Denying Thucydides’s “^r:::t

make it less real’ Recognizing

it does not mean just “t”ptitg whatever happens’

‘We owe it to future

generations to face o”t of h”to’y’s most brutal tendencies head on and

,h.r, do everything we can to defy the odds’

INTRODUCTION

I have written my work, not as an essay to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

-Thurydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

Here we are on top of the world. We have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, this thing called history. But history is something unpleasant that happens to other people.

-Arnold Toynbee, recalling the 1897 diamond jubilee celebration of Qeen Victoria

Like other practicing historians, I am often asked what the “les- sons of history” are. I answer that the only lesson I have learnt from studying the past is that there are no permanent winners and losers.

-Ramachandra Guha

A h, if we only knew.” That was the best the German chancellor l. \ could offer. Even when a colleague pressed Theobald von Beth- mann Hollweg, he could not explain how his choices, and those of other European statesmen, had led to the most devastating war the world had seen to that point. By the time the slaughter of the Great War finally ended in 1918, the key players had lost all they fought for: the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the German kaiser ousted, the

Russian tsar overthrown, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of its treasure and youth. And for what? If we only knew.

i

x11 Introduction

Bethmann Hollweg’s phrase haunted the president of the United States nearly half a century later. In 1962,John F. Kennedy was forty- {ive years old and in his second year in ofiice, but sdll struggling to get his mind around his responsibilities as commander in chief. He knew

that his {inger was on the button of a nuclear arsenal that could kill hundreds of millions of human beings in a matter of rninutes. But for

what? A slogan at the time declared, “Better dead than red.” Kennedy rejected that dichotomy as not just facile, but false. “Our goal,” as he put it, had to be “not peace at the expense offreedom, but both peace and freedom.” The question was how he and his administration could

achieve both.

As he vacationed at the family compound on Cape Cod in the sum- mer of 1962, Kennedy found himself reading The Cuns of Augu.st, Bar- bara Tuchman’s compelling account of the outbreak of war in 1,914. Tuchman traced the thoughts and actions of Germany’s Kaiser ‘W’il-

helm and his chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, Britain’s King George and

his foreign secretary Edward Grey, Tsar Nicholas, Austro-Hungarian

emperor Franz Joseph, and others as they sleepwalked into the abyss. Tuchman argued that none of these men understood the danger they faced. None wanted the war they got. Given the opportunity for a do-

over, none would repeat the choices he made. Refecting on his own responsibilities, Kennedy pledged that if he ever found himself facing choices that could make the difference between catastrophic war and

peace, he would be able to give history a better answer than Bethmann

Hollweg’s.

Kennedy had no inkling of what lay ahead. In October 1962, jtst two months after he read Tuchman’s book, he faced off against Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the most dangerous confrontation in hu- man history. The Cuban Missile Crisis began when the United States

discovered the Soviets attempting to sneak nuclear-tipped missiles into

Cuba, a mere ninety miles from Florida. The situation quickly esca- lated from diplomatic threats to an American blockade of the island, rnilitary mobilizations in both the US and USSR, and several high- st,rkcs clashes, including the shooting down of an American U-2 spy

Introduction xiii plane over Cuba. At the height of the crisis, which lasted for a rense thirteen days, Kennedy confided to his brother Robert that he believed the chances it would end in nuclear war were ..between one_in_three and even.” Nothing historians have discovered since has lengthened those odds.

Although he appreciated the dangers of his predicament, Kennedy repeatedly made choices he knew actually increased the risk of war, in_ cluding nuclear war. He chose to confront Khrushchev publicly (rather than try to resolve the issue privately through diplo*rti. .h”._”lr;; to draw an unambiguous red line requiring the removal of Soviet missiles (rather than leave himself more wiggle room); to rhreaten air strikes to destroy the missiles (knowing this could trigger Soviet retaliation against Berlin); and finally, on the penultimate day of the crisis, to give Khrushchev a time-limited ultimatum (that, if rejected, would have re_ quired the US to fire the first shot).

In each of these choices, Kennedy understood that he was raising the risk that further events and choices by others beyond his control could lead to nuclear bombs destroying American cities, including .V/ashing_ ton, DC (where his family stayed throughout the ordeal). fJ..*r-pt”., when Kennedy elevated the alert level of the American nuclear arse_ nal to Defcon II, he made US weapons less vulnerable to a preemptive Soviet attack but simultaneously relaxed a score of safety .rt.h.r. At Defcon II, German and Turkish pilots took their seats in NATO fighter bombers loaded with armed nuclear weapons less than t*o horrs I*ry from their rargets in the Soviet (Jnion. Since electronic locks on nu_ clear weapons had not yet been invented, there was no physical or tech_ nical barrier preventing a pilot from deciding to fly to Moscow, drop a nuclear bomb, and start World War III.

With no way ro wish away these .,risks of the uncontrollable,,, Ken_ nedy and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, reached deeply into organizational procedures to minimize accidents o. _irtrk r. i”_ spite those efforts, historians have identified more than a dozen close calls outside Kennedy’s span of control that could have sparked a war. A US antisubmarine campaign, for example, dropped explosives around

lntroduction

and which in time came to consume almost the entirety of ancient Greece. A former soldier, Thucydides rvatched as Athens challenged the dominant Greek power of the day, the martial city-state of Sparta. He observed the outbreak of armed hostilities between the two powers

and detailed the lighting’s horrific toll. He did not live to see its bitter

end, when a weakened Sparta finally vanquished Athens, but it is just as well for him.

While others identified an a:oiay of contributing causes of the Pelo-

ponnesian ‘War, Thucydides went to the heart of the matter. When he

turned the spotlight on “the rise of Athens and the fear that this in- stilled in Sparta,” he identified a primary driver at the root of some of history’s most catastrophic and puzzling wars. Intentions aside, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting

structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception. It happened between Athens and Sparta in the lifth century BCE, between

Germany and Britain a century ago, and almost led to war between the

Soviet (Jnion and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

Like so many others, Athens believed its advance to be benign. Over

the half century that preceded the conflict, it had emerged as a steeple of civilization. Philosophy, drama, architecture, democracy, history, and naval prowess-Athens had it all, beyond anything previously seen under the sun. Its rapid development began to threaten Sparta, which had grown accustomed to its position as the dominant power on

the Peloponnese. As Athenian confidence and pride grew, so too did its

demands for respect and expectations that arrangements be revised to

refect new realities of power. These were, Thucydides tells us, natural

reactions to its changing station. How could Athenians not believe that

their interests deserved more weight? How could Athenians not expect

that they should have greater infuence in resolving difGrences?

But it was also natural, Thucydides explained, that Spartans should see the Athenian claims as unreasonable, and even ungrateful. ‘Who,

Spartans rightly asked, provided the security environment that allowed

Athens to flourish? As Athens swelled with a growing sense of its own

xv xlv lntroduction

Soviet submarines to force them to surface’ leading a Soviet caPtain to

believe he was under attack and almost {ire his nuclear-armed torpe-

does. In another incident, the pilot of alJ-2 spy craft mistakenly flew

over the Soviet Union, causing Khrushchev to fear that Washington

was relining coordinates for a preemptive nuclear attack’ If one of these

actions had sparked a nuclear World War III’ couldJFK explain how his

choices contributed to it? Could he give a better answer to an inquisi-

tor’s question than Bethmann Hollweg did?

Th” .o*pl.*ity of causation in human affairs has vexed philoso-

phers, jurists, and social scientists’ In analyzing how wars break out’

historians focus primarily on proximate’ or immediate’ causes’ In the

case of World ‘War I, these include the assassination of the Hapsburg

archduke Franz Ferdinand and the decision by Tsar Nicholas II to mo-

bilize Russian forces against the Central Powers’ If the Cuban Missile

Crisis had resulted in war, the proximate causes could have been the

Soviet submarine captain’s decision to fire his torpedoes rather than al-

low his submarine to sink, or a Turkish pilot’s errant choice to fly his

nuclear payload to Moscow’ Proximate causes for war are undeniably

i*po.,r.rr. But the founder of history believed that the most obvious

.ror”, fo. bloodshed mask even more signi{icant ones’ More import-

ant than the sparks that lead to war’ Thucydides teaches us’ are the

structural factors that lay its foundations: conditions in which other-

wise manageable events can escalate with unforeseeable severity and

produce unimaginable consequences’

THUCYDIDES,S TRAP

In the most frequently cited one-liner in the study of international re-

lations, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides explained’ “It was the

rise of Athens and the fear that this insdlled in Sparta that made war

inevitable.”

Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian’War’ a confict that en-

gulfed his homeland, the city-state of Athens’ in the {ifth century BcE’

xv1 Introduction

importance, and felt endtled to greater say and sway, Sparta reacted with insecurity,fear, and a determination to defend the status quo.

Similar dynamics can be found in a host of other settings, indeed even

in families. ‘When a young man’s adolescent surge poses the prospect that he will overshadow his older sibling (or even his father), what do we expect? Should the allocation of bedrooms, or closet space, or seat-

ing be adjusted to reflect relative size as well as age? In alpha-dominated

species like gorillas, as a potential successor grows larger and stronger,

both the pack leader and the wannabe prepare for a showdown. In businesses, when disruptive technologies allow upstart companies like

Apple, Google, or [Jber to break quickly into new industries, the re-

sult is often a bitter competition that forces established companies like

Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, or taxi operators to adapt their business models-or perish.

Thucydides’s Trap refers to the natural, inevitable discombobulation

that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power. This can happen in any sphere. But its implications are most dangerous

in international affairs. Forjust as the original instance ofThucydidesi Trap resulted in a war that brought ancient Greece to its knees, this phenomenon has haunted diplomacy in the millennia since. Today it has set the world’s two biggest powers on a path to a cataclysm nobody

wants, but which they may prove unable to avoid.

ARE THE US AND CHINA DESTINED FOR \vAR?

The world has never seen anything like the rapid, tectonic shift in the

global balance of power created by the rise of China. If the US were a corporation, it would have accounted for 50 percent of the global eco- nomic market in the years irnmediately after

.World War II. By 1980,

that had declined to 22 percent. Three decades of double-digit Chi- nese growth has reduced that US share to 16 percent today. If current trends continue, the US share of global economic outprlt will decline further over the next three decades to just ll percent. Over this same period, China’s share of the global economy will have soared from 2

percenr in 1980 to 18 percent in 2016, well on its way to 30 percent in 2040.

China’s economic development is transforming it into a formida_ ble political and military comperitor. During the Cold .W.ar, as the US mounted clumsy responses to Soviet provocations, a sign in the penta_ gon said: “If we ever faced a real enemy, we would be in deep trouble.,, China is a serious porential enemy.

The possibiliry rhar the Unitecl States and China coul<1 find them_ selves at war appears as unlikely as it would be unwise. The centennials recalling World War I, however, have reminded us of rnan,s capacity for folly. When we say rhar war is ..inconceivable,,, is this a sraremenc about what is possible in the world-or only about what our limited minds can conceive?

As far ahead as rhe eye can see, the defining quesrion about global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides,s T.rp. Mort contesrs that fit this pattern have ended badly. Over the past five hun_ dred years, in sixteen cases a major rising power has threatened to clis_ place a ruling power. In twelve of those, the result was war. The four cases that avoided rhis ourcome did so only because of huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and acrions on rhe parr of challengeruni .hrl_ lenged alike.

