Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

Xi Jinping had consolidated power and made himself the world’s mightiest dictator since Joseph Stalin, while America’s politics continued to be a tribal, polarized mess—and America’s attention was diverted by other crises and conflicts around the globe. Never before had the People’s Republic of China (PRC) possessed such military strength and economic influence vis-à-vis its rivals. By outward appearances, Xi’s “Chinese Dream”—his ambition to make China dominant in Asia and around the globe—was on the verge of becoming a reality. But Xi was tormented by the nightmare of Chinese decline. For years, the pressures on the CCP regime had been mounting. Once-torrid economic growth had slowed to a crawl. The legacy of the One-Child policy was demographic disaster—an impending loss of nearly 200 million working-age individuals in China by mid-century. The regime had become more repressive as it grew ever more petrified of dissent. And in response to Chinese belligerence during the COVID-19 pandemic and for years thereafter, the democratic world had gradually been closing ranks to check Beijing’s rise. Taiwan was finally starting to shore up its inadequate military defenses, as its population rejected any suggestion of reunification with China. The United States—a country with a unique talent for slaying autocratic rivals—was waging a tech and tariff war against China’s economy while retooling its military to take on the PLA. On the eve of war, the world still saw China as a rising...

The CCP is laying plans to create a Sino-centric Asia and reclaim what it sees as China’s rightful place atop the global hierarchy. Beijing is using an impressive array of military, economic, diplomatic, technological, and ideological tools to protect the power and project the influence of a brutal authoritarian regime. The United States, for its part, is trying to defend a liberal international order it has anchored for generations and prevent Beijing from making the twenty-first century an age of autocratic ascendancy. America and China are thus locked in a fierce global struggle. It has become conventional wisdom in Washington—a rare point of agreement in a bitterly divided capital—that the two countries are running a “superpower marathon” that may last a century.

Our core argument in this book is that the conventional wisdom is wrong on both points. Americans urgently need to start seeing the Sino-American rivalry less as a 100-year marathon and more as a blistering, decade-long sprint. That’s because China will be a falling power far sooner than most people think.

The reason for this is China has reached the most treacherous stage in the life cycle of a rising power—the point where it is strong enough to aggressively disrupt the existing order but is losing confidence that time is on its side.

China’s miraculous, multi-decade rise was aided by strong tailwinds that have now become headwinds.

Through its “wolf-warrior” diplomacy and its confrontational behavior in hot spots from the Himalayas to the South China Sea, China has sprung a strategic trap on itself, scaring—and beginning to unite—potential rivals throughout Eurasia. Not least, the CCP has now violated the first rule of global politics for the past century: Don’t make an enemy of the United States.

We live in an age of “peak China,” not a forever rising China. Beijing is a revisionist power that wants to reorder the world, but its time to do so is already running out.

Countries that fear they are being encircled by rivals make desperate bids to break the ring. Some of the bloodiest wars in history have been started not by rising, self-assured powers, but by countries—such as Germany in 1914 or Japan in 1941—that had peaked and begun to decline. Vladimir Putin’s recent wars in the former Soviet Union fit this same mold. Xi’s regime is tracing a fraught but familiar arc in international affairs—an exhilarating rise followed by the prospect of a hard fall.

China’s predicament offers good news and bad news for America. The good news is that, over the long run, the Chinese challenge may prove more manageable than many pessimists now believe. An unhealthy, totalitarian China won’t effortlessly surge past America as the world’s leading power. We may one day look back on China as we now view the Soviet Union—as a formidable foe whose evident strengths obscured fatal vulnerabilities. The bad news is that getting to the long run won’t be easy. During the 2020s, the pace of rivalry will be torrid, and the prospect of war will be frighteningly real.

Russian aggression in Ukraine has made the successful containment of China all the more imperative. If China were to follow in Russia’s footsteps and expand violently in its region, Eurasia would be engulfed in conflict. The United States would again face the prospect of a two-front war, only this time against nuclear-armed aggressors fighting “back to back” along their shared border. America’s military would be overstretched and, likely, overwhelmed; America’s alliance system might come under unbearable strain. The postwar international order could collapse as countries across Eurasia scramble to defend themselves and cope with the knock-on effects of major-power war, including economic crises and mass refugee flows. A world already shaken by Russian aggression could be shattered by a Chinese offensive.

Another reason we focus on China is that it is especially dangerous. China’s economy is ten times larger than Russia’s, and Beijing’s military budget is quadruple the size of Moscow’s. Whereas Russia is essentially a two-dimensional great power that draws influence from its military and energy resources, China possesses a wider spectrum of coercive tools and can challenge the United States and its allies in almost any domain of geopolitical competition.

More than half of the world’s countries already trade more with China than with the United States; and China has recently become the world’s largest overseas lender, doling out more credit than the World Bank, the IMF, or all twenty-two of the Paris Club governments (a group of the world’s major lending nations) combined.

Beijing’s economic power may be peaking, but no other country is so capable of challenging America globally.

“peaking power trap”—

“The history of failure in war,” General Douglas MacArthur explained in 1940, “can almost be summed up in two words: too late.

