
with Japan and many other of China’s neighbours.
One other issue that needs to be addressed is how the strategy of rising
peacefully relates to what happens after a country has risen? The spectrum
of possibilities here is large. On one end of it lies the realist reading of
peaceful rise as a mere strategy of deception aimed at facilitating a transit
through a dangerous period of relative weakness. Once risen, the new power
then reverts to power-maximising behaviour. On the other end of the spectrum is a follow-through of peaceful rise into some form of benign and
consensual leadership. China is sometimes suspected of the deception strategy, not least because it has been reticent to set out its grand strategy, or say
what it will do once it has risen.11 Some Chinese backers of peaceful rise may
support it for that reason: a key theme of Sun Tze’s Art of War is, after all,
the merits of strategic deception. The United States likes to think of itself as
the benign and consensual leader, and even though many would contest that
interpretation, there is some truth in it. What actually happens after peaceful
rise is beyond the scope of this article. But perceptions of what will happen
once a rising power has risen do affect the process, and even the viability, of
a peaceful rise strategy, and are therefore important to the argument here.
For the United States, its commitment to peaceful rise was more or less
implicit in its liberal character. China cannot make the claim that its
internal structure necessarily supports peaceful rise, yet has made its rhetorical commitment to peaceful rise quite explicit. That combination puts a
premium on whether or not China will be able to persuade others that its
peaceful rise is something other than a temporary manoeuvre in a longer
game of the art of war.
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13
14
15
16
Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 163–64, 168.
G. John Ikenberry, ‘American Power and the Empire of Capitalist Democracy’, in G. John
Ikenberry, ed., Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 154.
Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London: Zed Books,
1990), p. 132.
Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investments in the US: 1914–1945 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 9.
Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (London: The Bodley
Head, 2012).
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to increase its population from 5 million in 1800 to 160 million in 1914.12
During its period of rise, the United States thus still ranked high: in 1900 it
was fourth after China, India (or the British Empire) and Russia. In terms of
economy (Gross Domestic Product (GDP)), China currently ranks third after
the EU and the United States, and just ahead of Japan. During its period of
rise the United States took an early lead, surpassing Britain during the 1870s
and increasing its lead as number one thereafter. The First World War
enabled the United States to become a net creditor, and to take over financial
leadership from a weakened Britain. By 1930, the US GDP was roughly the
size of the next three (Britain, Germany, and Russia) combined.
Interestingly, and perhaps a bit more surprising, both countries have lived
in relatively benign international environments during their periods of rise.
The United States has been, of course, famously favoured by geography.
Thus it has always had, and still has, relatively small and weak neighbours to
its north and south. Indeed, it is perhaps the only great power that has not
been ‘neighboured’ by other great powers. Its geographical remoteness has
also made its ascent both less threatening to the rest of the world and
reinforced its ‘disinclination’ to dominate other great powers.13 With huge
insulating oceans to east and west, it has moreover been difficult to reach
militarily, giving it options for degrees of isolation from the balance of
power not available to other great powers. The United States, in addition,
was able to set up and largely dominate a regional political and security
system in the Western hemisphere. It was also helped in its rise by its cultural
and linguistic affinity with the leading power, Britain. Britain not only
provided over 6 million emigrants to the United States between 1880 and
1914,14 but also was by far the largest investor in the US economy. By 1914,
Britain was responsible for well over half of the investment into the United
States.15 Contrary to realist expectations, it very quickly came to accept
America’s rise as being both inevitable following the Union’s victory in
the Civil War, and potentially beneficial as Britain’s rivalry with Germany
began to assume an increasingly serious form in the late 19th century.
Britain became, in effect, a major collaborator in the rise of the United
States—though this fact of course does not feature much in United States
self-understandings of its rise.
China’s history in this respect is more complicated.16 Up until the early
19th century it was insulated from other great powers by distance (although
China and the US
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17
18
Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investments in the US, p. 9.
Yinqui Wei and Xiaming Liu, Foreign Direct Investment in China: Determinants and
Impact (Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2001), pp. 1, 158.
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not from Asian steppe barbarians), and could usually dominate its civilized
neighbours. But from the 1840s through to the last decade of the Cold War,
China was vulnerable to all manner of foreign bullying and intervention,
both from the West and from a rapidly industrializing Japan. During the
period of its current peaceful rise, however, China has been lucky enough to
live again in a relatively benign environment. The Soviet Union may have
been a rival of sorts but by the late 1980s it had ceased to be threatening.
Japan, under US tutelage, did not cultivate offensive military power. The
United States broadly allowed China entry into the world economy and
encouraged its domestic reforms. The association of Southeast Asian
Nations drew China into its regional diplomatic arrangements. China’s
policy turn was partly responsible for creating this benign environment because it made China both less threatening and more attractive economically
to its neighbours and to the West. But China also benefitted from the generally more benign international and regional security and economic environment following the end of the Cold War. It might be argued that, like
Britain in relation to the United States, the United States has played a
significant facilitating role in the rise of China, mainly in terms of economic
policy. Like the United States, China is similarly reticent about acknowledging this helping hand from the leading power. What links their cases in
this respect is that both the United States and China were rising in the
context of an international society led by a liberal power.
