The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping's China

by Kevin Rudd

There was nothing inevitable about the Great War from 1914 to 1918. It came about because of the flawed decisions of political and military leaders in July and August 1914. That’s what led to

the slaughter. Those decisions cost approximately 40 million lives, including 117,000 Americans and 60,000 Australians.

next global conflagration, one so horrific that when it was done, as many as 85 million—approximately 3 percent of the world’s ...

Mao’s depredations of the country during the Great Leap Forward of 1958, which left some thirty million dead from starvation; the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao eliminated his political enemies through

Stalinesque show trials, leading to millions of deaths and the destruction of priceless cultural heritage at the same time; and human rights abuses that continue to this day.

No approach to understanding US-China relations is free from intellectual and cultural prejudice.

This may be emotionally satisfying to some and politically useful for others in eliciting widespread popular support for a given course of action, but its inability to bring about any good is of little interest to demagogues.

Above all, what history teaches us is that nationalism is a very dangerous thing in the conduct of international relations.

The US national security establishment, in particular, now holds the view that the CCP has never had any compunction about lying to deceive its political or strategic adversaries.

Thucydides’s Trap is “the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power.”

how the world looks from Xi’s desk in Zhongnanhai.

among the external forces that lie beyond Chinese control—and while great powers such as Russia, Japan, and even India could complicate or even impede China’s rise—only the United States could wield sufficient strategic and economic power to potentially derail it. That’s why the US continues to occupy the central position in Chinese Communist Party strategic thinking.

This is also compounded by a real fear of Xi on the part of Chinese officials and a career-preserving desire to provide analyses that conform to what they believe he wants to hear.

To put it another way, from the outset, Beijing saw the relationship as a transactional one, as a means of enhancing China’s national security and prosperity. Whereas Washington came to see it, at least in part, as transformational, carrying with it the deeper objective of changing the fundamental nature of Communist China itself.

This led to China also becoming the world’s largest trading country and the world’s second-largest destination for global foreign direct investment. It set the scene for the decline of American industry and the rise of populist resentment against globalization

in general—and China in particular.

how long a modernizing country should be governed by a single party with a stranglehold on all political power.

China argued that it would no longer tolerate foreign naval vessels operating in international waters lying within its two-hundred-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (an area granted by international law to waters surrounding sovereign territory, in which a country has rights to resources but no right to impede the passage of ships or aircraft) without express permission. This contravened the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which the PRC was an original signatory and which it ratified in 1996 (and which the US has not).

American concept of freedom represents a continuing existential threat to the political legitimacy of the party within China itself.

he is not just advancing the tired arguments of Marxist historical materialism and the self-destructionism inherent in a liberal-capitalist model. He is much more fundamentally making a point about Chinese culture, race, and nationalism,

which is infinitely more unifying for the 1.3 billion Chinese people who are not members of the CCP. The Chinese people, whatever their politics, feel a collective pride about the return of China to a central place in the global order—one commensurate with its civilizational longevity, cultural depth, and sheer size.

In China’s perspective, this is reflected in 150 years of US commercial efforts to penetrate China’s vast domestic market—from the age of opium to the age of Apple. It sees it in the history of US national security strategy. First, handing over Chinese territory to appease Japan after World War I. Then, using the protracted Japanese occupation of China during World War II to keep the bulk of Japanese imperial forces bogged down for the duration of the Pacific War instead of prioritizing a liberation of the Chinese mainland. And finally, leveraging Beijing against Moscow as part of an ultimately successful strategy to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War. While China sees such US policy and statecraft as a normal expression of US national interests, it objects to the American view that this somehow represents a uniquely moral approach to foreign policy. Even more ridiculous, in Beijing’s view, is any claim that US policy has ever been an exercise in generosity toward China’s interests. For example, the US might see its support for Chinese accession to the WTO in 2001 as an investment not only in the future of the global rules-based order but also as a moral investment in China’s domestic economic and political progress. Beijing’s interpretation, however, is purely pragmatic: the US and the rest of the West simply wanted more access to profitable Chinese markets—with a nefarious secondary hope of driving liberal-democratic “evolution” in China’s political system.

the spectacular rise of Buddhism and Christianity as spiritual alternatives to Marxism-Leninism. Protestant Christianity, in particular, is booming in China, growing from twenty-two million church members in 2010 to at least thirty-eight million in 2020. This number doesn’t include an estimated additional twenty-two million who, following a

major crackdown on churches by Xi since 2017, are thought to worship in underground churches not registered with the state. Nor does it include those who do not attend any formal services at all. In total, scholars estimate there may now be more than one hundred million Protestant believers in China—more than the entire membership of the party.