The Unired States and China can likewise avoid war, but only if they can internalize two difiicult truths. First, on the current trajectory, war between the US and China in the ilecades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than currently recognized.Indeed, on rhe historical record, war is more likely than not. By underestimating the danger, moreover, we add to the risk. If leaders in Beijing ancl Washington keep doing what they have done for the past decade, the US and China will almost cer_ tainly wind up at war. Second, war is not ineuitable. History shows that major ruling powers can manage relations with rivals, even those that threaten ro overtake them, without triggering a war. The record of those successes, as well as the failures, offers many lessons for statesmen today. As George Santayana noted, only those who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it.

lntroduction xY1l

i

i

xv111 lntroduction

The chapters that follow describe the origins of Thucydides’s Trap’

explore its dynamics, and explain its implications for the present con-

test between the US and China’ Part One provides a succinct summary

of the rise of China. Everyone knows about China’s growth but few

have realized its magnitude or its consequences’ To paraphrase former

Czech president Viclav Havel, it has happened so quickly that we have

not yet had time to be astonished’

Part Two locates recent develoPments in US-China relations on the

broader canvas of history. This not only helps us understand current

events, but also provides clues about where events are trending’ Our

review stretches back 2,500 years’ to the time when the rapid growth

of Athens shocked a dominant martial Sparta and led to the Pelopon-

nesian’War’ Key examples from the past 500 years also provide insights

into the ways in which the tension between rising and ruling powers

can tilt the chessboard toward war’ The closest analogue to the current

standoff-Germany’s challenge to Britain’s ruling global empire be-

fore World.War I-should give us all pause’

Part Three asks whether we should see current trends in America’s

relations with China as a gathering storm of similar proPortions’ Daily

media reports of China’s “aggressive” behavior and unwillingness to

accept the “international rules-based order” established by the US af-

ter World War II describe incidents and accidents reminiscent o{ t914′

At the same time, a dose of self-awareness is due’ If China were ‘iust

like us” when the US burst into the twentieth century brimming with

confidence that the hundred years ahead would be an American era’ the

rivalry would be even more severe, and war even harder to avoid’ If it

actually followed in America’s footsteps’ we should exPect to see Chi-

nese trooPs enforcing Beijing’s will from Mongolia to Austtalia’ just as

Theodore Roosevelt molded “our hemisphere” to his liking’

China is following a different trajectory than did the United States

during its own surge to primacy’ But in many aspects of China’s rise’ we

can hear echoes- What does President XiJinping’s China want? In one

line: to make China great again’ The deepest aspiration of over a billion

Chinese citizens is to make their nation not only rich’ but also pow-

Introductiott xix

erful. Indeed, their goal is a China so rich and so powerful that other

nations will have no choice but to recognize its interests and give it the respect that it deserves. The sheer scale and ambition of this “China Dream” should disabuse us of any notion that the contest between China and the United States will naturally subside as China becomes a “responsible stakeholder.” This is especially so given what my former

colleague Sam Huntington famously called a “clash of civilizations,” a historical disjunction in which fundamentally different Chinese and American values and traditions make rapprochement between the two

powers even more elusive. ‘While resolution of the present rivalry may seem diflicult to foresee,

actual armed conflict appears distant. But is it? In truth, the paths to war are more varied and plausible (and even mundane) than we want

to believe. From current confrontations in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and cyberspace, to a trade confict that spirals out of control, it is frighteningly easy to develop scenarios in which Ameri- can and Chinese soldiers are killing each other. Though none of these

scenarios seem likely, when we recall the unintended consequences of the assassination of the Hapsburg archduke or of Khrushchev’s nuclear

adventure in Cuba, we are reminded ofiust how narrow the gap is be- tween “unlikely” and “impossible.”

Part Four explains why war is not ineviteble. Most of the policy community and general public are naively complacent about the possi-

bility of war. Fatalists, meanwhile, see an irresistible force rapidly ap- proaching an immovable object. Neither side has it right. If leaders in both societies will study the successes and failures of the past, they will find a rich source of clues from which to fashion a strategy that can meet each nation’s essential interests without war.

The return to prominence of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.4 billion people is not a problem to be lixed. It is a conditior-a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation. Success will require not just a new slogan, more frequent presidential summits, or additional meetings of departmental working groups. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by

lnl.n, ,, the highest levels in :::;’;::”-ents. rt wirl require a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou En-

lai conversations that reestablished US-China relations in the 1970s.

Most signilicant, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes ar,d ac-

tions by leaders and the public alike than anyone has yet undertaken. To

escape Thucydides’s Trap, we must be willing to think the unthinkable

-and imagine the unimaginable. Avoiding Thucydides’s Trap in this

case will require nothing less than bending the arc of history. Part One

THE RISE OF CHINA

1

..THE BIGGEST PLAYER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD,,

You have no idea what sort of people the Athenians are. They are always thinking of new schemes and are quick to carry them out. They make a plan: if it succeeds, the success is nothing in compar- ison to what they are going to do next.

– Thucydides, Corinthian ambassador addresses the Spartan Assembly, 432tca

Let China sleep; when she wakes, she will shake the world.

-Napoleon, 1817

Q hortly after he became director of the Central Intelligence Agency \Jin September 20ll,I went to see America’s most successful mod- ern general in his ofrce in Langley, Virginia. David Petraeus and I had

first met in the 1980s when he was a doctoral student at Princeton and

I was dean of Harvard Kennedy School. We had stayed in touch ever since, as he rose through the ranks of the US Army and I continued my

academic work while also serving several tours in the Pentagon. After some preliminary discussion about his newjob, I asked David whether

the old hands at the Agency had begun opening for him some of the secret “jewel fox6s”-ghs files containing the deepest, most heavily classified secrets of the US government. He smiled knowingly and said,

“You bet,” but then waited for me to say more.

1 DESTINED FOR WAR

After a pause, I asked what he had learned about “deep sleepers”:

individuals with whom the Agency had established a relationship’ but

whose assignment essentially consisted of going to live and prosper in

a foreign country so as to develop a full understanding of its culture’

people, and government. With a commitment to be helpful to their

careers in unseen ways, the Agency only asked of these individuals that’

when called upon-unobtrusively, perhaps just once or twice in a de-

cade-they would provide their candid insights into what was hap-

pening in the country, and what was likely to happen in the future’

David was by this point leaning forward across the table as I opened

a report from someone whose incisive, far-sighted understanding could

inform Washington’s resPonse to the greatest geopolitical challenge of

our lifetime. As I said to the new director, this individual had succeeded

beyond all expectations. He had seen up close China’s convulsions frorn

the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in the 1960s to Deng

Xiaoping’s capitalist pivot in the 1980s’ Indeed’ he had established se-

rious working relationships with many of the people who governed

China, including China’s future president, XiJinPing’

I began reading the {irst set of questions from {ifty pages of Q$A

with this asset:

. Are China’s current leaders serious about displacing the United States as the number-one Power in Asia in the foreseeable

future?

. What is China’s strategy for becoming Number One?

. What are the major hurdles to China’s executing its strategy?

. How likely is China to succeed?

. If it does succeed, what will be the consequences for its neighbors in Asia? For the US?

. Is conflict between China and the US inevitable?

“The Biggest Player in the lTistory ,tf the World” 5

countries might someday violently collide. And he had given actionable

intelligence that could help prevent the unthinkable from happening.

Lee Kuan Yew was, of course, no CIA spy. His mind, heart, and soul belonged to Singapore. But the longtime staresman, who died in2015, was a font of wisdom hiding in plain sight. The report I gave to David was a sneak preview of Lee Kuan Yeut: The Crand Master’s Insights on China, the Uniteil States, and the World, abook that I coauthored in20l3 with Robert Blackwill and Ali Wyne. As the founder and long-serving leader of that tiny city-state, Lee took a small, poor, inconsequential fishing village and raised it to become a modern megalopolis. Ethnically

Chinese, he was educated at Cambridge University and embodied a fu- sion of Confucian and upper-class English values. And until his death in 2015,he was also unquestionably the world’s premier China watcher.

Lee’s insights into what was happening in China, as well as the wider

world, made him a sought-after strategic counselor to presidents and prime ministers on every continent-including every American head of state from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. His keen understand- ing of China reflected not only his “singular strategic acumen,”l as Henry Kissinger called it, but also his intense need to know as much as he could about this sleeping giant. Though its economic and political

might was not so obvious amid Mao’s agrarian Marxism, China was nevertheless a colossus in whose shadow Lee’s island nation struggled for enough sunlight to survive. Lee was one of the first to see China’s true nature-and its full potential.

Uniquely, as Lee studied China and its leaders, they also studied him

and his country. In the late 1970s, when Deng began ro think about leading China on a fast march to the market, Chinese leaders looked to Singapore as a laboratory in not only economic but also political de- velopment. Lee spent thousands of hours in direct conversations with Chinese presidents, prime ministers, cabinet oflicers, and rising lead-

ers of his “neighbor to the North.”2 Every Chinese leader from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping has called him “mentor,” a term of ultimate respect in Chinese culture.

This individual had provided invaluable answers to these questions

and many more. He had pulled the curtain back on the thinking of

the Chinese leadership- He had soberly assessed the risk that these two

6 DESTINED FOR WAR

My biggest takeaway from Lee for the new CIA director addresses

the most troubling question about China’s trajectory: .What

does its

dramatic transformation mean for the global balance of power? Lee

answered pointedly: “The size of China’s displacement of the world

balance is such that the world must find a new balance’ It is not possible

to pretend that this is just another big player. Thb is the biggest player in

the history of the worlil.”3

COULD THE US BECOME NUMBER TVO?

In my national security course at F1arvard, my lecture on China be-

gins with a quiz. The first question asks students to compare China

and the United States in 1980 with their current rankings’ Repeatedly,

students are shocked at what they see. One glance at the chart with

numbers from 2015 should explain why.

In a single generation, a nation that did not aPpear on any of the in-

ternational league tables has vaulted into the toP spot’ In 1980, China’s

gross domestic product (GDP) was less than $300 billion; by 2015, it

was $11 trillion-making it the world’s second-largest economy by

market exchange rates. In 1980, China’s trade with the outside world

amounted to less than $40 billion; by 2015, it had increased one hun-

dredfold, to $4 trillion.a For every two-year period since 2008, the in-

crerneflt oJ growth in China’s GDP has been larger than the entire econ-

China, as a percentage of the United States

1980 2015 GDP 7o/o 610/o

lmports 8o/o 73o/o

Exports 8o/o 15’lo/o

Reserves ‘160/o 3,140Vo

Fiqurcs as meosured in IJS dollars. Source:World Bank’

“The Biggest Player in the History of the World,’ 7 omy of India.s Even at its lower growth rate in 2015, China’s economy created a Greece every sixteen weeks and an Israel every twenty_five weeks.

During irs own remarkable progress between 1g60 and 1913, when the United States shocked European capitals by surpassing Great Brit_ ain to become the world’s largest economy, America,s annual growth averaged 4 percent.6 Since 1980, China’s economy has grown at 10 per_ cent a year. According to the Rule of 72-divide 72 by the annual growth rate to determine when an economy or investment will double

-the Chinese economy has doubled every seven years. To appreciate how remarkable this is, we need a longer timeline.