Part of this relatively benign environment for both the United States and
China was that during their ascendant periods—America’s after 1865 and
China’s after 1978—both countries benefitted from very substantial foreign
direct investment (FDI) as an important vehicle facilitating their own development. Thus FDI in the United States accounted for close to 20% of
annual GDP by 1914—around $7.1 billion in total stock.17 Indeed, in key
sectors such as steel, chemicals, and transport, FDI was crucial. Admittedly,
this proportion declined precipitately thereafter as a result of war, the expropriation of German assets, the depression, and a growing association in
the American official mind of foreign investment with threats to national
security. Nonetheless, for a critical period following the Civil War, FDI did
play a critical (and now little recognized) role in America’s 19th century
‘take off’. FDI was similarly important to China following the abandonment
of Maoism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At first careful not to move too
precipitately, China gradually abandoned economic isolationism and began
to open its doors to increased outside investment. Initially the great majority
of this came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau, moving China from
nearly zero FDI in the 1970s, to over $900 billion by the late 1990s.18 But as
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19
UNCTAD, ‘Global Investment Trends Monitor’, No. 10, October 2012, p. 23.
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time went on, the United States and the European Union became more
heavily involved too. The bulk of this investment tended to be concentrated
in the main coastal cities and the Special Economic Zones. However, China
fast became the most open and most attractive economy in the whole of the
developing world. Indeed, by the first half of 2012 it had overtaken the
United States in becoming the most important destination for FDI world
wide.19
Another more obvious similarity between them was that both experienced
a traumatic civil war before their period of rise. In the United States, this
took place between 1861 and 1865, immediately before the dramatic take-off
in the US’s population and economy. In China, things were again much
more complicated, with the civil war running for many decades. China fragmented after 1911, and from 1927 to 1949 there was an organized civil war
between communists and nationalists interspersed with foreign interventions
and invasions. China’s civil war ended three decades before its peaceful rise
began, but nonetheless the experience of civil war left a similar legacy in both
countries: both thereafter placed an enormous emphasis on remaining
united. Parallels could in fact be drawn between the ruthless military
anti-secessionism and rejection of self-determination that underpinned the
US civil war, and China’s similar current attitudes towards Tibet, Taiwan,
and Xinjiang. Abraham Lincoln and the Chinese Communist Party would
perhaps have understood each other quite well on this question. The United
States has been more fortunate in that its unity question was largely laid to
rest after the Civil War, and did not much affect its peaceful rise. For China,
the unity question is still not fully resolved, especially over Tibet and
Taiwan. It plays significantly into China’s international image, and therefore
into its wider foreign policy and IR.
A particularly interesting similarity between the United States and China
is the way in which the main lines of their foreign policies show striking
parallels during their period of rise. Both pursued economic engagement
with the rest of the world, and a focus on economic self-development (industrialization) while remaining politically aloof, self-defensive, and not wanting to participate in the global balance of power. The culturally and
economically expansive, but politically and militarily ‘isolationist’ policy
of the United States up to 1917, and again during the interwar years, does
not look all that different from the Dengist policy of reform and opening up
economically, and seeking stability and keeping a low profile regionally and
internationally. In this context, both countries practiced military restraint as
opposed to building up their armed forces as fast as, or faster than, their
economic growth. Except during wartime, United States military forces
remained modest right up to the start of the Cold War; China likewise,
even during Mao’s time, gave a relatively low priority to military expansion
China and the US
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SIPRI Military Expenditure database 2012, http://milexdata.sipri.org.
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and modernization in relation to the development and growth of its
economy.
Figures for US military expenditure as a percentage of its GDP during the
period of its rise are not easy to come by. But it is probably true that
between the end of the US Civil War and the United States entry into the
First World War, United States military expenditure seldom if ever exceeded
1% of GDP and was often much less than that. By the late 19th century this
was, of course, 1% of a fast growing economy that was already the world’s
largest, so it was not an inconsiderable sum. But despite its huge economic
lead, in the run-up to the First World War the military expenditure of the
United States was generally less than that of Britain, Germany, or Russia,
and about the same as France. The US army was not designed, and was
not strong enough, to fight wars against other significant powers. Instead it
was designed either to hold the country together (the role of the armies
of the North) or to be directed against weak opponents including native
Americans, rebellious colonials like the Philippinos, feeble neighbours like
Mexico, and relatively weak outside powers like Japan and Spain.
