The US vs China

Asia's new Cold War?

Jude Woodward

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784993429
• eBook ISBN: 9781526116567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Chine

This book addresses the most important question in geopolitics today - the future of relations between the US and China. Concerned that the rise of China will challenge the its hegemony in world affairs, the US has decided to reassert its influence in Asia to counteract any challenge. Examining and challenging the dominant causal explanations for and professed intentions of this shift in US policy, this book uncovers the real dynamics of contemporary Sino-American relations, surveying their complex interactions in the context of their post-war history, offering the reader an accessible and informative survey of the relations between China and the US in Asia, ranging from Russia's turn to the east, the rise of Japanese nationalism, democracy in Myanmar, North Korea's nuclear programme to disputes in the South China Sea. This book is an illuminating introduction to the defining issue shaping global politics for our time.

1

Introduction: America’s Pacific century?

The US has engaged upon a mighty attempt to carry through an axial strategic reorientation of its foreign policy to confront the challenges presented by the rise of China. This has meant trying to wrench the focus of US foreign policy 180 degrees from the ‘transatlantic’ priorities of the twentieth century to launch instead ‘America’s Pacific century’ (see Map 1). Donald Trump’s presidency has meant some changes in tactics – threatening a trade war and ramping up US demands on its allies to up their arms spending – but in its fundamentals his policy is essentially a continuation of that launched under President Barack Obama in 2010 to ‘pivot’ US foreign policy to focus on China. Although Obama claimed benign motives for this shift, in fact, as this book demonstrates, its real aim was to contain and constrain China through policies echoing those of the Cold War against the USSR. Trump has deepened this orientation.

The mechanisms of this US policy turn – examined in detail in this book – have been military, diplomatic and economic. On the military front the majority of US naval resources were shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, its bases expanded in size and number and its allies, particularly Japan, encouraged to rearm. Diplomatically it meant an offensive to reinvigorate its Pacific alliances and persuade its friends and allies to resist China’s economic overtures and ‘good neighbour’ diplomacy. Obama’s key economic initiative was the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a proposed US–Japan-led ‘free trade’ bloc offering preferential access to the US market as an alternative to trade with China. While Trump immediately abandoned this particular initiative, the essence of the policy – to put an economic squeeze on China – has continued. On the election stump Trump repeatedly accused China of currency manipulation, cheating on trade, stealing jobs and threatened to impose a 45 per cent tax on Chinese imports.

Within days of his election, Trump sharpened the US stance on China by accepting a congratulatory phone call from president Tsai of Taiwan, thereby, in terms of protocol, treating her as equal to a ‘head of state’ rather than a ‘provincial governor’ in line with Taiwan’s international status as a ‘province of China’.¹ This was followed by a series of hardline anti-China appointments to Trump’s core team. These included rabid China hawk, Peter Navarro, whose books include: Crouching tiger – what China’s militarism means for the world; Death by China – confronting the dragon, a global call to action; and The coming China wars: where they will be fought and how they can be won.² Dan DiMicco, another key Trump trade advisor and former steel executive, was known for arguing that China is to blame for the US’s industrial woes and that it had been waging a twodecade-long trade war with the US.³ Others in the Trump administration’s new inner circle included Alexander Gray, who previously worked for Republican congressman Randy Forbes, an outspoken China critic, and Mike Pillsbury, author of The hundred year marathon, which argues that China is gearing up for world domination.⁴ Rex Tillerson, Trump’s secretary of state, used his confirmation hearings to suggest that the US might install a naval blockade in the South China Sea to bar China from its islands in the Spratlys – a step that would clearly risk armed confrontation. Trump’s team immediately announced a major naval build-up in East Asia, including proposals to base a second aircraft carrier in the South China Sea, deploy more destroyers and submarines and expand or add new bases in Japan and Australia, and flagged the possibility of installing ‘air force long-range strike assets’ in South Korea.⁵

In short, the Trump–Pence administration continued in an even stronger form the policies of confrontation with China inaugurated by Obama. Any concerns that this could prove risky or counterproductive in dealing with China were dismissed with the argument that this new ‘peace through strength’ approach would put real muscle behind US policy in the region that had been lacking under Obama.

However, while Trump deployed a more pugnacious tone on China, his policy confronted the same constraints and problems as those, which, in the end, limited Obama’s success against China. Trump claimed he could overcome such checks through more bullish steps than Obama was prepared for, but that would mean embarking on a trade war with China in a situation where China’s economy has been more rapidly growing and dynamic than the US. It would mean taking steps that risk escalation to armed confrontation with China, an outcome that neither US elites nor the mass of its population are currently prepared for. A more aggressive policy towards China is undoubtedly more dangerous for the world, but for any US administration to actually prove more successful than Obama would mean surmounting the multiple obstacles to such an outcome that are outlined in this book.