The greatest geopolitical catastrophes occur at the intersection of ambition and desperation. Xi Jinping’s China will soon be driven by plenty of both.

China doesn’t want to be a superpower—one pole of many in the international system. It wants to be the superpower—the geopolitical sun around which the system revolves.

China was now a great power capable of mounting a global challenge to the United States. Xi himself had put it bluntly in a less publicized speech years earlier. The road ahead would be hard, he explained, and traveling it would require “great strategic determination.” Yet the destination was not in doubt: China would build “a socialism that is superior to capitalism” and ensure a “future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.”

At its creation in 1949, the People’s Republic was a technologically backward, poverty-ridden country—“a vast poorhouse,” wrote American strategist George Kennan, “for which responsibility is to be avoided.” 4 When Mao Zedong died in 1976, the country remained appallingly underdeveloped. Over time, however, the combination of good fortune and enlightened economic reforms moved China from socialist stagnation to bustling authoritarian capitalism. The resulting growth was mind-blowing: Real gross domestic product grew 37-fold between 1978 and 2018.5 Today, China has the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity), manufacturing output, trade surplus, and financial reserves. In 2018, it was the top trading partner for 128 nations.6 All of which means that China’s leaders can entertain some very big dreams.

First, the CCP has the eternal ambition of every autocratic regime—to maintain its iron grip on power.

As Wen Jiabao, then China’s head of government, once said, “To think about why danger looms will ensure one’s security. To think about why chaos occurs will ensure one’s peace. To think about why a country falls will ensure one’s survival.”

Second, the CCP wants to make China whole again by regaining territories lost in earlier eras of internal upheaval and foreign aggression.

That self-governing island’s anomalous status cannot “be passed on from generation to generation,” Xi has said: Beijing cannot wait forever for its renegade province to return.

The CCP’s third objective is to create “Asia for Asians,” a regional sphere of influence in which China is supreme because outside actors, especially America, are pushed to the margins.

Beijing probably doesn’t envision the sort of outright physical dominance that the Soviet Union exercised in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. It may not go rampaging militarily across Asia. The CCP envisions, rather, using a mix of attraction and coercion to ensure that the economies of maritime Asia are oriented toward Beijing rather than Washington, that smaller powers are properly deferential to the CCP, and that America no longer has the alliances, regional military presence, or influence necessary to create problems for China in its own front yard.

The closest Xi Jinping has come to publicly declaring this ambition was when he said, in 2014, that “it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia”—a euphemism for a situation in which America has been kicked out of a region that then has no way of resisting China’s power.13 Other officials have been more explicit. In 2010, PRC foreign minister Yang Jiechi told ten Southeast Asian countries that they must defer to Beijing’s wishes because “China is a big country and you are small countries, and that is a fact.”14

“By 2050, two centuries after the Opium Wars, which plunged the ‘Middle Kingdom’ into a period of hurt and shame, China is set to regain its might and re-ascend to the top of the world.”

authoritarian forms of government would be protected and even privileged in the age of Chinese ascendancy, as the period of democratic dominance ends.

Another Sinologist, Liza Tobin, offers a stark appraisal of Xi’s “community of common destiny”: “A global network of partnerships centered on China would replace the U.S. system of treaty alliances, the international community would regard Beijing’s authoritarian governance model as a superior alternative to Western electoral democracy, and the world would credit the Communist Party of China for developing a new path to peace, prosperity, and modernity that other countries can follow.”

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system,” writes Henry Kissinger. “They aspire to be the international system.”24 That’s the ultimate ambition of Chinese statecraft today.

China’s inflation-adjusted military spending spending grew 10-fold between 1990 and 2020, a rate of sustained expansion unparalleled in modern history.27 The PLA has used that money to build the weapons, from anti-ship ballistic missiles to quiet attack submarines, needed to keep American ships and planes out of the western Pacific—and give Beijing a free hand against Taiwan or another nearby foe.

Beijing is on pace to become a full-fledged nuclear peer of the United States by the 2030s. And China is building aircraft carriers, acquiring overseas bases, and developing the ability to project power into the Indian Ocean and, eventually, around the world.

Over more than a decade, Beijing has used multifaceted coercion to strengthen its control of the South China Sea; most notably, by building artificial islands and then piling air bases, missiles, and other military capabilities on top of them. It has grabbed control of disputed features from the Philippines and sent oil rigs, fishing fleets, and a quasi-official maritime militia into the exclusive economic zones of its neighbors. (Chinese ships have also dumped piles of human excrement near contested reefs and features, causing one environmental expert to exclaim, “China, stop shitting in the Spratlys.”30) “We don’t want to quarrel with you,” Xi told the president of the Philippines in 2017. “But if you force the issue, we’ll go to war.”31 Looking further afield, the PLA has tested Japan’s air and naval defenses around the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, harassed India militarily in the Himalayas, and made menacing threats toward Taiwan. That island “won’t stand a chance” if China invades, PLA officials have taunted.