Finding reliable figures for China’s military expenditure as a percentage of
GDP after 1978 is almost equally problematic, with China’s government
pitching the numbers for military expenditure low, and the US military
pitching them high. The estimates from Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute (SIPRI) are perhaps a reasonable compromise.20 They
show considerable consistency for the period 1989–2010, with China’s military expenditure as a percentage of GDP fluctuating within a narrow band
of 1.6–2.5. As with the United States, of course, this modest-looking figure
has to be seen in the context of a very rapidly growing economy. This has
made China’s military expenditure until recently roughly comparable to that
of the big European states such as Britain, France and Germany, and with
Japan. Even if China is now pulling ahead of these, it still falls extremely far
short of the massive US figure. In some parallel with the United States,
therefore, China has favoured economic development and growth over military expenditure. It has focused on military modernization to be sure, but
unlike powers rising in warlike mode, it has done so at a measured pace, and
has not sought to rival US military power across the board.
Despite their relative military restraint, both countries have exhibited a
certain weakness for navalism: the United States in building the ‘Great
White Fleet’ during the 1890s; and China now looking towards a blue-water
navy during the second decade of the 21st century. The ‘Great White Fleet’
brought the US navy more up to international standard than its army. By
the outbreak of the First World War, the United States had more of the
modern ‘dreadnought’ battleships (12) than France (7), Japan (7), or Russia
(5), but many fewer than Britain (41) or Germany (24). Naval might was
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21
Barry Buzan, ‘China in International Society: Is ‘‘Peaceful Rise’’ Possible?’, Chinese
Journal of International Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2010), pp. 5–36.
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partly about showing off their new power, but more instrumentally it also
reflected the keenness of both to insulate their regional sphere from outside
interference. For the United States, this was embodied in the Monroe
doctrine (1823), the building of naval power, the Panama canal, and a
policy of self-interested interventionism in Central and South America and
the Caribbean. China’s position is again more complex, partly because there
are substantial powers within its region, and partly because the United
States is deeply embedded as an intervening power in East Asia.
Nevertheless, China’s military policy is aimed at establishing sea control
out to the first island chain, and in asserting expansive territorial claims in
the South and East China Seas. Like the United States before it, China
wants to be able to exclude outside powers from its region, though in attempting this it faces much more challenging circumstances than those that
faced the United States.
In line with politically isolationist policies, both states were extremely
reluctant to take on international leadership responsibilities commensurate
with their rising power. This reticence was easier to pull off when their power
was relatively small during the early phases of peaceful rise, but increasingly
difficult as their relative power began to weigh significantly in the global
balance. In the case of the United States, this policy left international society
seriously under-managed during the first half of the 20th century, when the
United States had for long been the biggest economy and Britain, especially
after the First World War, was no longer strong enough to lead effectively.
The United States was a reluctant entrant into both the First and Second
World Wars, and having taken the lead in setting up the League of Nations,
then abandoned it. China has only just arrived at the point where the
question of matching its responsibilities to its power is becoming pressing,
both for China itself and for international society.21 At the time of writing
there has been no significant display of willingness in Beijing to begin taking
more responsibility for global management, and some disturbing signs of
self-interested swaggering. The concern to maintain domestic development
and domestic stability (harmony) continues to reign supreme.
Despite their reluctance to take a leading role in international society,
both a rising United States and a rising China nonetheless took firm positions in relation to it. Both joined the general framework of international
society, but took dissenting positions on key points. The United States,
along with most of the Americas, was happy to assume the status of sovereign equality and thereby to convert European into Western international
society. But the United States rejected the institution of balance of power,
and via the Monroe Doctrine tried to set itself up as hegemonic in the
Western hemisphere, not least by sponsoring the first International
China and the US
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22
23
24
25
26
Charles A. Jones, American Civilization (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas,
2007), pp. 6, 66–74.
Ibid., pp. 3, 36.
Barry Buzan and Yongjin Zhang, eds., International Society and the Contest over ‘East
Asia’, forthcoming.
Barry Buzan, The United States and the Great Powers (Cambridge: Polity, 2004),
pp. 154–65.
Tingyang Zhao, ‘Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept ‘‘All-Under-Heaven’’
(Tian-xia)’, Social Identities, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2006), pp. 29–41.
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Conference of American States in 1889. It led the building of a regional
international society in the Americas distinctive for its high degree of legalism and commitment to intergovernmental institutions.22 Because of their
highly racialised societies,23 the states of the Americas were also laggards in
the early human rights campaigns against slavery. Since 1978, China has
likewise sought to integrate itself into Western-global international society.
Like the United States, it has taken a very strong line in favour of sovereign
equality and non-intervention: both states are strongly sovereigntist in their
attitude towards international society. And like the United States it has
resisted those parts of the prevailing international society that disagreed
with its internal makeup, in this case most obviously the Western understanding of human rights. There are signs that China would like also to
follow the United States in establishing regional hegemony, for example in
its support for narrower memberships of Asian regional institutions. But as
explained above, China’s neighbourhood is much more complex than that
faced by the United States, and it has so far had little success with this
strategy.24
Perhaps more curiously given their isolationism, both countries projected
a rhetoric of international harmony, albeit of profoundly different types.