More broadly, the party is painfully aware of the more amorphously subversive but pervasive power of American cultural, educational, technological, and other soft powers, particularly among China’s young people and private entrepreneurs.

At the same time, China has a remarkable incapacity to reflect on its Han ethnocentrism, including its historical predisposition for racial stereotyping and the widespread view that most non-Han ethnicities are racially inferior, or luohou (backward), and in need of Sinicization.

China’s view of America is that it is insufferably arrogant, condescending, and systemically incapable of treating China or its leaders with appropriate national respect, let alone as equals.

The US is also seen as demanding that others give America “face” while routinely denying their Chinese interlocutors the same basic courtesies.

Beijing contrasts its approach with the selectivity of American interventions around the world—a selectivity that targets some countries, such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya, in the name of democratic principles but not other undemocratic states, such as Saudi Arabia, that happen to be strategic allies of the United States.

China does not respond well to what it sees as the self-serving argument that the colonialist and neocolonialist obscenities of the past represent a bygone era that “civilized” nations in the postwar West have long left behind. They point to the accumulated wealth of many Western powers as having been extracted from their former colonial possessions, for which no compensation has been offered to postcolonial successor states. As for the United States in particular, which claims it has never been a classic colonial power, China points to the long and checkered history of the Monroe Doctrine and the unabashed American national self-interest alive in the very idea of the Western Hemisphere being, somehow, the unique preserve of US power.

But while China’s understanding of modern America may be imperfect, it is more disciplined and sophisticated than what we find today among Washington political elites in their understanding of what actually makes China tick. Not only do Chinese strategists rigorously keep up-to-date with Washington’s English-language policy debates (which Washington elites do not do in reverse), but they also use a consistent analytic framework to make sense of their strategic environment. In line with Marxist-Leninist dialectical analysis, Chinese leaders are trained to identify what is called thesis and antithesis, trend and countertrend, and action and reaction across politics, economics, society, technology, and international relations. This, in turn, is based on a deeper assessment of the unity of opposites, contradictions, and struggle as drivers of historical change. These formal assessments of China’s international operating environment are the product of multiple inputs from across the party, government departments, and official think tanks. As good Marxists, the Chinese leadership regard their conclusions—never reached lightly over a weekend but usually over several years—as revealing long-term trends that are “scientifically and objectively true,” to

use the Marxist formulation.

Slowly, Americans have also learned that China today is not just a source of copying, counterfeiting, and cheaply made knock-offs but also a powerhouse of technological innovation. And among America’s China-watching policy and business community, respect is extended, albeit grudgingly, to China’s post-Mao leadership for their political resolve, policy pragmatism, and capacity to navigate the crises they have faced in bringing about the country’s economic modernization. There is, therefore, a significant level of underlying American regard for China’s national achievements, both current and historic, which Americans extend to relatively few other countries or cultures.

This difficulty in deciphering what the party wants, beyond the goals explicitly laid out in the public speeches of its leaders, is once again compounded by the purpose-built opacity of the Chinese political system. Indeed, the system is designed to keep prying foreign eyes as far away as possible from the actual core of Chinese leadership processes, including those factors that ultimately drive its political decisions. In part, this comes from the perceived need to present absolute unity of purpose at all times and a fear that if anyone discovers that the CCP’s internal processes are much messier than they would have us believe, it would lead to a perception of weakness and turmoil. It is also the product of a Leninist party’s long-standing predisposition to maintain secrecy at all costs, no matter the topic.

