Is China strong or is China weak?
I think it’s both. That might be a cop-out, but I hope what will follow will also convince you of this dynamic. I will also provide a couple of frameworks to help people think through this for themselves. I use Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers to think through this — that geopolitical power is fundamentally tied to economic strength. I elaborate more on this later on.
The first framework is the notion of offensive realism. The concept describes the international order as anarchic, and that other countries are concerned about the threats posed by other countries — usually neighboring countries for fear of invasion. Countries aim to be as powerful as they can be secure from other countries. Some countries are so powerful that they become hegemons in particular regions. The United States is the clearest instance of a hegemon in the Americas, at least. Countries fearing a regional hegemon can try to engage the United States as an offshore balancer, to balance against that regional hegemon. This has happened several times. The United States was the offshore balancer in continental Europe against Germany in both World Wars; it was the offshore balancer against a belligerent Japan, and again against North Korea.
The second main idea is nationalism. Ideologies used to define systems of governance. Today nationalism seems to be the main tool that elites use to govern their own countries. The idea of a country is what drives social cohesion when other ideologies are no longer in play. Capitalism won in the Cold War against Communism; the Chinese Communist Party is really trying to promote capitalism in China, but that’s more to do with history more than anything else. Nationalism can result in social cohesion and the promotion of it creates political legitimacy for the ruling elites.
The third framework can be described as “guns and butter”. Guns refer to military, while butter refers to economic development. Developing and maintaining a military is a cost to the economy, and there are few spillovers. The US is an exception to this, but broadly the technical developments made in the military are not always made available for commercial use. Countries have to think about how much resources are going to be ‘sunk’ in military spending that could go elsewhere in society, such as education or healthcare.
I think about the structure of China’s economy, about the move away from exports to consumption. I think about this economic transition as a painful one for those working in manufacturing industries, and I think about the social safety nets that exist in China. Can China’s social safety nets provide refuge in these wrenching times?
The next thing I think about is China’s governing system, which really is one based on patronage, and less about governing ability. (Cf Victor Shih) This means that the system is not clearly meritocratic, as we hear about news about offshore accounts of various Chinese leaders, and when we hear about the skyrocketing property prices in specific locales, driven by rich Chinese with cash.
I also think a bit about demographics. China is ageing rapidly, and that will become an issue in about 20 years’ time. Still that means that it will have to think about generating the resources to be able to manage that issue.
If we put all these together, we can get a sense of what is driving China’s strategic goals:
China’s elites are trying to generate growth and obtain resources to manage an uncertain future.
As I am thinking about this, I am also reading other material, such as Michael Pillsbury’s work on the “One Hundred Year Marathon” — that China is seeking to replace the US as the global hegemon. It’s a plausible story about how China is attempting to create the conditions for its rise to global hegemon status. However, I am just thinking about how China’s domestic conditions do not exactly bode well for it. I wonder if its actions around the world, including the South China Sea, are an attempt to gather sufficient resources to ensure its continued governing legitimacy to cope with precisely those domestic conditions.
More ink can be spilled further on this topic, and at some point, I do want to think about China’s innovation capacity and more detail on the patronage system that I assert.
Also grateful to Francis Fukuyama for his Origins of Political Order and the sequel, Political Order and Decay. I hope to write about these soon.