In the eighteenth century, Britain gave birth to the Industrial Revo- lution, crearing what we now know as the modern world. In 1776, Adam Smith published The Weahh of Nations to explain how after mil_ lennia of poverty, market capitalism was creating wealth and a new middle class. Seventeen years later, an emissary from King George III (the same “mad King George” who lost the Revolutionary War to the US) arrived in China to propose establishing relations between the two nations. At that moment, British workers were massively more produc_ tive than their Chinese counterparts.T The Chinese were many, as they had been over the centuries. But they were poor. At the end ofeach day of labor, a Chinese worker had produced barely enough to feed him_ self and his family-leaving relatively little surplus for the state to pay soldiers or invest in armamenrs like a navy (which over four millennia Chinese emperors never did, bar one brief half-century exception) to project power far beyond its borders. Today workers in China are one quarter as productive as their American counterparts. If over the next decade or two they become just half as productive as Americans, Chi_ na’s economy will be twice the size of the US economy. If they equal American productivity, China will have an economy four times that of the US.

This elementary arithmetic poses a fundamental problem for Wash_ ington’s effort to “rebalance” China’s growing weight. In 2011, with considerable fanfare, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced

8 DESTINED FOR WAR

an important “pivot” in American foreign policy, redirecting Washing- ton’s attention and resources from the Middle East to Asia.8 In Presi-

dent Obama’s words, “After a decade in which we fought two wars that

cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the US is turning our attention to

the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region.”e He promised to increase

America’s diplomatic, economic, and military presence in the Asia-Pa-

cific, and signaled the US determination to counter the impact of Chi- na’s rise in the region. President Obama has featured this “rebalance”

as one of the major foreign policy achievements of his administration.

As assistant secretary of state under Obama and Secretary Clinton, Kurt Campbell led this initiative. His 2016 book, The Pivot: The Future

of American Statecraft in Asia, makes the best possible case for the “great

rebalance” as more than aspiration. Despite his best efforts, however,

he is unable to find many metrics to support his thesis. Measured in

attention span of the president, time spent at National Security Council

principals’ and deputies’ meetings, face time with leaders of the region,

sorties flown, hours of ships on station, and dollars allocated, the pivot is hard to find. Ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with new wars in Syria and against ISIS across the Middle East to monopo-

lize the administration’s foreign policy agenda and dominate the pres-

ident’s days over his eight years in oflice. As one Obama White House

ofiicial recalled: “It never felt like we pivoted away from the Middle East. About 80 percent of our main meetings at the National Security Council have focused on the Middle East.”r0

Even if American attention had not been focused elsewhere, Wash- ington would have struggled to defy the laws of economic gravity. Compare the relative weight of the US and Chinese economies as if they were two competitors on opposite ends of a seesaw. The conclu-

sion is as obvious as it is painful. Americans have been debating whether

they should put less weight on their left foot (the Middle East) in order

to put more weight on their right (Asia). Meanwhile, China has just

kept growing-at three times the US rate. As a result, America’s side of the seesaw has tilted to the point that soon both feet will be dangling entirely off the ground.

“The Biggest Player in the History o-f the World,,

Who,s rebalancing whom?

9

This is the subtext of the first question on my class quiz. The sec_ ond question pricks more delusions. It asks students: .Vy’hen might the US actually find itself number two? In what year might China overtake the United Srates to become the number_one auro market, the biggest market for luxury goods, or even the largest economy in the world, full stop?

Most students are stunned to learn that on most indicators, China has already surpassed the United States. As the largest producer of ships, steel, aluminum, furniture, clothing, textiles, cell phones, ,.rd.o_pir_ ers, China has become the manufacturing powerhouse of the world.11 Students are even more surprised to discover that China has also be_ come the world’s largest consumer of most products. America was the birthplace of the automobile, but China is now both the largest auto_ maker and the largest auto market. Chinese consumers bought twenty million cars in 2015-three million more than were sold in the US.r2 China is also the world’s largest market for cell phones and e_com_ merce, and has the largest number of Internet users.r3 China imported more oil, consumed more energy, and installed more solar power than any other nation.ra perhaps most devastatingly for America,s sel{_con_ ception, in 2016-as it has since the 200g worldwide financial crisis -China continued to serve as the primary engine of global economic growth.rs

2004 2O14 2O24est

I 10 DESTINED FOR WAR

BUT THAT,S IMPOSSIBLE!

For Americans who grew uP in a world in which IJSA meant num-

ber one-and that would be every citizen since roughly 1870-the idea that China could unseat the US as the world’s largest economy

is unthinkable. Many Americans imagine that economic primacy is an

unalienable right, to the point that it has become part of their national

identity.

America’s attachment to its position atop the world helps explain the

{irestorm that erupted at the International Monetary Fund/World Bank

meeting in Washingto n in 2014 when the IMF issued its annual report

on the global economy. As the press reported the headline: “America Is

Now No. 2.” ln MarketWatch’s shout-out: “There’s no easy way to say

this, so I’ll just say it: ‘We’re no longer No. 1.”16 More somberly, as the

Financial Times $)rnmarized the IMF’s message: “Now it is ofiicial. In

20t4 the IMF estimates the size of the U.S. economy was $17.4 trillion

and the size of China’s economy was $17.6 trillion.” The FTwent on

to note that “as recently as 2005, China’s economy was less than half

the size of the U.S. By 2019, the IMF expects it to be 20o/obigger.”17

The IMF had measured China’s GDP using the yardstick of pur-

chasing power parity, or PPP, which is the standard now used by the

major international institutions whose professional responsibilities re-

quire them to comPare national economies. As the CIA puts it, PPP “provides the best available starting point for comparisons of economic

strength and wellbeing between countries.” The IMF explains that

“market rates are more volatile and using them can produce quite large

swings in aggregate measures of growth even when growth rates in

individual countries are stable. PPP is generally regarded as a better

measure of overall wellbeing.”l8 Measured by purchasing power parity,

China has not only surpassed the US, but also now accounts for roughly

18 percent of world GDP, compared tojust 2petcett in 1980.1e

Among those for whom American primacy is an article of faith, the

IMF announcement stimulated a vigorous search for metrics by which

the US is still number one. These include GDP per capita, new data that

“The Biggest Player in the History of the World” l1

United States vs. China GDP, measured in the purchasing power

of each nation’s currency 35

30

25

20

United States

*- Chlna

o

F 1 5

t0

5

0

6t6s domestic ptoduct (GDP) ot pur.hating powet paity (ppp). Sou rce: lntemotionol Monetary Fu nd

Estimates begin after2015 )

-R*tr

take better account of quality of life and well-being, and new ratio- nales for the previous standard that measured GDp at market exchange rates.2o Since a number of my respected colleagues disagree, I asked the world’s leading proGssor-central banker, former MIT professor Stan- ley Fischer, how we should measure the US economy against China’s. Fischer wrote the textbook on Macroeconomics, taught Ben Bernanke (former head of the Federal Reserve System) and Mario Draghi (head of the European Central Bank), served as the chairman of the Central Bank of Israel, and now serves as the vice chairman of the US Fed. He knows whereof he speaks. And in hisiudgment, ppp truly is the best benchmark-and notjust for assessing relative economic strength. “In comparing the size of national economies,” he told me, “especially for the purposes of assessing comparative military porential, as the first ap- proximation, the best yardstick is PPP. This measures how many air- craft, missiles, ships, sailors, pilots, drones, bases, and other military-

I l2 DESTINED FOR WAR

related items a state can buy and the prices it has to pay in its own national c::Lrrency.”21 The International Institute for Strategic Studies’

authoritative annual The Military Balance concurs, noting that “the ar-

guments for using PPP are strongest for China and Russia.”22

As I write this, the favorite story line in the’Western press about the

Chinese economy is “slowdown.” A word-cloud search of reports on

the Chinese economy frorn 201″3 to 2016 in the elite press finds that

this is the most frequently used word to describe what is happening

there.23 The question Gw pause to ask is: slowing compared to whom?

Over this same period, the American press’s favorite adjective to de-

scribe American econornic performance has been “recovering.” But

compare China’s “slowdown” with America’s “recovery.” Has China

slowed to about the same growth rate as the US? A little bit higher? Or

a lot more?

To be sure, since the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2008,

the Chinese economy has indeed slowed, from an average of 10 per-

cent in the decade prior to 2008 to the current 6 to 7 percent annually

in 2015 and 2016. But while Chinese economic growth has declined

by approximately one-third from the pre-crisis level, global economic

growth has been cut nearly in half. The “recovering” US economy has

averaged just 2.L percent growth annually in the years since the Great

Recession. The EU economies, meanwhile, have grown by 1.3 percent

annually since then and continue to stagnate. The same is true ofJapan,

which has averagedjust 1.2 percent growth during this period.2a For all

the noise about the Chinese economic slowdown, remember one in-

candescent fact: since the Great Recession, 40 percent of all the growth

around the world has occurred injust one country: China.2s

COULD ROME BE BUILT IN T\vO’IUUEEKS?

In 1980, American visitors to China were rare. The country had only

recently “opened” to the’West, and travel was sti1l difiicult- Those who

went found a country that looked as if it had been plucked from the distant past: vast, rural, unchanging, inscrutable, asleep. They saw

“The Biggest Player in the History of the World” 13

b;rrnboo houses and crumbling Soviet-style aparrment blocks, and city srreets crowded only with throngs of bicycles, their riders wearing rrcarly identical drab Mao suits. Tourists who ventured across the water from Hong Kong saw the empty fields of Guangzhou and Shenzhen ,lotted with tiny villages. ‘W’herever they went, Americans encountered grinding poverty: 88 percent of China’s one billion citizens struggling to survive-as they had for millennia before the Industrial Revolution

– on less than $2 a day.’6 The once-empty streets of Beijing are now clogged with six million

automobiles. Looking back on his secret diplomatic mission to China in the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger-the secretary of state who played a key role in reopening China to the West-said, “Remembering China in 797 1, if anyone had shown me a picture of what Beijing looks like and said in 25 years Beijing will look like this, I would have said that’s absolutely impossible.”2T The village of Shenzhen is today a mega-city of more than ten million people, with real estare prices that rival Sili- con Valley’s. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, an astute China watcher, has described the country’s explosion as “the English Industrial Revolution and the global information revolution combust- ing simultaneously and compressed inro not 300 years, but 30.”28

‘When Americans complain about how long it rakes to build a build- ing or repair a road, authorities often reply that “Rome was not built in a day)’ Someone clearly forgot to tell the Chinese. By 2005, the coun- try was building the square-foot equivalent of today’s kome every two weeks.2e Berween 2011, and 2013, China both produced and used more

cement than the US did in the entire twentieth cenrury.3o In 201,1, a Chinese firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another construction firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days.31 Indeed, China built the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock in just 15 years.3z

When he first saw rhe “massive, beautifully appointed” Tianjin Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center, which hosted the 2010 ‘World Economic Forum’s summer conference, New York Times col:um- nist Thomas Friedman conGssed to having gasped. It was built in just

74 DESTINED FOR WAR

8 months. Friedman noted the feat with amazement, but also dismay.