The United States one was based on universalist liberal ideas about harmony of interests through a market economy, and the peaceful effects of
trade and democracy and individual freedom. Put simply, the United States
view was that if all countries became like America, there would be a peaceful
world. American exceptionalism was thus outward looking and open.25 As
noted above, American liberalism gave some reassurance, especially to
Britain, that once risen the United States would remain relatively benign.
China meanwhile has retreated from the ideological universalism of its
Maoist period based on Marxian notions of structural conflict rather than
on harmony. Now it projects ideas of harmony based loosely on Confucian
prescriptions about ‘all under heaven’ (Tianxia).26 This has been allied to
a strong interpretation of non-intervention, non-discrimination and the
right of peoples to determine their own political and social development.
In China’s case, harmony seems now more to be based on the respect
for, and preservation of, differences, rather than the cultivation of homogeneity along some particular ideological line. Chinese exceptionalism is
inward looking and closed, broadly summed up in the much used phrase
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27
Barry Buzan, ‘China in International Society’, pp. 20–21.
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‘with Chinese characteristics’ when describing almost any social, economic
or political policy.27 Again as noted above, this poses the problem for
China that other powers will be suspicious about what happens after
China has risen.
Rather less surprisingly, both China and the United States practiced protectionism during their period of rise. The United States (or more precisely
the northern states) practiced protectionism throughout its rise until the
Civil War. Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1791 that ‘to maintain between
the recent establishment of one country and the long-matured establishments of another country, a competition upon equal terms is in most
cases, impractical’. Tariffs followed in 1816, 1824, and 1828. By 1857 tariffs
averaged 20%. The defeat of the South was in fact a defeat for the kind of
free trade policies favoured by the Confederacy and more generally the
Democrats. Protectionist tariffs remained the bedrock of the Republican
Party between 1890 (the McKinley Tariff) and 1909 (Payne-Aldrich
Tariff). Wilson liberalized trade somewhat, but after the First World War
the Republicans reintroduced high tariffs (The Fordney-McCumber Tariff,
1922). In short, throughout its rise before 1914 the United States accorded
high tariff protection to its economy, manufactures in particular such as
textiles, iron, steel, glass, and tin plate. Nor did the situation change at all
in the inter-war period. If anything, the situation deteriorated in the 1920s
and got even worse in the 1930s with the onset of the depression. This kind
of overt protectionism was further reinforced between the two wars when
(as we have seen) the United States became less open to inward FDI and a
battery of legislation was passed to ensure that Americans retained control
over an increasingly American economy.
China has been more constrained by the rules of what is now a much more
highly institutionalized global economy than that faced by the United States,
and also by its need to keep export markets open. But China has never fully
bought into the notion of an ‘open door’ broadly associated with the
Western ideal of globalization. On the contrary, many of its instincts
remain protectionist. Thus while it might protest the protectionism of
others (as it did at the 2012 18th party congress) it practices its own form
of the same, keeping its own goods cheap by ensuring that the reminbi
remains weak. Furthermore, though it may practice competition at home,
its own economy—and its own leading corporations—remain very much
under the direction of an all-powerful dirigiste state. Indeed, state-led enterprises continue to command the heights of the Chinese economy. Finally, as
Western economists have for long been pointing out, China engages in more
subtle forms of protectionism: not by putting up tariff barriers but rather by
demanding technology transfers from Western investors for being allowed
access to the Chinese market.
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Key Points of Difference
The most obvious difference between China and the United States, as many
Chinese like to point out, is that theirs is a very old country, indeed a civilization, that measures itself in millennia, whereas the United States is a
quite new country with a history not yet spanning a quarter of one millennium. The United States’s history is nevertheless quite long compared to
many other contemporary states, including many in Europe. And although
the United States is definitely a recent start-up compared with China, in one
important sense, as Jones points out, the United States is the oldest state in
that it has a good claim to be the first modern state.29 Since China aspires
to modernity it is in this key sense younger than the United States. This
difference is closely related to another one, that China rests on the cultural
homogeneity of a people who have been in situ for a long time. China’s
28
29
Yaqing Qin, ‘Rule, Rules, and Relations: Towards a Synthetic Approach to Governance’,
Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2011), pp. 117–45.
Charles A. Jones, American Civilization, p. 51.
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The final similarity may be more difficult to quantify but nevertheless has
potentially large significance. Despite their massive cultural differences,
which might broadly be summed up as being individualist versus collectivist
societies,28 American and Chinese societies have much in common including
amongst other things a strong sense of patriotic pride (often verging on
the chauvinist) married to a much-commented upon commitment to materialism and materialist measures of success. This may in part help explain
America’s very real fascination with a modern entrepreneurial China that
might have much more in common with the United States than some
Americans would care to admit. It would certainly help explain China’s
very deep respect for American power and American economic success.
