IEP

Bordeaux
Academic Year 2020-21



Problems in International Politics

Dario Battistella
Professor of Political Science
[email protected]
https://dariobattistella.fr/



02:
The Consequences of China’s Rise:
Balance or Parity?




Joseph Nye on A Prospective Hegemonic Transition_2015 Davos Forum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjGD_qFgPhE

China's Official Discourse_2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nosIUmjrXXk

China-US Tensions in the South China Sea_2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dodbqgKn8js




Document 1 : America’s Perception of China in the 1990s

“In the period beyond 2015, there is the possibility that a regional great power or global peer
competitor may emerge. Russia and China are seen by some as having the potential to be such
competitors, though their respective futures are quite uncertain. …
China has the potential to become a major military power in Asia. The United States will
continue to engage China, seeking to foster cooperation in areas where our interests overlap
and influence it to make a positive contribution to regional stability and act as a responsible
member of the international community. China is likely to continue to face a number of
internal challenges, including the further development of its economic infrastructure and the
tension between a modern market economy and authoritarian political system, that may slow
the pace of its military modernization. Moreover, China's efforts to modernize its forces and
improve its power-projection capabilities will not go unnoticed, likely spurring concerns from
others in the region.
Finally, it is important to note that this projection of the security environment rests on two
fundamental assumptions: that the United States will remain politically and militarily engaged
in the world over the next 15 to 20 years, and that it will maintain military superiority over
current and potential rivals. If the United States were to withdraw from its international
commitments, relinquish its diplomatic leadership, or relinquish its military superiority, the
world would become an even more dangerous place, and the threats to the United States, our
allies, friends, and interests would be even more severe.”

Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review, Department of Defense, Washington

D.C., May 1997

Document 2: China’s Perception by American Scholars

“Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. has been uncontested in its
position as world leader. This respite may well be relatively short. China has surfaced as the
new threat to U.S. dominance of world affairs. As the Chinese challenge develops during this
century, the tectonic plates on which international relations rest will move irreversibly. …
China has the demographic, economic, and political potential to catch and overtake the Unites
States, first in the size of its economy and then in power. If this is to happen, China’s
overtaking of the U.S. economy, in terms of GDP, will occur considerably earlier than its
overtaking in power. The former is expected in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
The latter would take substantially longer. The fact that economic power only subsequently
translates into national power will provide a breathing space for both nations to adjust to the
new realities.”

Ronald Tammen et al., Power Transitions. Strategies for the 21st Century, NY,
Chatham House, 2000, p. 153-155.


“The United States has been the most powerful state on the planet for many decades and has
deployed robust military forces in the Asia-Pacific region since the early years of the Second
World War. … But because of China’s rise, the United States will no longer be the
preponderant power in the Asia-Pacific region, as it has been since 1945. The most important
question that flows from this discussion is whether China can rise peacefully. …
Some claim that China can allay any fears about its rise by making it clear to its neighbors
and the United States that it has peaceful intentions, that it will not use force to change the
balance of power. The belief here is that Beijing has the ability to signal its present and future
intentions to Australia and other countries in compelling ways.
Unfortunately, states can never be certain about each other’s intentions. They cannot know
with a high degree of certainty whether they are dealing with a revisionist state or a status quo
power. For example, there is still no consensus among experts as to whether the Soviet Union
was bent on dominating Eurasia during the Cold War. Nor is there a consensus on whether
Imperial Germany was a highly aggressive state that was principally responsible for causing
the First World War. The root of the problem is that unlike military capabilities, which we can
see and count, intentions cannot be empirically verified. Intentions are in the minds of
decision makers and they are especially difficult to discern. One might think that Chinese
leaders can use words to explain their intentions. But talk is cheap and leaders have been
known to lie to foreign audiences. Thus, it is hard to know the intentions of China’s present
leaders, which is not to say that they are necessarily revisionist.
But even if one could determine China’s intentions today, there is no way to know what they
will be in the future. After all, it is impossible to identify who will be running the foreign
policy of any country 5 or 10 years from now, much less whether they will have aggressive
intentions. It cannot be emphasized enough that we face radical uncertainty when it comes to
determining the future intentions of any country, China included.”

John Mearsheimer, “The Gathering Storm: China’s Challenge to US Power in Asia’,

The Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 3, 2010, p. 381-396.