It took almost as long for a’Washington Metro crew to repair “two tiny escalators of 21. steps each at a red line station” near his home in Maryland.33

Friedman devotes an entire chapter of his book Hot, Flat, anil Crowded to a fantasy about the far-reaching reforms the United States

could enact if only it were “China for a day.”‘o Today China is do- ing in hours what it takes years to accomplish in the US. I have been reminded of this daily when I see the bridge over the Charles River between my oflice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business

School. It has been under reconstruction, snarling traffrc, for 4 years. In

November 2015, Beljing replaced the substantially larger, 1,300-ton

Sanyuan Bridge in just 43 hours.3s Overall, China built 2.6 million miles

of roads-including 70,000 miles of highways-between 1996 and 20!6, connecting 95 percent of the country’s villages and overtaking

the US as the country with the most extensive highway system by al-

most 50 percent.36

Over the past decade, China has constructed the world’s longest

high-speed rail network: 12,000 miles of rail lines that caruy Passen- gers between cities at speeds of up to 180 miles per hour. In the US,

that much new track would stretch from New York to California and

back, twice. At 180 mph, one could go from Grand Central Terminal

in New York City to lJnion Station in DC in just over an hour; from

Boston to’Washington in two. Indeed, China now has more high-speed

rail tracks than the rest of the world combined.3T During this same de-

cade, California has been struggling mightily to build a single 520-mile

high-speed connection between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Voters

approved the project in 2008, but the state recently admitted it will not

be finished wttil 2029, at a cost of $68 billion-9 years later and $35 billion more than was originally promised.38 By then, China plans to

have completed another 16,000 miles of high-speed rail connections.3e

Beyond the skyscrapers, bridges, and fast trains lies the far more pro-

found impact of China’s human development. A generation ago, 90 out

of every 100 Chinese lived on less than $2 a day. Today fewer than 3

“The Biggest Player in the History of the World” 15

in 100 do.a0 Average per capita income has risen from $193 in 1980 to over $8,100 today.al In assessing progress toward the IJN’s Millennium Development Goals for improving the lives of the world,s poorest peo- ple, World Bank presidenr Robert Zoellick noted in 2010, “Between 1981 and 2004, Chinasucceeded in lifting more than half a billion peo- ple out of extreme poverty. This is certainly the greatest leap to over- come poverty in history.”a2

China’s education, health care, and related indicators refect simi- lar improvements in its people’s well-being. lo 1949, Chinese cirizens could expect to die at the age ofthirty-six, and 8 in 10 could not read or write. By 2014, life expectancy had more than doubled, to seven- ty-six, and 95 percent are literate.a3 If China continues on its current growth path, millions of individuals will experience a hundredfold in- crease in living standards over their lifetimes. At the average per capita growth rate in the US over the past decade, Americans will have to wait 740 years to see an equivalent improvement. As the Economist has repeatedly explained to its readers, for the first time in modern history, Asia is now richer than Europe in terms of accumulated private wealth. Asia is expected to surpass North America around 202O,with China as the main driver of wealth accumuladon (which includes total financial assets across households).aa

In the blink of history’s eye, China’s economic growrh has not only raised hundreds of millions frompoverty, but also produced an extraor- dinary number of rnillionaires and billionaires. By one count, China surpassed the United States as the country with the mosr billionaires in 20t5 and is now adding a new billionaire every week.as And while Chinese are among the most aggressive savers in the world-families typically save over 30 percent of their disposable income-one can hardly imagine what Karl Marx would say if he knew how many Chi- nese “Communists” are wearing Prada today. Chinese shoppers bought half of the world’s luxury goods sold in201,5.a6 Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and Gucci now see Chinese as their primary customers. Sotheby’s and Christie’s highest-priced auctions are no longer held in New york and London, but in Beijing and Shanghai.

1,6 DESTINED FOR WAR “The Biggest Player in the History ttf the World” 17

The impact of China’s investments in education is already evident ;rcross the Chinese economy. Long known primarily as a low-cost pro- ,lucer of inexpensive consumer goods, China has seen its share of total qlobal value-added in high-tech manufacturing increase from 7 per- (cnt in 2003 to 27 percent in 2014. The US National Science Foun- ,lation report that documented this growth also finds that over that srme decade, the American share of this market declined from 36 to 29 percent. For example, in the Ast moving field of robotics, in 201,5 China not only registered twice as many applications for new patents, but also added two and a half times as many industrial robots to its workforce.s3 China is now the world leader in producing computers, semiconductors, and communications equipment, as well as pharma- ceuticals.5l In 201,5, Chinese filed almost rwice as many total patent ap- plications as the second-place Americans and became the first country

to generate more than one million applications in a single year.ss On its current path, China will surpass the US to become the world leader itr research-and-development spending by 2019 .s6 As a 201.4 American

Academy of Arts and Sciences study warns: “If our nation does not act quickly to shore up its scientific enterprise, it will squander the ad- vantage it has long held as an engine of innovation that generates new cliscoveries and stimulates job growth.”sT

In response to these trends, many Americans have sought refuge in the

belief that for all its size and bluster, China’s success is still essentially a

story of imitation and mass production. This view has some grounding

in reality: theft of intellectual property-both in the old-fashioned way, with spies, and increasingly by exploiting cyber methods as well

-has been another key part of China’s economic development pro-

gram. As a Chinese colleague once explained to me, what Americans call RtD (research and devclopment), Chinese think of as RD&T, where the T stands for theft. Of course, China only targets nations that have intellectual property worth stealing-the most important being the United States. “The amount of theft that’s going on is simply stag-

gering,” FBI director James Comey said in 2014. “‘lhere’s only two types of big corporations in America. Those who have been hacked

THE STEM REVOLUTION

A generation ago, China stood at the bottom of most international

rankings of nations in education, science, technology’ and innovation’

But after two decades of determined investment in the country’s hu-

man capital, it has become a global comPetitor’ Today it rivals’ and by

some measures outperforms, the United States’47

The internationally recognized gold standard for comparing educa-

tion performance among high school students is the Program for In-

ternational Student Assessment’ On the 2015 PISA test’ China ranked

sixth in mathematics while the United States ranked thirty-ninth’

China’s score was well above the OECD average’ while the IJS score

was signi{icantly below. Even the highest-rated American state’ Mas-

sachusetts, would stand just twentieth if it were measured as its own

country in the rankings-a drop from its ninth-place rating when the

test was last conducte d, in 2012’oo According to the most recent Stan-

ford University comparison of students entering college in the {ields

of engineering and computer science, Chinese high school graduates

arrive with a three-year advantage over their American counterparts in

critical-thinking skills.o’

In 2Oll,Tsinghua lJniversity passed MIT in the U’ S’ News & World

Report rankings to become the number-one university in the world for

.ogirr””.i.rg. Among the top ten schools of engineering’ China and the

US each had four.su In STEM subjects (science, technology’ engineer-

ing, and mathematics), which provide the core competencies driving

advances in science, technology, and the fastest-growing sectors of

modern economies, China annually graduates four times as many stu-

dents as the US (1 .3 million vs’ 300,000)’ And that does not include an

additional 300,000 Chinese students currently enrolled in US institu-

tions.sl This gap has persisted for a decade despite the Obama admin-

istration’s celebrated Educate to Innovate initiative to promote STEM

education, launched in 2009 ‘ In every year of the Obama administra-

tion, Chinese universities awarded more PhDs in STEM {ields than

American universities.s2

18 DESTINED FOR WAR

by the Chinese, or those who don’t yet know they’ve been hacked by

the Chinese.” A2016 investigation by CBS1 60 Minutes reported that

China’s corporate espionage has cost American companies hundreds of

billions of dollars, leading a topJustice DePartment ofiicial to call Chi-

nese cybertheft “a serious threat to our national security'”s8

Though it remains a hotbed of cyber piracy and corPorate spying’

with each passing year it is getting harder to dismiss China’s growing

power as an innovator in its own right’ Consider suPercomPuters’

which the’White House Ofiice of Science and Technology singled out

as “essential to economic comPetitiveness, scienti{ic discovery, and na-

tional security.”u’To ensure that the US could sustain its “leadership

position” in supercomPuting, President Obama established the Na-

tional Strategic Computing Initiative in 2015 as a pillar of his Strategy

for American Innovation. But since Jun e 2013, the world’s fastest su-

percomputer has been located not in Silicon Valley but in China’ In-

deed, in the rankings of the world’s 500 fastest suPercomputers-a list

from which China was absent in 2001-today it has 167, two more

than the United States. Moreover, China’s toP supercomputer is five

times faster than the closest American comPetitor’ And while China’s

supercomputers previously relied heavily on American processors, its

top compute r in 2016 was built entirely with domestic processors’60

Two further 2016 breakthroughs in China provide troubling point-

ers to the future: the launch of the world’s first quantum communi-

cations satellite, designed to provide an unprecedented scope of hack-

proof communications, and completion of the largest radio telescope

on earth, a device that has an unmatche d capacrty to search deep space

for intelligent life. Each of these achievements demonstrates China’s

ability to undertake costly, long-term, pathbreaking projects and see

them through to successful completion-a capability that has atro-

phied in the US, as demonstrated by the failure of multiple recent

multibillion-dollar investments in mega-projects, from plutonium re-

processing at Savannah River in South Carolina (facing cancellation,

despite $5 billion in taxpayer expenditures. after a recent estimate

stated that the project would cost $1 billion annually and last decades),

“The Biggest player in the History of the World,’ 19 to what MIT called the “flagship” carbon capture and storage project at Kemper County, Mississippi ($4 billion in cosr overruns, recently delayed by over two years, and facing an uncertain future).61

BIGGER BARRELS OF BIGGER GUNS While GDP is not the only measure of a country,s rise, it provides the substructure of national power. And while GDp does not translate in_ stantly or automatically into economic or military srrength, if history is our guide, nations with larger GDps over time have proportionally greater infuence in shaping international affairs.