In fact, one of the more obvious measures of this respect is where the
new Chinese elite now seem to prefer to send their children (to the
United States) to get a ‘gold standard’ education. At the political level
these broader similarities may also help us explain why both states are
much inclined to bean counting in terms of their military and economic
strength. This quantitative approach to power plays easily into zero-sum,
realist, materialist ways of thinking about international relations, and could
easily reinforce the views of those on both sides who either want to, or think
they have to, construct their relationship as one of rivals or enemies.
It perhaps also plays into some of their current policy similarities. Most
obviously both have been obstructionist at global environmental negotiations on the grounds that they are unwilling to put restraints such as
commitments to pollution control in the way of maximizing their economic
development and GDP growth.
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nationalism is therefore of the ethno-cultural type, which differentiates it
strongly from the rest of the world in terms of ‘Chinese characteristics’. The
United States, in contrast, is mainly a country of immigrants. Its nationalism
is civic rather than ethnic, and combines with a multicultural identity.
America’s civic nationalism also gives it a unique identity that differentiates
it strongly from the rest of the world. But, as noted in the discussion of
American exceptionalism above, this differentiation is open and potentially
inclusive, rather than closed and exclusive. For all of its many faults and
hypocrisies, America’s ideology and commitment to individual freedom does
have considerable worldwide appeal. And alongside this inclusive ideology is
the fact that America’s multiculturalism allows many parts of the world to
see themselves in some sense as represented in America. The American
melting pot both homogenizes its citizens into Americanness, while allowing
them to keep hyphenated identities as Mexican-, Chinese-, German-,
Korean- and many other national types of American. In this area of identity
and culture/ideology, therefore, the US and China could hardly be more
different.
On top of this deep intrinsic difference, lie equally big ones in the timing
and historical conditions under which the two have conducted their rise. The
trajectory of the United States began more than a century before China’s
recent start, and the nature of international society has changed profoundly
between the two periods of rise. In terms of modernity and industrialization,
the United States was a late developer, along with Germany and Japan
coming in the second round after Britain. China is a late developer, arguably
in a fourth round, meaning that it is rising in a context in which the world
economy as a whole is much more developed, and there are many other
industrialized and industrializing countries rather than just a handful. This
matters in several ways. Most obviously the United States rose during a
period in which great power wars were normal and regular occurrences,
commitment to maintaining a global economy was thin and episodic, and
empire building and racism were legitimate practices. China, in contrast, has
risen into a world where nuclear weapons have made great power wars
irrational, when empires and racism are neither legitimate nor fashionable,
and when commitment to maintaining world trade, and a stable world economy more broadly, is stronger and more uniform.
Both the United States and China rose in a context where other large
powers were also rising (the United States rose alongside Germany,
Japan, and Russia/USSR; China is rising alongside India and Brazil). But
beyond that, the differences are great. The United States rose in a context in
which there were major ideological differences amongst the great powers,
and several of the rising ones were making extreme military and ideological
challenges to the liberal status quo. Although the United States did not start
any of the consequent wars, it was drawn into both of them as a key player.
China and the US
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In a sense, the United States was the major beneficiary of the First and
Second World Wars, where it joined late, suffered relatively little damage
or casualties, and was able to pick up the pieces after the other great powers
had been destroyed or depleted by the conflicts. China is rising in a context
where ideological differences amongst the powers are much lower, the institutional framing of international society is much stronger, and none of the
rising powers seeks to overthrow the existing order by force (though they
may well of course want to negotiate modifications to it). Like the United
States, China will probably not start any hegemonic wars. But neither will it
get drawn into any such wars, nor have the option to benefit from them by
standing back.
As argued above, both China and the United States have experienced a
shift from being relatively insulated from the core of the international system
by distance and geography, to being inescapably enmeshed in it. While this
might at first look like a similarity, it is in fact more of a difference. For the
United States, the end of its insulation, although foreshadowed by the First
World War, took place relatively late, during the Second World War, by
which time the United States was already the leading great power. So during
its rise, the United States had real choices about the degree to which it would
engage or not with the rest of international society, and for the most part it
chose isolationism. For China, this shift took place in the middle of the
19th century, when outside intrusion burst in on it and exposed its weakness.
China suffered a major fall from power between 1840 and 1945, a traumatic
experience that influences its current outlook heavily. The United States has
never had that experience, and even on the worst declinist scenarios would
have only a relatively mild version of it should it fall from global primacy
during the coming decades. Since the foreign intrusions began, China has
never had the choice to engage or not. It had only the choice about how and
on what terms to engage, and sometimes, as during the period up to the
1940s, not even that. During its Maoist period China engaged by being
oppositional to Western-global international society. Under Deng it chose
engagement and peaceful rise, and has so far stayed with this choice.