For example, in 2012, Chinese vessels massed around a Philippine-controlled feature in the South China Sea known as Scarborough Shoal. Seemingly attempting to seize control of it, a dangerous standoff with the Philippine Navy ensued until Obama administration officials mediated a deal for both sides to withdraw. The Philippines’ ships ultimately withdrew, but China’s stayed. Shocked American officials learned their lesson, but Beijing was emboldened. By 2014, China was engaged in a major campaign to create “facts on the ground” in the South China Sea, with swarms of dredging ships pouring sand onto reefs and islets in order to create multiple artificial islands, some large enough to house military-style airstrips, hangars, and supply depots. Standing beside President Obama at a summit in 2015, Xi Jinping pledged that the islands would never be militarized. American officials were doubtful, scoffing at China’s public protestations that its island-reclamation efforts were merely to “assist meteorological and oceanographic research.”

There is only a small step between the sense of being deceived and the even deeper sense of betrayal that follows. That’s because deception shatters trust, as much between states as between individuals.

2001, when China was first welcomed into the WTO. From Washington’s perspective, supporting China’s accession to the trade body was the

single most important decision made by a US administration since diplomatic normalization in 1979, the effect of which was to turbocharge China’s economic rise, enabling it to become the largest trading power and second-largest economy in the world within a decade. However, China did not open its markets fully to the US and the rest of the West as promised. In the view of America and many of its allies, China continued to protect its industries (contrary to WTO rules), subsidize its exports, manipulate its currency, and steal intellectual property as a deliberate stratagem to accelerate its economic and military development. On top of this, China deployed the full resources of the state in a bold bid to overtake all its international competitors in the high-technology industries of the future. In other words, China had no interest in becoming a market economy anchored in the principles of competitive neutrality as provided for

under the terms of its WTO accession. Instead, it intended to continue to use the full powers of its authoritarian capitalist model to win an undeclared economic war against the US and the West. Even worse, in the American view, China continued to run massive trade surpluses with the Unit...

Chinese aphorism on deception—that “above, there are policies, but below, there are counterpolicies” (shang you zhengce, xia you duice)—seemed to be in effect.

the driving sentiment was that whatever international economic agreements China signed up to were largely a political smoke screen, behind which the deeply nationalist and protectionist orientation of the Chinese state continued to churn.

“No state is ever fully transparent with another state, particularly in the context of unfolding strategic rivalry.”

Where Xi has changed China’s worldview has been in the reinvigoration of the party’s Marxist-Leninist foundations, the turbocharging of Chinese nationalism, and the sharpening of the country’s national ambitions.

Xi also recognizes that the basis of all national power ultimately hangs on economic power and no longer simply “from the barrel of a gun,” as Mao used to say.

it sees its maritime periphery as deeply hostile. Here, China perceives a region strategically allied against it—with a ring of US allies from South Korea to Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines and Australia. China’s strategic response to this is clear. It seeks to fracture US alliances. It has said as much repeatedly in its declaratory statements, claiming that they are relics of the Cold War. Meanwhile, as noted above, Xi has overseen a transformation of China’s military capabilities in which the army continues to shrink and its naval and air forces continue to expand, along with an arsenal

of missiles and other asymmetric weapons.

They also understand that the only real source of employment growth in China’s economy over the last thirty years has come from the private sector—not state-owned enterprises (SOEs)—although this has become increasingly ideologically contentious in Xi Jinping’s China.

it is easier to understand why the Western liberal-democratic value system, most potently championed by the United States, is anathema to Xi Jinping. America, with its simultaneous embodiment of political and religious liberty, a powerful and innovative economy, and a strong military is fundamentally problematic for party ideologists. This is because it offers a powerful countercase to the core arguments underpinning China’s authoritarian-capitalist model: that state direction and ideological control are essential preconditions for both national greatness and individual prosperity.

This was followed in 2017 by China’s new foreign NGO law, which placed new security restrictions on the operations of

any NGO attracting philanthropic funding from abroad. With the strike of a pen, this law crushed an active civil society that developed over decades, with organizations promoting everything from occupational health and safety to the schooling of migrant workers’ children. Then, more recently, Xi has also moved to ban private schooling and the hiring of foreign teachers as well as the use of international textbooks and curricula.