Chinese never forget Mao’s dictum: power grows out of the barrel of a gun. They know that the Communist party governs China, rather than successors of Chiang Kai-shek,s Guomindang, for one and only one reason. Mao and his fighting comrades won the civil war. .W.hen

in 1989 students and their supporters rose up in Tiananmen Square to protest, who crushed them to keep the Communist authorities in power? Chinese soldiers with guns and tanks. As China’s economy has gotten bigger, its guns and tanks-and their twenty_first_century equivalents-have gotren better, and allowed for a new level of com_ petition with other great powers, especially the United States. Just as technology start-ups like Facebook and Uber have used the concept of disruptive innovarion to upend previously dominant firms, the Chi_ nese military is developing new technologies that can counter ships, planes, and satellites that the US has developed 6vs1 ds62ds5_and for a fraction ofthe cost. Today, states playing catch_up need not replicate investments that their competitors made in hardware and other .,leg_

acy” platforms. New technologies allow for asymmetric responses, like missiles that can be launched from the Chinese mainland to destroy atcraft carriers, or antisatellite weapons that for a million dollars can destroy a multibillion-dollar US satellite.62

Although it has devoted on average just 2 percent of its GDp to defense since rhe late i 980s (the US has spent closer ro 4 percent),63 three decades of double-digit economic growth have allowed Chinese

20 DESTINED FOR WAR

military capabilities to expand eightfold’oa Today its defense budget of

$146 billion in market “”h”‘gt rates (or $314 billion in PPP) ranks

,..orrd only to that of the US’ and is twice Russia’s’65 China’s growing

military might will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 6′ For now’

,ofti.” i, ,o ,ry ,h” China has already secured a number of advantages

on the battlefield- The most authoritative assessment of the changing

balance of military power in the region is a 2015 RAND Corporation

study called “The U’S’-China Military Scorecard'” The report 6nds

,lrrr, by 2017, Chirra will have an “advantage” or “approximate par-

ity” in six of the nine areas of conventional capability: for instance’ in

launching attacks on air bases or surface targets’ achieving air superi-

ority, and preventing an opponent from using space-based weapons’

The report concludes ‘h” o*’ the next {ive to {ifteen years’ “Asia will

witness a progressively receding frontier of U’S’ dominance'”66 Like its

.”o.ro-i. p.ogress, China’s military advances are rapidly undercutting

America’s ,rrr,, ” a global hegemon and are forcing US leaders

to con-

front ugly truths about the limits of American power’

THE NE\X/ BALANCE OF PO\VER

-While serving as secretary of state’ Hillary Clinton once suggested that

in the twenty-firr, .”””‘y the concept of balance of power was obso-

lete.(‘7 Lee Kuan Yew disagreed’ He saw the idea as a fundamental build-

ing block in understanding relations among nations’ But’ he explained’

“il th” old concept, b,l””t of power meant largely military lowe,r’ 11

today’s terms, it is a combination of economic and military’ and I think

the economic outweighs the military'”68

This new balance of power has been called by another name: geo-

economics, which is the use of economic instrulnents (from trade and

investment policy to sanctions’ cyberattacks’ and foreign aid) to achieve

geopolitical goals. Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris explore the

lo*.p, in tii, zorcbook’ War by other Means: ceoeconomics and State-

craJt. Theyargue that China “is the world’s leading Practitioner of geo-

“The Biggest Player in the History of the World” 21

cconomics, but it has also been perhaps the major factor in returning rcgional or global power projection back to an importantly econorrlic (ls opposed to political-military) exercise.”6′

China primarily conducts foreign policy through economics be- (:rllse, to put it bluntly, it can. It is currently the largest trading part- rrcr for over 130 countries-including all the major Asian economies. Its trade with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ,rccounted for 15 percent of ASEAN’s total trade in 2015, while the US accounted for only 9 percent. This imbalance will accelerate in the :rbsence of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as China moves quickly to es-

trblish its own equivalent in an emerging co-prosperity area.To

This geoeconomic strategy harks back to Sun Tzu’s maxim: “Ulti nrate excellence lies not in winning every battle, but in defeating the cnemy without ever fighting.” As Henry Kissinger’s On China explains, victory for Sun Tzu was “not simply the triumph of armed forces,” but “the achievement of the ultimate political objectives” that a military clash would be intended to secure: “Far better than challenging the cnemy on the lield of battle is . . . maneuvering him into an unfavor- :rble position from which escape is impossible.”Tl In economic relations

today, China is doingjust that.

Of course, mastery in international afhirs requires more than just cconomic leverage. A government must have not only the economic heft but also the skill to wield economic instruments efFectively. Here

China has demonstrated a unique mastery in using hard instruments of “soft power.”‘When parties are slow to recognize reality or determined

to resist, China is ready to use the carrots and sticks of its economic power-buying, selling, sanctioning, investing, bribing, and stealing as needed until they fall into line. Nations that have become dependent on China’s supply of key imports, and on Chinese markets for their cxports, are particularly vulnerable: when disagreements arise, China

simply delays the first and blocks the second. Notable cases include Chi-

na’s abrupt cessation of all exports of rare metals toJapan in 2010 (to persuadeJapan to return several Chinese fishermen it had detained); its

N

22 DESTINED FOR WAR

zeroingout of salmon purchases from what had been Norway’s num-

ber-one market tt 2OlL (to punish Norway for the Nobel Peace Prize

committee’s selection of ” “ottd Chinese dissident’ Liu Xiaobo); and

its prolonged inspection of bananas from the Philippines until they had

rotted on the docks \n 201’2(to change the Filipino government’s-cal-

culations about a dispute over Scarborough Shoal in the South China

Sea).

Chi.r” “oioys

such superiority in its balance of economic power

that many other states have no realistic oPtion but to comply with its

wishes, even when the international system is on their side’ In 2016’fot

instance, China fat\ rejected an unfavorable ruling by the Permanent

Court of Arbitration oi”‘ ” di’po’e with the Philippines in the South

China Sea, setting the table for another contest of wills’ In this standofr

and others involving the South China Sea’ China has demonstrated an

ability to combine charm’ largesse’ bribes’ and blackmail to find “com-

promises” that give it most of what it wants’

Better than bilateral bargaining’ of course’ are international institu-

tions that give the d”‘ig”it the ‘dt””t”ge’ The United States led the

*”y do*rr*,his road it’1he “ft”rmath of ‘World War II when creating

the Bretton Woods institutions: the IMF (to coordinate international

{inance), the World Bank (to provide below-market-rate loans to de-

veloping countries), and the GATT and its successor’ the World Trade

Organization (to promote trade)’ In both the IMF and the’WorldBank’

one-and only one-country has a veto over any changes in gover-

nance of the institutions: the United States’

Predictably, as China’s economy has grown’ its leaders have become

unhappy with these inherited arrangements’ and have thus begun to

fbrg;;;* ones’ After years of the United States’ refusing to accommo-

date China’s request f* ‘ l”tgtt share of the votes at the World Bank’

in

2013 Beijing stunned’Washington by establishing its own comPetitive

institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)’ Despite

an intense campaign by Washington to Pressure nations not to join Chi-

na’s bank, fifty-seven ‘ig”td opl”fo” it launched in 2015-inclu&ng

some of Ame,i””” k”y””lli”” *”h the UK in the lead’ They said no to

“The Biggest Player in the History of the World” 23

the United States and yes to China in the hope of receiving loans at be-

low-market rates and contracts for large construction projects funded lry the bank. Their incentives were plain to see: even before the AIIB was established, the China Development Bank had surpassed the World

Ilank as the biggest linancer of international development projects.T2 lncluding its commitment of $30 billion to the AIIB as starting capi- tal, China’s combined international development finance assets in 2016

were $130 billion larger than those of the six major Western develop- rnent banks combined.T3

This was not the first time China decided to start its own club rather

than play by the West’s rules. In the aftermath of the financial crisis and

Great Recession of 2008, China organized the BRICS-Brazil, Rus- sia, India, China, and South Africa-as a group of rapidly expanding cconomies capable of making decisions and taking actions without su-

pervision from the United States or the G7. After Vladimir Putin sent

I{ussian troops into Ukraine in201,4, the United States and European Union disinvited him to what was supposed to have been a G8 meet-

ing and declared him “isolated.” A month later, Xi Jinping and other

leaders of the BRICS welcomed him with open arms at their summit.

Other Chinese initiatives have had similar efftcts. In September 2013,Xi Jinping announced China’s intention to invest $1.4 trillion in building a “New Silk Road” of infrastructure to link sixty-five countries in Asia, Europe, and North Africa with a combined popu- lation of 4.4 billion people. Through the “Silk Road Economic Belt” :rnd “21st-Century Maritime Silk Road”-collectively known as One llelt, One Road (OBOR)-China is constructing a network of high- ways, fast railroads, airports, ports, pipelines, power transmission lines,

,rnd fiber-optic cables across Eurasia. These modern physical links along

what were once ancient Chinese trade routes will foster new diplo- rnatic, trade, and financial ties. At this point, OBOR includes 900 proj- ccts at a cost exceeding $1.4 trillion. Even after adjusting for infation,

this amounts to 12 Marshall Plans, according to the investor and for- rrrer IMF economist StephenJen.Ta

Largesse, economic imperialism-call it what you will. The fact is

= €

F’

24 DESTINED FOR WAR

that Chinals economic network is spreading across the globe, altering

the international balance of power in a way that causes even longtime

US allies in Asia to tilt from the US toward China. In Lee Kuan Yew’s succinct summary, “China is sucking the Southeast Asian countries

into its economic system because of its vast market and growing pur-

chasing power. Japan and South Korea will inevitably be sucked in as well. It just absorbs countries without having to use force . . . China’s

growing economic sway will be very dificult to fight.”zs Or in the Chi- nese version of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, rules.

The implications of these developments for the relative position of China and the United States were captured memorably in a comment

by one of America’s wisest Asia hands. Having served for three decades

in the US government, including assignments as ambassador to both the Philippines and South Korea, in 1998 Stephen Bosworth was ap- pointed dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. In the decade that followed, he shifted his focus away from

Asia to commit himself fully to that educational institution. Then, in 2009, he was asked by President Obama to become his special envoy for

North Korea. W’hen he returned from an initial two-week trip across the region after meeting w’ith prime ministers and presidents, Bosworth

reported that he could scarcely believe what he had seen. It was, he re- called, a “Rip Van’Winkle experience.” In “olden days”-by which he meant before 1998-when a crisis or issue arose, the first question Asian leaders always asked was: What does’W’ashington think? Today,

when sornething happens, they ask first: W’hat does Beijing think?

Part Two

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

DESTINED FOR WAR106

lary and Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy of the

mid-1930s’

which repudiated the style of interventionism that the new

presidenCs

“oorir,,rrd p”d”t”‘sor had embraced so fervently’

After leaving ofiice’ TR told a friend: “If I must choose between a

policy of blood “‘d ito”

“nd one of milk and water’ I am for

the policy

of blood and iron’ ” ” i”””‘ not only for the nation but in the

long

run for the world”’77 “”‘ ‘n” impact of TRs “civilizing missiort”

and

“police power” rankled many in ih” h”*i’phtre’78 In L9l3’the Atg””

tine political l.’d”‘ M;;;t’L*””” spoke plainly to the newly elected

Woodrow ‘Wilson,

‘”;;; tn’I”‘””y Latin American countries

“have

become oPen season fot ‘ht vilest of instincts that in the United

States

itself are not condoned since they violate notions of public responsi-

bility and opinion ‘ ‘;t ‘ “”1t of such behavior the lJnited States

has gradually become the most unpopular nation among us'”

Diaz had

famously caPtured tf’u ‘”””””” *uf’ UU lament’ “Poor Mexico! So

far from God and so close to the United States'”7n

As we watch Be{jing’s renewed assertiveness in its neighborhood’

and the south “‘d E”tLhit” S””‘ along its border in particular’

should

we hear echoes of fX’Lti”ns in the Caribbean? If China were to be-

come half as demanding now as the US was then’ will American

lead-

ers today {ind a way to””d”t “‘ adroitly-as the British did? Reviewing

the record to this point’ the differences between Xi and TR are more

striking than the ‘i*il”iti”” However’ ther:e are few signs

that Amer-

icans are preparing to “tt”” Britain’s fate’ Watching the

trend lines’

Thucydides would lik”ly ‘”yt buckle uP-we ain’t seen nothing yet’

6

.WHAT XI,S CHINA WANTS

The admiration of the present and succeeding ages will be ours, since we have not left our power without witness . . . We have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.

-Thucydides, Pericles’s Funeral Oration, 431 scn

lleaven is above, earth is below, and that in between heaven and earth is called China. Those on the peripheries are the foreign. The foreign belong to the outer, while China belongs to the inner.

-ShiJie, “On rhe Middle Kingdom,” 1040 cr

The greatest Chinese dream is the great rejuvenation of the Chi- nese nation.