A similar caveat, perhaps turning an apparent similarity into a difference,
applies to the point argued in the previous section, that both China and the
United States have benefitted from a relatively benign international environment and help from the leading power. While this similarity remains
valid, the United States was always part of the Western identity and project,
whereas China, despite its adoption of some features of modernity, remains
culturally and politically strongly non-Western. This difference matters in
any consideration of hegemonic succession. The US took over from Britain,
its nearest kin country in terms of ethnic stock, culture and ideology.
This was perhaps a unique transition in that Britain could let its world
leadership go without feeling deeply threatened by the likely nature of the
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30
Michael A. Witt, ‘China: What Variety of Capitalism?’, INSEAD Working Paper 2010/88/
EPS, 2010.
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new global order led by the United States. If it came to such a transition
between China and the United States, China would have to take over from a
hegemon with a culture and a political order deeply different from its own.
China’s adoption of capitalism would help a bit, making it easier than a
transition involving a profound ideological difference, such as one from the
United States to the Soviet Union would have been. But it is almost impossible to imagine the United States feeling as comfortable about China as
Britain was able to feel about the United States. If China became more
democratic that would help a lot, as shown by the West’s relative lack of
concern about the rise of India. But it still would not recreate the unique
conditions that applied between Britain and the United States.
Both China and the United States rose in the context of a liberal economic
order in which they were embedded. Neither rose in isolation. But while
there are some similarities (see on protectionism in the previous section)
the differences are greater. In domestic terms, the United States has
always had a foundational commitment to a free enterprise system. This is
part and parcel of its liberal commitment to individualism and the market.
China’s conversion to capitalism is very recent, and comes in authoritarian
form.30 It remains unclear how deep its commitment to the market actually
is, and this uncertainty plays into the doubts about what a risen China
would be like. In this regard, China’s recent drift back towards favouring
State Owned Enterprises is worrying. The Chinese Communist Party clearly
has no interest whatsoever in liberal individualism, and feels deeply uneasy
about the capitalist society that its hugely successful economic reforms are
inevitably creating.
In systemic terms, the United States experience was rather mixed. The
United States was unquestionably part of the world economy during the
period of its rise, but it could be argued that the world economy before 1945
needed the United States more than the United States, with its vast resources, technological know-how and large market at home, needed the
rest of the world. The systemic context for the United States rise was an
unstable liberal order waxing and waning during the 19th and 20th centuries. The US economy was big enough to make it significantly responsible
for these instabilities, most obviously in 1929. After decades of denying its
responsibilities, the United States had eventually to take on the role of
liberal hegemon after the Second World War. China has risen into a
well-established and highly institutionalized liberal economic order, to
which it was initially fiercely opposed, but with which since 1978 it has
been seeking accommodation. But China’s policies of reform and opening
up made it far more dependent on the more advanced world—for a market
for its goods, for inward investment, for political support, and in its own
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region, for successful examples it could follow, if not necessarily imitate.
In this sense, and ironically, although both were dependent on foreign capital, markets and technology, China as a formally communist-led country
seemed to lean on the capitalist world far more than democratically-led
America with its special mission to spread the gospel of free enterprise.
It remains an open question whether the economic crisis beginning in
2008 will create turbulent conditions for China more similar to those experienced by, and in part created by, the United States.
In relation to international society, the United States was reformist revisionist, wanting negotiated change in international society towards more
legal and institutionalized practices. China says it is a status quo power,
wanting to join the US-led order and seeking stability above all. But there
are hints that it might be either another kind of reformist revisionist
(wanting increases in its own status, and negotiated changes in some
norms and practices), or possibly a radical revisionist (the nationalist
position wanting China to start flexing its muscles as soon as its relative
strength allows, or shift more sharply back towards a state-run economy).
The universalist ideology of the United States on international society
gave it a relatively clear position. As yet, and apart from its strong pluralist
commitment to sovereignty, non-intervention, and the protection of cultural and political distinctiveness, China’s position on what kind of international society it would like to be part of remains murky. This difference
perhaps relates to the relative stability of the basic character of the US
polity after the Civil War, and the relative uncertainty both within China
and outside it about what kind of polity China will become over the
next decades. After its civil war, the American polity settled into a stable
form within which it has evolved ever since. For better or for worse, this
provides considerable continuity and predictability about how the United
States relates to international society. China’s civil war is still within living
memory, and as the ongoing pressures for major social reform indicate, the
country has probably not yet settled into an enduring form of political
economy.
