Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century

by Gideon Rachman

‘China is an ancient civilisation with over 5,000 years of history.’ It was, in some respects, a boilerplate remark. Yet China’s awareness of its thousands of years of history is fundamental to the country’s understanding of itself.

the dangers of a period in which an established great power is challenged by a rising power. Allison calculates that in twelve out of sixteen such cases since 1500 the rivalry ended in war.

‘The defining question about global order in the decades ahead will be: can China and the United States escape Thucydides’ trap?’

the rise of China is an epochal event that requires a response. That response must be both forceful and sustained if the US is to preserve its privileged position in global affairs. But it must be measured and nuanced if it is to avoid plunging America into a potentially disastrous conflict in Asia.

West’s centuries-long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close. The root cause of this change is the extraordinary economic development in Asia over the last fifty years.

the political, strategic and ideological dominance of the West is now under challenge in entire regions, all over the world – in Asia, in the Middle East, in eastern Europe, in Latin America and in Africa.

The most important is the long-run shift in global economic power

‘By 1914, Europeans and their colonists ruled 84% of the land and 100% of the sea.’

It is economic might that allows nations to generate the military, diplomatic and technological resources that translate into international political power. But, over the past fifty years, the West’s dominance of the global economy has steadily eroded.

2014 when the IMF announced that, measured in terms of purchasing power, China was the world’s largest economy.

‘Asia is set to overtake the combined economic output of Europe and North America within the decade to 2020.’7

The fundamental reason for the shift in economic power to Asia is simple: weight of numbers. By 2025 some two-thirds of the world’s population will live in Asia.

by the early 2020s, when the Chinese economy is likely to overtake that of the US, in real terms as well as PPP.8

2012 for the first time in over a century, Asian nations spent more money on armaments and troops than European countries. India was, by then, competing with Saudi Arabia for the title of the world’s largest arms importer.

the relationship between economic and political power is not straightforward.

Over the long run, though, there clearly is a strong relationship between economic might and international political power.

In time, the growing wealth of Asian nations will also translate into political power that will be felt all over the world. For the moment, however, the most obvious consequence of the erosion of Western power is a fraying of international order and a growing risk of conflict around the world.

America’s inability to restore order in the Middle East, combined with the European Union’s paralysis, fostered a sense of declining Western power – and may well have encouraged security challenges to the US in Asia and Europe.

the United States is easily the healthiest part of the Western alliance. Much of America’s ‘weakness’ in the Obama years was, in reality, the weakness of its allies.

the process of Easternisation is rooted in deep historical and economic forces that are beyond the power of any single US president to change.

Locked in a confrontation with the West, Russia’s leadership has seized upon the idea that power is migrating east and sought ever-closer relations with China.

The centre of gravity in the world of economic, political and military strategy is moving to the Asia-Pacific region.’

the Turkish state has become increasingly estranged from Europe and the US.

In developing Africa, meanwhile, leaders from Ethiopia to South Africa have become increasingly intrigued by the ‘China model’ – which seems to offer the prospect of rapid economic growth without the need to pay obeisance to Western strictures on democracy or corruption.

There are two main impediments to Eastern power. The first is the internal political problems of the emerging Asian superpowers.

The second and even more serious obstacle to the smooth Easternisation of global political power is the divisions and rivalries within Asia itself.

for the foreseeable future, there will be no ‘Eastern alliance’ to supplant the ‘Western alliance’.

political instability and rivalries within Asia also pose considerable risks for the West – and the world as a whole.

The First World War marked the beginning of the end of European dominance of the world.

the Second World War was a decisive moment in weakening the West’s political domination of Asia – and so creating the conditions for the process of Easternisation that is currently unfolding.

‘It is no exaggeration to say that millions, probably hundreds of millions of people in societies that have grown up with a history of subjection to Europe and America – the Chinese software engineer and the Turkish tycoon, as well as the unemployed Egyptian graduate – derive profound gratification from the prospect of humiliating their former masters and overlords.’11

foreign policy is ultimately about power.

America’s military budget was bigger than that of the whole of the rest of the world combined.

Pacific had ‘for all practical purposes been an American lake for our navy since the end of World War Two’.12 But the Pacific is now contested territory.

Deng’s dictum – ‘Coolly observe, calmly deal with things, hold your position, hide your capacities, bide your time, accomplish things where possible’ – became famous

Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister during that period, said of America and China that ‘our common interests far outweigh our differences’.

By the time President Xi took office, there was already a body of new ideas and emerging policies that he could draw upon as the basis for a more assertive foreign policy. Three related ideas were particularly important: a sense of aggrieved nationalism; increasing confidence in China’s strength relative to the United States; and a deep fear about China’s own domestic political stability and the potentially subversive role of the West.

In the years after 1989, the idea that China had undergone a ‘century of humiliation’, only to be saved by the Communist Party from a predatory world, was drilled into a generation of school and university students

China’s leaders were buoyed by a growing sense of wealth and power.

The fact that China – aided by a massive splurge of government spending – recovered from the shock of 2008 far faster than the West further bolstered Chinese self-confidence. The growing awareness of how much the US had borrowed from China also created the impression that the traditional power relationship between Washington and Beijing was changing.

For all China’s continuing insistence that it was still a developing nation, the government in Beijing was increasingly behaving like a superpower-in-the-making – and the only country that it still seemed to regard as a true equal was the United States.

China’s increasingly assertive nationalism under Xi Jinping was a reflection of insecurity as much as confidence.

Chinese officials seemed sincerely to embrace the Russian view of the uprising in Ukraine – namely that it was essentially organised by the Americans, using all their nefarious tools, from the internet to Western-funded NGOs.

Under Xi, the Great Firewall has been raised higher, amidst a crackdown on Western influence that has affected universities, bloggers and television schedules.

Xi’s China presents a paradox. Its assertive foreign policy and rhetoric suggests that China is a country that is increasingly confident of its own power and international role. But a crackdown on dissent and corruption at home, against the backdrop of a slowing economy, points to a strong sense of insecurity at the top levels of government. The two themes – assertive nationalism overseas and nagging insecurity at home – come together in the government’s fear of Western subversion.

The remaining years of the Obama administration were defined by a constant tension in foreign policymaking between the desire to maintain a strategic focus on Asia and the permanent distraction of the pounding headaches of turmoil in the Middle East and then Russia.

‘Abenomics’. The idea is that Japan must do everything to break the cycle of deflation (falling prices), which discourages spending and investment

At the same time, Abenomics promises to push through structural reforms, to make it easier for Japanese firms to hire and fire – and to encourage Japanese women into the workforce. By allowing Japan’s central bank to print money in previously undreamed of quantities, Abe excited (and sometimes horrified) economists all over the world.

Japanese nationalism was as much of a problem as the Chinese variety, when he wrote that ‘Both Tokyo and Beijing are determined to play to nationalist sentiments.’4

The mood of the Japanese public still looked strongly pacifist – which made a striking contrast with the nationalism that often flared amongst China’s netizens.