-XiJinping, 2012

\[/hat does President Xi Jinping want? In one line: to “Make W chim Great Again.”

This primal ambition was clear to the world’s premier China watcher

from the day Xi became president. Lee Kuan Yew knew Xi well, and understood that China’s unbounded aspiration was driven by an in- domitable determination to reclaim past greatness. Ask most China scholars whether Xi and his colleagues seriously believe that China can displace the United States as the predominant power in Asia in the

108 DESTINED FOR WAR

foreseeable future. They will duck the question with phrases like “It’s complicated. . . on the onehand. . . but on the other. . .” \X/hen I put this question to Lee during a meeting shortly before his death in 2015,

his piercing eyes widened with incredulity, as if to ask, ‘Are you kid- ding?” He answered directly: “Of course. ‘lVhy not? How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?”1

Lee foresaw the twenty-first century as a “contest for supremacy in Asia.”2 And as Xi rose to the presidency in 2012, Lee announced to the world that this competition was accelerating. Among all foreign

observers, Lee was the first to say of this largely unknown technocrat, “‘Watch this man.”

Indeed, for the only time in a half century of assessing foreign lead-

ers, Lee compared the new Chinese president to himself. Both men were shaped by trials that left deep grooves in their souls. For Lee, the

“whole world collapsed” when Japan invaded Singapore h 1942. “lt was,” he recalled, “the single biggest political education of my life.” Most important, “for three and a half years I saw the meaning of power.”3 Similarly, Xi was schooled in the struggle to survive the mad- ness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Refecting on that experience, he noted that “People who have little experience with power, those who have been far away from it, tend to regard it as mysterious.” In con- trast, Xi learned to “look past the superficial things: the f owers and the glory and the applause.” Instead, as he said, “I see the detention houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper

level.”a

Xi emerged from the upheaval with what Lee called “iron in his soul.”s In what is surely the most unusual comparison anyone has ever

made between Xi and another international leader, Lee likened him to Nelson Mandela, “a person with enormous emotional stability who

does not allow his personal misfortunes or sufferings to affect hisiudg-

ment.”6

Xi’s vision for China is similarly iron-willed. His “China Dream” combines prosperity and power-equal parts Theodore Roosevelt’s muscular vision of an American century and Franklin Roosevelt’s dy-

rramic New Deal. It captures the intense yearning of a billion Chinese: to be rich, to be powerful, and to be respected. Xi exudes supreme .’onfidence that in his liGtime China can ,r^li”rall three by ,rrt.ioirg its economic miracle, fostering a patriotic citizenry, and bowing to nJ other power in world affairs. And while rhese exrraordinary ambitions cngender skepticism among most observers, neither Lee nor I would l)et against Xi. As Lee said, ..This reawakened sense of destiny is an irverpowering {orce.”,

What Xi’s China Wants 109

“Making China Great Again’, means: . Returning China to the predominance in Asia it enjoyed before

the Wbst intruded. . Reestablishing control over the territories of ,.greater China,,,

including not just Xinjiang and Tibet on the mainland, but also Hong Kong and Taiwan.

. Recovering irs hisroric sphere of influence along its borders and in the ad.lacent seas so that others give it the deGrence great nations have always demanded.

. Commanding the respect of other great powers in the councils of the world.

At the core of these national goals is a civilizational creed that sees China as rhe cenrer of the universe. In the Chinese language, the word for China, zhongguo (trEEly, means..Middle Kingdom.,,-*Mid_ dle” refers not to rhe space between other, rival kingdoms, but to all that lies berween heaven and earth. As Lee summarized the world view shared by hundreds of Chinese ofiicials who sought his advice (including every leader since Deng Xiaoping), they ..recall a world in which China was dominant and other stares relared ro rhem as suppli_ cants to a superior, as vassals came to Beijing bearing tribute.,,8 In this narrative, the rise of the West in recent centuries is a historical anom_ aly, reflecting China’s technological and military weakness when it faced dominant imperial powers. Xi Jinping has promised his Gllow citizens: no more.

110 DESTINED FOR WAR

THE V/ORLD ACCORDING TO CHINA

As befits the oldest continuous civilization on earth, the Chinese have

a uniquely long sense of history. In no other country do modern lead-

ers explain policy decisions by “invoking strategic principles from millennium-old events.”e In 1969, when to everyone’s surprise Presi- dent-elect Richard Nixon chose a Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger,

to be his national security adviser, Kissinger’s new boss told him that he

intended to explore an opening to China. Kissinger had made his ca-

reer studying and writing about European history, not Asia. Knowing

that he needed a crash course, he began with a weekend tutorial from his Harvard colleagueJohn King Fairbank, the founding dean of mod-

ern China studies in the United States. In Fairbank’s summary, classical

Chinese foreign policy consisted of three key tenets: demand for re- gional “dominance,” insistence that neighboring countries recognize

and respect China’s inherent “superiority,” and willingness to use this

dominance and superiority to orchestrate “harmonious co-existence”

with its neighbors.ro

From Fairbank, Kissinger learned “the disesteem of physical coer- cion deeply embedded in Confucian teaclring.” For China, “the mil- itary functioned as a last resort.” Fairbank also explained that Chi- na’s concept of international order mirrors its internal governance. In

Fairbank’s classic summary, “Chinese tended to think of their foreign

relations as giving expression externally to the same principles of so- cial and political order that were manifested internally.” As a result,

“China’s foreign relations were accordingly hierarchic and non-egali-

tarian.”ll Just as it suppressed dissent and demanded that all its citizens bow to the power of the central government, so too did it expect re- gional powers to prostrate themselves before Beljing.

Finally, Fairbank taught that Chinese civilization was profoundly

ethnocentric and culturally supremacist, seeing itself as the apex of all

meaningful human activity. “The Chinese Emperor was conceived of and recognized as the pinnacle of a universal political hierarchy, with all other states’ rulers theoretically serving as vassals.”l2 In this system,

What Xi’s China Wants 111 as in the Confucian social system within China, order or harmony de_rivrd from hierarchy. The fundamental duty of states as well as individ_ uals was Confucius,s commandment: ,,Know thy place.,, Thus foreign rulers had to acknowfedge their (lower) place by performing the ritualkowtow, touching their forehead to th” ground. This time_honored gesture spoke to a very real history-thousands of years in whichChina had srood alone as Asia,s political, economic, and cultural heg_emon, its periphery arrayed with ..a host of lesser srates tt., i_UiU.a Chinese culture and paid tribute to China,s greatness.,, To Chinese leaders, Kissinger learned, this ..constituted the natural order of the universe. ” 13

Refecting its civilization,s centripetal orientation, Chinese foreignpolicy traditionally sought to maintain international hierarchy, notto expand its borders through military conquest. As Kissinger wroteafter leaving office, China,s sense ,t “,

i, ,t oola ,.tower “”.”, U, g*_graphical sphere . . . did nor necessarily imply an adversarial relation_

sh.ip with neighboring peoples.’, And *hile, .,like the United States, China thought of itself as playing a special role,,, it ..never espoused the American notion of universalir_’ro ,p..rd its values around theworld.” Instead, it .,confined itself to conr;ling the barbarians imme_ diately at its doorstep, strove for tributary states like Korea to recognize China’s special status, and in return, conGrred benefits such as ;; ,$:;,

rn sum, china “expanded by cultural osmosis, nor missionary

Millennia of Chinese dominance ended abruptly in the first half ofthe nineteenth century when the eirrg Dynasty came face_to_face with the power of an industr ialuing,frp”.frf W.rt..o Europe. The follow_ ing decades were marked by military deGat, foreign_infuenced civil war, economic colonization, and occupation by outside powers_first by the European imperialisrs and 1″r.. ty-J”prr.

For much of this period, foreign po*.., exerted grearer influence in China than the Chinese government itself. \Vhen rhe elng tried toprohibit British merchanrs from selling opium to Chinese in the 1g30s,London dealt them a quick, de.isir..l.Lat in the First Opium War,

112 DESTINED FOR WAR

begun in 1839. When the Qing sued for Peace’ the British pressed their

advantage with the Treaty of Nanjing’ which ceded control of Hong

rong tJB.itain, opened {ive Ports to trade with foreigners’ and granted-

British citizens immunity ftom lot’l law’15 The subsequent Treaty of

Bogue forced the Qrg Empire to recognize Britain as a nation equal to

China. And thirteen yt”t’ i”tt’ in 1856′ the French joined the British

in the Second Opium War, eventually burning the imperial Summer

Palace in Beijing to the ground in 1gO0′ The defeated Chinese were

forced to legalize both foreign merchants’ attempts to hook them on

opium and foreign missionaries’ efforts to convert them to Christian-

i y.’u Foreign warships were also granted the

right to navigate the length

of China’s rivers at will, penetrating deep into the Chinese heartland’

On one occasion, , gu”bo’t ventured 975 miles inland up the Yangtze’17

As Stapleton Roy, a seasoned diPlomat who was born in Nanjing and

served as US ambassador to China frorn 7991′ to 1’995 ‘ recalls :

“From

1854 to 1941, U.S. gunboats cruised China’s inland rivers to protect

American interests’ As recently as 7948′ during the Chinese civil war’

as a thirteen-year-old I was evacuated frorn Nanjing to Shanghai on an

American destroyer that had cruised some two hundred miles up the

YangtzeRiver to China’s then capital city'”18

The Qlrg’s efforts to defend China’s sovereignty through military

d.r”lop*rt proved futile’ For centuries’ China had treated Japan as

a tributary state. But in 1894′ a modernizing Japan attacked’ seizing

Manchuria, Taiwan, and the vassal state of Korea’ Five years later’ the

rebels of a Chinese uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion attacked for-

eign enclaves under a b”t'”t that read’ “Revive the Qrg and destroy

the foreign'” In response, an eight-nation alliance of imperial Powers

invaded China’s major cities and engaged in a “carnival of loot'”‘e One

American diplomat, Herbert G’ Squiers’ managed to {ill several railroad

cars with stolen art and porcelain’ some of which is still rumored to be

held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York today’2o

The exhausted Q’g administrators held out as long as they could’

but in 1912 the disgraced dynasty collapsed’ plunging the country into

What Xi’s China Wants 1 1,3

chaos. Warlords divided China and fought a civil war that lasted for al-

rl1ost forty more years.Japan exploited this weakness in 1937, invading and occupying much of the country in a brutal campaign that killed as rnany as twenty million Chinese. Every high school student in China today learns to feel the shame of this “century of humiliation.” The Iesson is unmistakable: Never forget-and never againl

Not until Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communists won the civil war in 1949 d1d China’s victimhood ultimately end. Although the once-grand

cmpire was in ruins, it was at last back in Chinese hands. Thus Mao could declare with pride, “The Chinese people have stood up!”