At the regional level, there are some similarities in the roles of China and
the United States in their respective local spheres, but as already discussed,
large differences too. The United States was always the elephant in the
Americas, having a love–hate relationship with its neighbours from very
early on in its rise. It has mainly been able to exclude rival powers from
its region. It can, and up to a point still does, dominate the Western hemisphere, and has some legitimacy as regional leader. China was for nearly two
millennia secure as the elephant in its region, enjoying both primacy and
legitimacy as the hub of civilization. But from the 19th century it was unable
to keep rival powers out of the region, and was displaced as the dominant
power from within the region by Japan from the late 19th Century until
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recently. Huge resentment over Japan’s challenge to China’s hegemony still
poisons relations between the two (and thereby greatly benefits the United
States position in the Western Pacific). China still cannot exclude outside
powers from its region, and neither does it yet have the power or the legitimacy to reassert regional leadership. China lives in a region with other great
powers and the United States does not (though it might do with the rise of
Brazil). So while the United States feels relatively secure in its region, China
still does not.
Conclusions
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We have shown that the similarities between the United States and
China touch at enough points of significance to make the comparison
between them intriguing, particularly in relation to some conspicuous similarities in their policies (e.g. protectionism; general restraint in acquiring
military strength, yet also having a weakness for navalism; giving primacy
to economic growth over agreements on dealing with global warming,
and refusing either to lead or be led on this issue). Yet there are also
many big differences between the United States and China both in themselves and in the timing and placement of their rise to power. The remaining
question to be answered is therefore: ‘So what?’ This comparison is entertaining, but is it useful beyond helping the United States and China to
put their relationship into an interesting historical context, and perhaps
thereby to understand each other better? Does it suggest any lessons
about the process of peaceful rise, either generally, or in relation to
China’s current policy? What does comparing these two cases of peaceful
rise, one completed nearly seven decades ago, the other still in process, tell us
about China’s prospects? Despite the differences between the two cases we
can see six useful lessons.
The first general lesson is that one can see from the United States case
that a kind of peaceful rise is indeed possible, despite the predictions of
realist theory. In a narrow but important way, the United States achieved
a warm rise in relation to the existing hegemon, though a colder and sometimes warlike one in relation to other great powers and its neighbours. That
accomplishment makes the Chinese case a lot more interesting than it would
be if the realists were always right. But peaceful rise is much more complicated and differentiated than at first appears to be the case. Because it
involves different domains it can be partly peaceful and partly warlike, as
was the case with the United States. The key to seeing the United States
as a genuine case of peaceful rise is that it did not challenge the reigning
hegemon, and indeed supported it. On that model, a Chinese rise that
avoided direct rivalry with the United States, but involved similar neighbourhood bullying to that of the United States, would still, in a narrow way,
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(1) China is a relative latecomer to industrial modernity, meaning that
there are a lot more substantial, modernized powers in the international system than there were when the United States rose;
(2) China is less secure in its own region than the United States was, both
because there are other substantial powers surrounding it, and
because the United States has a strong position in East Asia; and
(3) It seems highly unlikely that there will be hegemonic wars from which
China can take advantage as the United States did. The two world
wars eliminated or weakened many great powers leaving the field clear
for the United States. China has to rise in a context of many other
rising powers and older powers not going away.
What further inhibits China over the longer term is its own limited world
view—one that does not seem to encompass the idea of global leadership, let
alone doing much more than repeating the old Westphalian mantra that
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count as a kind of peaceful rise. So even although peaceful rise is against
realist logic, realist logic is by no means out of the picture. It is often
observed that the bellicose turn in China’s behaviour coincides precisely
with the weakening of the United States as a result of the economic crisis
beginning in 2008. This fits with realist logic, and if true supports the position of those who think that peaceful rise was only ever a temporary ruse to
cover an awkward transition period. In that case, China is now exiting from
its peaceful rise strategy, and pursuing power politics from a position of
greater strength. Peaceful rise is then nothing more than a footnote within
a broadly realist picture, and the United States remains a unique, perhaps
unrepeatable, exemplar of it.
The second lesson is that in some very significant ways, China’s prospects
for rising peacefully look easier to achieve than was the case for the United
States. China rises in a system/society in which great power war is largely
ruled out, and in which the institutional order is relatively well developed. In
the absence of empire-building, official racism and deep ideological divides,
the surrounding context for China’s rise is relatively benign. Warlike rise is
not really an option except perhaps in a limited way within China’s local
neighbourhood, though even there the United States presence in East Asia
makes such a strategy much more dangerous than it was for the United
States. When the United States was rising, warlike rise was a realistic,
even rational, option. Now it is not. Although foolishness leading to war
can never be ruled out, the main question for China is what kind of peaceful
rise, cold or warm, and in relation to which constituencies: neighbours, other
great powers, and the reigning US hegemon?
Despite this easier position, the third lesson is that there are three obvious
reasons why China’s position in the international system/society is never
going to be as relatively strong as the United States was at its peak:
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31
32
Michael Cox, ‘Power Shifts, Economic Change and the Decline of the West’, International
Relations, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2012), pp. 369–83.
Barry Buzan, ‘A World Order without Superpowers: Decentered Globalism’, International
Relations, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2011), pp. 1–23.