Document 3: Interpreting China’s Intentions

“In recent years, it has become increasingly common in U.S. media, pundit, and academic
circles to describe the diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as newly or
increasingly assertive. Some observers have even suggested that this new assertiveness
reflects a fundamental shift in Chinese diplomacy away from Beijing’s more status quo–
oriented behavior of the previous thirty years. Many believe that it reflects a conscious
decision by the top leadership in the wake of the 2008–09 financial crisis to be much more
proactive in challenging U.S. interests in East Asia and, indeed, elsewhere around the world.
The new assertiveness meme has “gone viral” in the U.S. media, the blogosphere, and in
scholarly work.

However, … the new assertiveness meme underestimates the degree of assertiveness in

certain policies in the past, and overestimates the amount of change in China’s diplomacy in
2010 and after. Much of China’s diplomacy in 2010 fell within the range in foreign policy
preferences, diplomatic rhetoric, and foreign policy behavior established in the Jiang Zemin
and Hu Jintao eras.”

Alastair Iain Johnston, “How New and Assertive Is China's New Assertiveness?”,
International Security, 37 (4), 2013, p. 7–48.



Document 4: China Overtakes the US…

“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No.
2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to
become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president,
America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

It just happened – and almost nobody noticed.

The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy.
And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services,
China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A. As
recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.

To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy
when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S. … These
calculations are based on a well-established and widely used economic measure known as
purchasing-power parity (or PPP), which measures the actual output as opposed to
fluctuations in exchange rates. … PPP is the real way of comparing economies. …

Yes, when you look at mere international exchange rates, the U.S. economy remains bigger
than that of China, allegedly by almost 70%. …Yes, all statistics are open to various quibbles.
It is perfectly possible China’s latest numbers overstate output — or understate them. That
may also be true of U.S. GDP figures. But the IMF data are the best we have.

Make no mistake: This is a geopolitical earthquake with a high reading on the Richter scale.
Throughout history, political and military power have always depended on economic power.
Britain was the workshop of the world before she ruled the waves. And it was Britain’s
relative economic decline that preceded the collapse of her power. And it was a similar story
with previous hegemonic powers such as France and Spain. This will not change anything
tomorrow or next week, but it will change almost everything in the longer term. We have
lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late
19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a
world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and
the U.S.A. For all their flaws, the two countries have been in the vanguard worldwide in terms
of civil liberties, democratic processes and constitutional rights.”

Brett Arends, “It’s Official: America Is Now N° 2”, MarketWatch, December 4, 2014
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/its-official-america-is-now-no-2-2014-12-04


Document 5: Evolution of America’s and China’s Power


1. GDP - Billions of US Dollars in Current Prices/Official Exchange Rate

Country 1989 1999 2009 2019

USA 6,539 8,609 14,478 21,349


China 461 1,097 5,122 14,140


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)



2. GDP – Billions of US Dollars in Current Prices/Purchasing Power Parity

Country 1989 1999 2009 2019

USA 6,539 8,609 14,478 21,349

China 1,043 3,351 11,084 27,438


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

3. Military Budget - Billions of Constant US Dollars/Percentage of GDP

Country 1989 1999 2009 2018

USA 601/5.5 413/2.9 764/4.6 732/3.4

China 19/2.5 38/1.9 131/2.1 261/1.8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures


Document 6: China, the US, and the Thucydides Trap

“When Barack Obama meets this week with Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s first
state visit to America, one item probably won’t be on their agenda: the possibility that the
United States and China could find themselves at war in the next decade. In policy circles,
this appears as unlikely as it would be unwise.

And yet 100 years on, World War I offers a sobering reminder of man’s capacity for folly.
When we say that war is “inconceivable,” is this a statement about what is possible in the
world—or only about what our limited minds can conceive? In 1914, few could imagine
slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: world war. When war ended four years
later, Europe lay in ruins: the Kaiser gone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the
Russian tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn
of its youth and treasure. A millennium in which Europe had been the political center of the
world came to a crashing halt.

The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United
States can escape Thucydides’ Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the
attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in
ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended
badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and
International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases
over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge,
painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the
challenged.

Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades
ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed,
judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not. Moreover, current
underestimations and misapprehensions of the hazards inherent in the U.S.-China relationship
contribute greatly to those hazards. A risk associated with Thucydides’ Trap is that business
as usual—not just an unexpected, extraordinary event—can trigger large-scale conflict. When
a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise
be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions
that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.”

Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?”,
The Atlantic, September 24, 2015.