Throughout the famine of the Great Leap Forward, the mayhem of his Cultural Revolution, and his relentless purges, Mao’s achievement

has remained the core of the Communist leadership’s claim to legiti- rnacy: his Party saved China from domination by foreign imperialists. And today, after three decades of frantic economic expansion, China believes that it is finally returning to its proper place in the world. But recovering that primacy will be possible only when China becomes not just wealthy but also strong-as Xi did in the crucible of the Cultural Revolution.

wHo IS Xr JTNPTNG? Xi was born a princeling of the revolution, the son of a trusted col- league of Mao, Vice Premier Xi Zhongxun, who had fought alongside lrim in the Chinese civil war. Destined to grow up in Beijing’s “cra-

die of leaders,” he awoke shortly after his ninth birthday in 1962 to cliscover that a paranoid Mao had arrested his father. In the days that followed, his father was humiliated and eventually imprisoned for the cluration of the Cultural Revolution. During what Xi describes as a “clystopian” period, Red Guards repeatedly forced him to denounce his

own father.’When his school closed, Xi spent his days defending him- sclfin street fights and stealing books from shuttered libraries to try to cclucate himself.2r Sent to the countryside by Mao to be “reeducated,”

Xi found himself living in a cave in a rural village in Yan’an, shoveling

tt4 DESTINED FOR WAR

dung and snapping to the demands of his peasant foreman. Depressed by deprivation and abuse, his older half-sister, Xi Heping, hanged her- self from a shower rail.

Instead of suicide, Xi chose to embrace the reality of the jungle. There-in his apt word-he was “reborn.” As one of his longtime friends told an American diplomat, he “chose to survive by becoming

redder than red”-and doing whatever it took to claw his way back to the top.22 Xi was nothing if not persistent. The leader of 1.4 billion people and a Communist Party with 89 million members was actually rejected the first nine times he sought to join the Party, succeeding fi- nally on his tenth attempt.

‘With assistance from former friends of his father, he managed to return to Beijing and become a student at the prestigious Tsinghua (Jniversity. After graduation, he took an entry-level staffiob in the Central Military Commission. To earn his stripes, he then returned to the countryside for what Xi’s biographer Kerry Brown characterized as

the “harsh and unglamorous political training” of a provincialoffrcial.z3

But there he steadily worked his way up the hierarchy, and, in 1997, won-just barely-a seat on the Party’s Central Committee. (When the ballots for the 150 slots were counted, he came in 151st. Only be- cause Party leaderJiang Zemin decided to make an exception and ex-

pand the membership to 151 was he included.)2a’W’hen he was sent to be the Party chief in the province of Zhejiangin 2002, Xi oversaw spectacular economic growth: exports increased 33 percent annually

for his four years in ofrce.25 He also proved adept at identifying and

supporting promising local entrepreneurs, including Jack Ma, whose

Alibaba is now a global titan that rivals Amazon.

While Xi demonstrated his skills as an administrator, he kept a low profile, avoiding the ostentatious displays of wealth common among many of his colleagues. ‘When names of potential future Party leaders

began circulating in 2005, his was not one. But then, in early 2007, a high-level corruption scandal swept Shanghai. Chinese president Hu

Jintao and his colleagues on the Politburo Standing Committee felt a

desperate need to act quickly and decisively. Knowing of Xi’s repu-

What Xi’s China Wants 115 rarion for recitude and discipline, they chose him ro put out the fire.He did so with a combination of decisiveness and finesse that won theadmiration of all his peers. By rhe summer of 2007,his name ,ofp.a internal party lists of the most capable individuals likely to nra , ji..in the next generation ofleaders.

Xi was rewarded when the top four hundred party leaders whocomposed the Central Comrnittee and its alternates met in October 2007 to selecr the nine_man Standing Committee that would lead thenation for the next five years.* He emerged not only as a member ofthe Standing Committee, but also ,. lr.i”. apparent to president Hu.As unassuming as he was ambitious, Xi had assiduously kept his headdown as he climbed the party ladder, narrowly beating the favorite LiKeqiang to become nexl in line for the top spot. When the press firstannounced that he was the likely successo, to Hu, he was so unknown

outside inner party ranks that a widely circulated joke asked, ..Who is XiJinping?” The answer: *The husband of peng Liyuan,,_the fa_mous folksinger to whom he is married_26

After Mao,s death in 1,976, the party made every effort to prevenr potential autocrats fro sized not “”,, .”-n.:;:’;:J:#::i::: ::Tf::ff# who were sound, safe, and p.”f..rbiy uncharismatic. The leader be_ came just one member of a team of nine senior party technocrats who made policy decisions by consensus. Traditionally, Standing Commit_ tee members are doppelgdngers. In official photos, dressed in identi_ cal suits, shirts, and ties, it is often difticult for foreign counterparts todistinguish them from each orher. HuJintao fit this mold so well that he frequently read his talking point, fr-om note cards, sometimes evenin one-on-one meedngs. Xi was assumed to be cut from the same cloth -an agreeable spokesman for the collective leadership.

Little did they know. By the end of his second year as president,Xi had so firmly concentrared power in his own hands that he was oGten reGrred to as the..Chairman of Everything.,,Unlike his go_along

* XiJinping later reduced the Standing Committee from nine to seven members.

116 DESTINED FOR WAR

to get-along Predecessors, he has sidelined other figures so completely

that he has no deputy or obvious successor’ Though his vice premier’

Li Keqiang, continued on Paper to lead the economic reform program’

decision making on all keyissues in fact shifted to a newly created Lead-

ing Group for Financial and Economic Affairs’ headed by Xi’s trusted

colleague Liu He, rePorting directly to the president’ Wielding a highly

visible anticorruptio” t”Jp’ig” to masterful effect’ he purged dozens

of powerful rivals previouiy i=t’oogt” to be untouchable’ including the

former head of China’s internal security service’ Zhou Yongka;fig-

the {irst Standing Committee member ever Prosecuted for corruption’

In his consolidation of power’ Xi has taken more than a dozen titles

for himself, including chairman of a new national security council and

commander in chief of the military’ a title that even Mao was never

given. And he has had himself anointed China’s “Core Leadet” -a

term symbolic of his centrality to the state that Hu had allowed to lapse’

Most signi{icant, as of this writing Xi appears to be setting the stage to

def1, traditional term limits and remain in power beyond 2022’21

*

* This assessment Proved correct in March 201 B when the National People’s Con-

What Xi’s China Wants 11,7

Reviving Chinese nationalism and patriotism to instill pride in being Chinese.

Engineering a third economic revolution.* Xi knows this will en- tail politically painful structural reforms to sustain China’s histor-

ically unsustainable rates of growth.

Reorganizing and rebuilding China’s military so that it can, as Xi says, “fight and win.”

Any one of these initiatives would be more than enough for most lreads of state to attempt in a decade. But Xi and his team have chosen to address all four at once, seeing them as critically interdependent. Many ‘Western interlocutors, including advisers friendly to China, lrave warned him about overload. Indeed, a number of serious scholars

placed their bets that Xi would not make it to the end of his first term irr the autumn o{ 201.7. Yet Xi exudes what China scholar Andrew Na- tlran has described as “Napoleonic self-confidence.”2e As former Aus-

tralian prime minister Kevin Rudd (who has known Xi since the 1980s when they were both lower-level government ofiicials) puts it, Xi has ,r “deep sense of national mission, a clear political vision for the coun- try,” and is “very much a man in a hurry.”3o

Chinese ofiicials are keenly aware of the hurdles they face. For cxample, Xii key economic adviser Liu He-whom I have known Iirr two decades, since he was a student at Harvard Kennedy School

-keeps a list of more than two dozen problems, among them: de- rnographics (will China become old before it can become rich?); the ..hallenges of fostering innovation; maintaining social stability while tlownsizing inefiicient state-owned enterprises; and meeting energy ,lcmands without making the environment unlivable. He has analyzed ,’:rch with deeper insight and more nuance than any’Western observer

* ‘Ihe first economic revolution, under Deng Xiaoping, began China’s march to tlrr, market in 1,978 with special economic zones and the first stage of privatiza- tion. The second acceleration of reform and opening to the outside world was .vcrseen byJiang Zemin, who fostered decades of hyperfast growth.

REALIZING CHINA’S DREAM

According to Xi’s political mentor’ Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew’ a na-

tion’s leader must “Paint his vision of their future to his people’ trans-

late that vision into policies which he must convince the people are

worth supporting, and {inally galvanize them to help him in their im-

p1..rl..r,xio.r.”‘B Elaving painted a bold vision of the China Dream’

‘Xi i.

“gg.”rrirely mobilizing supporters to execute a hugely

ambitious

“g”rrd^ ofr.,ion advancing on four related fronts:

. Revitalizing the Party, cleansing it of corruption’ restoring its

sense of mission, and reestablishing its authority in the eyes of the

Chinese PeoPle’

gress amended the constitution to eliminate presidential term limits’

118 DESTINED FOR WAR

I have read. Aware of the risks’ Xi and the Party continue to double

down on all fronts’ he traced the source of

In my own lengthy conversations with Liu’

this con{idence back to the Wall Street-initiated global financial crisis

of 2008’31 Without boasting’ he reviews the record of Chinese perfor-

mance in response to this tlh’llt”g”‘ Alone among the world’s largest

economies, China managed to weather the crisis and subsequent Great

Recession without f’ilinlg into negadve growth’32 Because they had re-

jected the’Washington 6o”‘””to’ to liberalize China’s financial mar-

kets, when the 2008 crisis struck’ China’s leaders had more tools with

which to respond-and they used them’ Like the Obama administra-

tion, Chinese officials in 2009 provided an unprecedented $586 billion

{iscal stimulus’ As a result’ the Chinese can now travel on fast trains

between their major cities’ In contrast’ they ask’ what did the US get

for its $983 billion infusion?33

To convince the rest of the Chinese leadership and his fellow citizens

that his China Dream i’ “ot.1o” rhetoric’ Xi has fouted a cardinal rule

of political survival: “”t”t ti”” an unambiguous objective and a date in

the same sentence’ Within a month of becoming China’s leader in2olZ

Xi announced two bold objectives and speci{ied deadlines for meet-

ing each. To realize it’ d”l*’ China will achieve “Two Centennial

Goals.” First, it will build a “moderately Prosperous society”

ld:uble

2010 GDP per caPita, to around $10’000) by 2027’when it celebrates

the 100th anniversary of the Chinese CommunistParty’ t^t:,:”d]]’*O’

become , “*od””‘ijtd’ fully developed’ rich and powerful” nadon by

the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic in 2049’*

Precipitously, the {irst deadline arrives in the ninth year of his sched-

* It is worth noting that Chinese ofiicials and Public documents

choose their eco-

nomic yardsticks purposefullY When assessing the size of the Chinese economy

in public, oflicials GDP, rather than PPP, to make

almost alwaYs the economY aPPear smaller use market exchange rates (MER)

to measure and less threaten-

ing. Behind closed doors, when comParing China and the US’ they use PPP

(see

discussion in chaPter 1). In this case, Xi’s Two Centennial Goals

What Xi’s China Wants 119

uled ten-year term as president. If China reaches that goal, its econ- omy will be 40 percent larger than that of the United States (measured in PPP), according to the IMF.3a If China meets the second target by 2O49,its economy will be triple America’s. Moreover, in Xi’s plan, eco- nomic supremacy is just the substructure of the dream. American busi-

nessman Robert Lawrence Kuhn is one of the few Westerners with reg- ular access to Xi’s inner circle. When talking among themselves, Kuhn

notes, Xi’s team emphasizes that being number one means being first not only in economic terms, but also in defense, science, technology, and culture.35 Making China great again is thus not just a matter of making it rich. Xi means to make it powerful, make it proud, and make the Party, as the primary driver for the entire venture, once again the worthy vanguard of the people.