Belt and Road Initiative (BRI),

Critical to BRI—and everything else China is doing—is the pursuit of technological supremacy. The CCP has long sought to hasten China’s rise with a world-class program of intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, and commercial espionage. Through its Digital Silk Road project, Beijing is now trying to position companies such as Huawei and ZTE as the world’s chief providers of telecommunications infrastructure and advanced surveillance equipment.

its policies—selling advanced surveillance systems, training foreign officials in the art of repression, bolstering embattled tyrants in places as far away as Africa and South America—unquestionably make the world a more autocratic place. On the global stage, China twists concepts of human rights to emphasize economic development rather than political freedom; it champions notions of sovereignty meant to protect dictators from nosy democrats.

Chinese strategy is “grand” in every sense of the word. It marries the geopolitical insights of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who argued that great powers must build ocean-going navies and rule the waves, with those of Halford Mackinder, who popularized the idea that the Eurasian “heartland” could become an unassailable geopolitical fortress if controlled by a single actor.45 That strategy envisions preeminence within China’s regional surroundings as a springboard to global influence; it wields a vast array of tools to achieve a vast array of military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological ends. China’s strategy is also grand in one final way: It requires severe competition, perhaps confrontation, with the United States.

Americans might be surprised to find that Chinese leaders view the United States as a dangerous, hostile nation determined to hold other countries down. In 2010, then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton scoffed at the idea that America was “bent on containing China,” pointing out that “China has experienced breathtaking growth and development” in the American world order.46 Yet even as China has, in many ways, flourished in the Pax Americana, its leaders have long worried that Washington threatens nearly everything the CCP desires.

the United States has a distinguished record of destroying its most serious global challengers—imperial Germany, imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union—as well as a host of lesser rivals. “The mortuary of global politics is piled high with the corpses of socialist countries,”

When America and China were avowed enemies during the early Cold War, Washington both sponsored Tibetan rebels who fought against that regime and supported Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek and his claim to be China’s rightful ruler.

America simply cannot cease threatening the CCP unless it somehow ceases to be what it is—a liberal democracy concerned with the fate of freedom in the world.

the regime harbors “a constant and strong belief that the U.S. has sinister designs to sabotage the Communist leadership and turn China into its vassal state.”

The CCP cannot make China whole again without reclaiming Taiwan, but America shields that island—through arms sales, diplomatic support, and the implicit promise of military aid—from Beijing’s pressure.

2014, two distinguished Western statesmen reported a prevailing belief in Beijing that America’s China policy revolves around “Five to’s”: “to isolate China, to contain China, to diminish China, to internally divide China, and to sabotage China’s leadership.”57 These perceptions lead to a belief that realizing China’s dreams will ultimately require a test of strength. The CCP faces a “new long march” in its relations with America, said Xi in 2019—a dangerous struggle for supremacy and survival.

the only thing unusual about China is just how dynamic it has been. No country in the modern era has grown so fast for so long. No country in the modern era has seen its ability to change the world expand so dramatically. This being the case, it was always improbable that China would happily settle into America’s world, because doing so would have required accepting arrangements—such as U.S. protection of Taiwan and U.S. military alliances arrayed along China’s maritime periphery—that no great power would tolerate forever. It was inevitable that Beijing would want to subdue its geopolitical periphery, as America did during its own rise to global power; spread its influence into faraway regions; and make the world conform to Chinese desires. “Of course” a surging China would contest American supremacy, the great Singaporean prime minister Lee Kwan Yew remarked. “How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?”

China’s leaders view themselves as heirs to a Chinese state that was a superpower for most of recorded history. A series of Chinese empires claimed “all under heaven” as their mandate; they commanded deference from smaller states along the imperial periphery. “This history,” writes veteran Asia-watcher Michael Schuman, “has fostered in the Chinese a firm belief in what role they and their country should play in the world today, and for that matter, into the distant forever.”

In Beijing’s view, an American-led world in which China is a second-tier power is not the historical norm but a profoundly galling exception. That order was created after World War II, at the tail end of a “century of humiliation” in which a divided China was plundered by rapacious foreign powers. The CCP’s mandate is to set history aright by returning China to the top of the heap. “Since the Opium War of the 1840s the Chinese people have long cherished a dream of realizing a great national rejuvenation,” said Xi in 2014. Under CCP rule, China “will never again tolerate being bullied by any nation.”

A strong, proud China might still pose problems for Washington even if it were a liberal democracy. But the fact that the country is ruled by autocrats committed to the ruthless suppression of liberalism domestically turbocharges Chinese revisionism globally. A deeply authoritarian state can never feel secure in its own rule because it does not enjoy the freely given consent of the governed; it can never feel safe in a world dominated by democracies because liberal international norms challenge illiberal domestic practices. “Autocracies,” writes the China scholar Minxin Pei, “simply are incapable of practicing liberalism abroad while maintaining authoritarianism at home.”

There is nothing extraordinary about this. When America became a world power, it forged a world that was hospitable to democratic values. When the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe, it imposed Communist regimes. In great-power rivalries since antiquity, ideological cleavages have exacerbated geopolitical cleavages: Differences in how governments see their citizens produce profound differences in how those governments see the world.

China is a typical revisionist state, an empire trying to reclaim its cherished place in the world, and an autocracy whose assertiveness flows from its unending insecurity. That’s a powerful—and volatile—combination.