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states should not interfere in the internal affairs of other states.31 If China is
to make a success of its peaceful rise, it badly needs to develop a vision of the
kind of international society it wants to be part of, and to make that vision
reassuring to others.
There is of course nothing China can do either about being a late developer or not having other great powers fight hegemonic wars to its advantage. It will rise into a world where there are several other great powers,
some of them neighbours.32 So the fourth lesson is that China will therefore
not have to, or have the option to, take over as singular hegemon for
the world economy as the United States did. Instead, it will have to participate in a collective hegemony to create, manage, and support the rules and
institutions of the global economy. If it did bid for singular hegemony
it would be disadvantaged not only by the power structure, but also by
the degree of cultural and political difference between itself and both the
existing hegemon and the international order more generally.
The fifth lesson is that the regional level will be crucial to China’s peaceful
rise. At the regional level, China is less geostrategically favoured than the
United States both because its neighbours are stronger than the United
States ones were (and still are), and because outside intervention in its
region (mainly by the United States) is also strong and well-established.
China has less opportunity than the United States did to simply dominate
its region, and so it has to be more careful than the United States was about
how it conducts relations with its neighbours. Since the United States both
had weak neighbours and could insulate its region from outside interference,
it could afford to abuse its neighbours and conduct a regional rise that was
significantly cold and sometimes warlike. China does not have the option
that the United States did of keeping separate its relationships with its
neighbours, other great powers, and the leading power. In China’s case
these three domains are all quite tightly tied together. Consequently,
China would pay a huge price for copying the United States model. But
China does have the option of seeking to build better relations with its
neighbours, as Germany and Indonesia and Brazil have done (and Russia
and India have conspicuously not done). Coming to terms with its region is
essential to China’s prospects for peaceful rise, or at least for a warm version of peaceful rise in line with China’s rhetoric of harmony. For a time
during the later 1990s and early 2000s, this warm peace seemed to be China’s
strategy, and with the exception of relations with Japan, it worked
quite well. China was in good standing with most of Southeast Asia and
also with South Korea. But since 2008–2009, this policy seems to have been
China and the US
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34
Robert S. Ross, ‘Chinese Nationalism and its Discontents’, The National Interest, No. 116
(2011), pp. 45–8.
Nicholas Khoo, ‘Fear Factor: Northeast Asian Responses to China’s Rise’, Asian Security,
Vol. 7, No. 2 (2011), pp. 95–118.
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abandoned, and China has taken a more nationalist, bullying, arrogant,
and swaggering line towards most of its neighbours.33 This policy has
already led to rising fears of China in Japan and South Korea,34 fears
recently heightened by China’s resort to gunboat diplomacy in the islands
dispute with Japan. If sustained, it will kill China’s warm peaceful rise at
its roots. It will encourage regional balancing against it, and it has
already helped to consolidate the United States position in Asia. It does
not mean that China will revert to the warlike rise of other great powers,
but it does mean that it will achieve only a cold, perhaps very cold, ‘negative’
peace.
The sixth and final lesson, both for China and for international society, is
that peacefully rising powers risk staying too long in isolationist mode,
refusing to take great power managerial responsibilities commensurate
with their level of power and capability. This is what the United States
did from the late 19th century through to the Second World War. Partly
as a consequence, international society fell apart during the 1930s. For the
reasons given above, this issue is going to be less crucial for China than it
was for the United States, at least in relation to the global economy. Britain
was failing as the liberal hegemon both because the relative size of its economy had become too small, and because it was bankrupted by two world
wars. This forced the US into either taking the leadership role or abandoning the global liberal economic order. Despite the presence of a deep
economic crisis, the current situation does not look like this. The United
States is not going to be as weak as Britain became. Its economy may be in
relative decline, but its relative size and quality, and the strength of its
military, will remain high. Neither the United States economy nor its
military have been ruined by either the Cold War, or its misadventures in
Iraq and Afghanistan, to anything like the same extent as Britain was weakened by two world wars. China will not therefore be faced with the same
extreme choices as the United States unless it tries to displace the United
States or overthrow the liberal economic order, both of which it is poorly
placed to do. Given that other powers are also rising, and that the United
States, Europe and Japan are not going to disappear as major centres of
power, China will never face the hegemonic question faced by the United
States, and international society needs to look beyond singular hegemony to
stabilize the economic order. For China, and for international society, the
question will be whether China pulls its weight in creating and managing
the post-Western order, or whether it succumbs to a self-centred and reckless
nationalism. Perhaps it will be on the issue of the global environment,
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rather than the global economy, that China’s willingness to pull its weight
in the management of international order will be tested. Peaceful rise is
possible for China, and in the very narrow sense of it not triggering great
power war, very probable. The choice is between what kind of peaceful
rise—warm or cold. There is still time and possibility to choose about
this, but on the present trajectory China is heading for a cold peace, both
in its neighbourhood and in the world.
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The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2013