Obama’s Pacific turn

The origins of the US turn to confrontation with China, intensified by Trump and launched by Obama, were clearly set out in a landmark article published in autumn 2011 by then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton entitled ‘America’s Pacific century’, outlining the US’s new global strategic priorities.⁶ The US stood at a ‘pivot point’, she said, which critically demanded a fundamental reorientation of US foreign policy. Asia had become ‘the key driver of world politics’, and therefore to ‘sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values’ it was vital that the US make ‘similar investments as a Pacific power’ to its ‘post-World War II commitment to building a comprehensive and lasting transatlantic network of institutions and relationships’. Alongside this, while for the previous decade US attention and resources had been absorbed by the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US now had to be ‘smart’ in reprioritising the allocation of its resources to the Asia-Pacific region. This policy became known as the US ‘pivot to Asia’.

Reminding the world that the US ‘is both an Atlantic and a Pacific power’, Clinton announced this turn was one of ‘the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade’, sitting at the heart of its ‘overall global effort to secure and sustain America’s global leadership’. And at the centre of this were relations with China, which Clinton described as among ‘the most challenging … the United States has ever had to manage’. With this policy shift, the US was declaring that ‘the US would not sit aside as China … established itself as regional leader’.⁷

While China had always been on the US’s crowded radar, it had never before been the determining question in US long-term strategies. US engagement with China had begun in the nineteenth century when, after the defeat of the Qing dynasty in the Opium Wars, it extracted extraterritorial privileges for US merchants in the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia, which the Chinese dubbed one of the ‘unfair treaties’. In the early twentieth century the US, alongside the European powers, vied with Russia and Japan for influence in China. After the overthrow of the Qing dynasty it sought favour with rising nationalist forces by supporting the Guomindang (GMD) in its attempt to fend off the rise of Mao’s communists. After 1945, as civil war resumed, the Truman administration was split between those who wanted to throw US weight behind the GMD and those who believed it was already a lost cause. It backed the GMD, but had little effect on the outcome and US political circles debated ‘who lost China’ long after the communist victory in 1949.

The US refused to recognise the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and a year later, when the US was de facto at war with China on the Korean peninsula, its policy-makers debated extending the war to China itself. In the Cold War decades that followed, as discussed in Chapter 5, American administrations were happy to ‘triangulate’ the tense relations between China and the USSR amid the widening Sino-Soviet split, initially allying with Moscow to contain China and, from 1972, decisively locking China into its global strategies against the USSR.⁸ In the tumult of the events of 1989 the US hoped that the ‘fall of communism’ might extend to Beijing, but instead the protests in Tiananmen Square were crushed. But although the Bush administration imposed sanctions most were subsequently lifted by the Clinton administration in the face of a powerful business lobby in favour of trade with China.⁹ But through all these ups and downs, at no point in this chequered history could it be claimed that the US considered China its number-one, global strategic problem.¹⁰

The twenty-first-century rise of China, coupled with the US’s own accelerating relative decline, changed this decisively. How to respond to the ‘China challenge’ moved to the heart of US foreign policy concerns.

China’s economic rise

China’s unflagging economic advance – with growth averaging over 10 per cent per annum for three decades to 2011 – saw it overtake Germany in 2007, and then Japan in 2010 to become the world’s second largest economy. It became the world’s largest exporter and second largest importer in 2009, and surpassed the US as the world’s largest trading nation in 2013. In 2013 it also displaced the US as the world’s largest industrial producer. In a switch that took place at incomparable speed, according to data from the United Nation (UN), China’s total industrial production went from 61 per cent of the US level in 2007 to 125 per cent by 2013.¹¹ Considering manufacturing alone – that is, excluding mining, electricity generation and gas and water supply – the gap is even wider. In 2007 China’s manufacturing output was 62 per cent of the US level, by 2013 it was 135 per cent – $2.7 trillion compared to $2 trillion in the US. No other country’s industrial production even approaches China’s – in 2013 China’s industrial output was 335 per cent of Japan’s and 389 per cent of Germany’s.

Figure 1.1 China and US GDP in the long run

Source: Maddison, World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP. 1–2008 AD
© John Ross

The long-term trends in the growth of the Chinese and US economies are presented in Figure 1.1, which shows how China’s economy has been steadily gaining on the US since the 1980s.

On the basis of these trends, even before the international financial crisis, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) would have overtaken the US within a couple of decades, but following 2008 and the further slowing of growth in the US and the West, this accelerated. Between 2007 and 2015 the Chinese economy more than tripled in size, while the US economy grew by only about 20 per cent.¹² As a result World Bank estimates suggest China’s economy actually overtook that of the US in 2014 in terms of purchasing power parities (PPP).¹³ China does not accept the PPP measure, but it would require a dramatic turnaround for its GDP not to overtake the US’s, even in market prices, within the next decade (see Figure 1.2).¹⁴

Of course, even if PPP estimates were accurate and the Chinese economy is already larger than the US economy, this would not mean that China had the same fundamental economic strength as the US. In 2014 China’s GDP per capita ($12,880) was still less than a quarter that of the US ($54,597).¹⁵ If expected growth rates were maintained in both economies it would be at least 2050 before China catches up on this measure. Moreover, the US enjoys other advantages, at least for the time being: the dollar remains the world’s leading currency; the US has far more advanced infrastructure and technology; a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: America’s Pacific century?
• Part I: Is a US–China conflict inevitable?
• Part II: Containment without Russia?
• Part III: Containment from the east
• Part IV: Containment from the southern seas
• Part V: Containment from south and west
• Select bibliography
• Index