XI’S NIGHTMARE

When XiJinping has nightmares, the apparition he sees is Mikhail Gor- bachev. Shortly after taking power, Xi asked his close colleagues a rhe- torical question: “‘Why did the Soviet (Jnion collapse?” As he never tires of reminding them, “It is a profound lesson for us.” After careful analysis, Xi concluded that Gorbachev made three fatal errors. He re- laxed political control of society before he had reformed his country’s economy. He and his predecessors allowed the Communist Party to become corrupt, and ultimately hollow. And he “nationalized” the So-

viet military, requiring commanders to swear allegiance to the nation, not the Party and its leader. As a result, this “left the Party disarmed.” ‘When

opponents rose up to overthrow the system, in Xi’s words, there

was nobody left who “was man enough to stand up and resist.”36

Xi could see that in the years since the 1989 Tiananmen Square in- cident, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been walking a path

dangerously close to Gorbachev’s. Particularly after the mantra of the era declared “To be rich is glorious,n’ almost everyone who was power-

ful enough to do so became wealthy. This included many Communist

Party leaders, government ofiicials, and military ofEcers. As this wealth MER. Measured in PPP’ the fust has alreadY

been achieved’

,re measured in

‘,’li. r

120 DESTINED FOR WAR

became visible in ostentatious displays of luxury, citizens rightly be-

gan to question the Party’s moral core and Iidelity to its mission. As

Xi warned Party ofiicials, “The wavering of idealistic faith is the most dangerous form of wavering. A political party’s decline often starts with the loss or lack of idealistic faith.”31 It also undermines public confidence and trust.

Xi knows that the supreme leader’s credibility ultimately depends on a chain of command in which his order will cause a soldier to shoot

his Gllow citizens. Discussing Gorbachev’s fate, he and Lee Kuan Yew

came to the same conclusion. In Lee’s words: “The day Gorbachev said

to the masses in Moscow: do not be afraid of the KGB, I took a deep breath. He is sitting on top of a terror machine that holds the damn pile

together, and he says: do not be afraid.” Lee was not surprised by the

results because “He hadSumped into the deep end of the pool without

learning how to swim.” For good measure, Lee added: “Between being

loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If no- body is afraid of me, I am meaningless.”38

The {irst imperative in realizir.g Xi’s China Dream is to relegitimize

a strong Party to serve as the vanguard and guardian of the Chinese state. Shortly after taking ofiice, Xi told his Politburo colleagues that “winning or losing public support is an issue that concerns the CCP’s

survival or extinction.” And he bluntly warned them: “Corruption

could kill the Party.” Qgoting Confucius, he vowed to “govern with virtue and keep order through punishments.”3e This was not an idle

threat. Xi launched an anticorruption campaign of unprecedented scale

led by his closest associate, W’ang Qhan. Under Wang, 18 task forces headed by trusted lieutenants report directly to Xi. Since 2012, more than 900,000 Party members have been disciplined and 42,000 expelled

and prosecuted in criminal courts. Among those have been 170 high-

level “tigers,” including dozens of high-ranking military ofiicers, 18 sitting or former members of the 150-person Central Committee, and

even former members of the Standing Committee.ao In pursuing this

campaign, Xi and his inner circle have also been developing a strategy to formalize it in ways that advance the rule of law.

In contrast to Gorbachev,s glasnosl_openness to ideas_Xi has ,lc,rnanded ideological conformity, tightening control over political .liscourse. He has insisted that the media vigorously promote ih. pr._ t y’s interests. Indeed, he has even prototyped a system to track every t irizen’s financial, social, and digital behavior as part of a massive .,so_ r’ial credit” database reminiscent of George Orwell,s 1gg4.41At the same lirne, Xi has moved to cement the party’s centrality in China,s gov_ (‘rnance. Deng Xiaoping sought to separate party from gorr.ro.rr.rrr, :rnd strengrhen China’s srare bureaucracy vis_)_vis the party. Xi has Hatly rejected that idea, proclaiming, in efFect, ,.Ir,s the pa.ty, stupid.,, Slrortly after Xi took power, an op_ed in people,s Daily crystallir.a ni, position: “The key to running things well in China and realizing the(llrina Dream lies in the party-,,+z

MAKING CHINA PROUD AGAIN Xi knows that a clean party is not enough. Even as Deng,s market re_ fbrms broadened rapid econornic growth a{ter .19g9, the party still struggled to arriculate its raison d’€tre. Why should the Chinese peo_ ple allow it to govern them? The party,s answer is the second priority of Xi’s China Dream: a renewed sense of national identity embraced with pride by a billion Chinese. In their fierce communism, Mao and his fellow revolutionaries had subordinated being Chinese to a global (and decidedly Western) ideology. But for many Chinese, the Marxist norion of a “new socialist man” always seemed alien. Nationalism has proved to be a far more effective, durably native concept.43

Xi is reinventing the party as the twenty_first_century successor of the imperial mandarins-the guardians of a proud civilization with a historical mandare to rule. ..Several thousanJ years ago, the Chinese nation trod a path that was difFerent from other nations,,, says Xi. .,It is not a coincidence that we started up .socialism with Chinese character_ istics.’ It was decided by our country,s historical inheritance.,,aa China scholar Mark Elliott has highlighted .,a bright line drawn directly from empire ro republic. The people,s Republic has becorne the successor

What Xi’s China Wanx 121

122

state of the Qrg . ‘ . and increasingly has come to rely upon this equa-

tion for its legitimacY-“as

Xi has led a revival of classical Chinese thought’ ordering ofiicials na-

tionwide to attend lectures on the “brilliant insights” of Confucius and

other Chinese philosophers to encourage “national self-con{idence”‘

while declaring that “the Chinese Communist Party is the successor

to this {ine traditional Chinese culture'”4u Much as the splendor of the

Roman Empire became an inspiration during the Italian Renaissance’

the glory of the Chinese nation’s “golden age” (shengshi ffiU)’ remem-

bered as the era before the Qing Dynasty’s fall’ is now a source of pride

in modern China. It is no coincidence that the intensely retrospective

term “rejuvenation” (fuxing EX)-t” central to Xi’s China Dream

-can also be translated as “renaissance'”

Meanwhile, the phrase wuwang guochi (nE’E,flt)’ or “never forget

our national humiliation,” has become a mantra that nurtures a patri-

otism grounded in victimhood and infused with a demand for pay-

br”k. A’, GeoffDyer has explained, “The Communist Party has faced a

slow-burning threat to its legitimacy ever since it dumped Marx for the

market.” Thus the Party has evoked past humiliations at the hands of

Japan and the West “to create a sense of unity that had been fracturing’

,rrd,o define a Chinese identity fundamentally at odds with American

modernitY.”aT

During the 1990s when many’Western thought leaders were cele-

brating th. “”rrd of history” with the apParent triumph of market-

based democracies, a number of observers believed that China’ too’

was on a Path to democratic government’ Today’ few in China would

say that politi.d freedoms are more imPortant than reclairning China’s

international standing and national pride’ As Lee put it pointedly’ “If

you believe that there is going to be a revolution of some sort in China

for democrac|, you are wrong’ Where are the students of Tiananmen

now?” he asked Provocatively’ And he answered bluntly: “They are

irrelevant. The Chinese people want a revived China'”a8 So long as Xi

can deliver on his p.omi’e to restore China’s Past greatness’ the Party’s

future (and his own) would seem secure’

What Xi’s China Wants 123

SUSTAINING THE UNSUSTAINABLE

Xi knows the Chinese people’s support for sweeping Party rule still .lepends largely on its ability to deliver levels of economic growth no other nation has achieved. But continuing China’s extraordinary eco- rromic performance will require perpetuating a unique high-wire act. Xi’s unambiguous promiseof 6.5 percent growth per year through2}2l demands what some have described as “sustaining the unsustainable.”

There is general agreement about what China must do to continue

growing at that pace for many years to come. The key elements are stated

in China’s most recent five-year economic plan, including: accelerating

the transition to domestic consumption-driven demand; restructuring

or closing inefiicient state-owned enterprises; strengthening the base of science and technology to advance innovation; promoting Chinese cntrepreneurship; and avoiding unsustainable levels of debt.

At its current position on the development spectrum, China needs rnany more years of high growth rates to catch up to the living stan- clards of the world’s most advanced economies. China’s per capita income is still less than one-third that of South Korea or Spain, and one-fifth that of Singapore or the US. As it steadily moves from the rnanufacture of basic goods to higher-value products and services, in- comes should increase. But Xi is wary of the middle-income trap that lras ensnared many developing countries as rising wages erase their competitive edge in manufacturing. This is the impetus for what he calls “supply-side reforms,” which aim to rebalance China’s export-led

cconomy with domestic consumption and serrices. In fact, China’s ser- vice sector grew by 8 percent in 2015, and for the first time accounted tor over 50 percent of GDP.ae

To reduce inefEciency in state-owned enterprises, Beijing has prom- ised to “ruthlessly bring down the knife on zombie enterprises”- companies that operate despite being technically insolvent-cutring lbur million jobs in the process.5o Meanwhile, the “Made in China 2025” plan calls for raising the quality and technological sophistication ,rf Chinese products.

DESTINED FOR WAR

t24 DESTINED FOR WAR What Xi’s China Wants 125

rrrographic problem (Xi repealed the one-child policy in 2015). None-

r lreless, the number of new entrants into the workforce will continue irrcreasing vfill 2041. With an additional 300 million Chinese mov- irrg from poor rural areas to new cities and workers’ productive lives

lcngthening, Beijing still has decades to mitigate this risk.ss

Given the scope and ambition of Xi’s plan, most ‘Western econo- rrrists and many investors are bearish. But most of these economists ,’nd investors have lost money betdng against China for the past thirty years. As the former chair of President Reagan’s Council of Economic

Advisers, Martin Feldstein, puts it: “Not all of these policies have to succeed . . . If enough of them succeed well enough, 6.5% growth over tlre next few years might not be out of reach.”5e

Domestic reforms are matched by similarly dramatic changes to (lhina’s role in the global economy. In20L3, Xi announced a multi- .lecade, multitrillion-dollar infrastructure project called One Belt, One

l{oad (OBOR). Its goal is a transportation and technology network

spanning Eurasia and nearly all countries bordering the Indian Ocean. ‘lhe plan will effectively export some of China’s excess industrial ca- pacity and provide a cushion for the construction, steel, and cement in-

tlustries, which have struggled in recent years as the country completed

rrrany ofits highest-priority infrastructure projects. The planned proj- ccts abroad are massive. From an 1,800-mile, $46 billion corridor of roads, railways, and pipelines running through Pakistan, to hydroelec-

tric dams and tin mines in Myanmar, to a new naval installation in l)jibouti in the Horn of Africa, China is moving at a pace never seen

in these countries.

But OBOR is about much more than simply rechanneling excess

irrdustrial capacity. Just as the original Silk Road not only spurred trade but also stimulated geopolitical competition (including the nine-

rcenth-century “Great Game” that pitted Britain against Russia for

conrrol of Central Asia), OBOR will allow China to project power ,rcross several continents. OBORs promise to integrate the countries

of Eurasia refects a vision in which the balance of geostrategic power

shifts to Asia. In this, one can hear echoes of claims made a century ago

Xi is also determined that China become a world leader in science’

technology, and innovation by the mid-twenty-{irst century’ He has

boosted R&D spending, incubated tech start-ups’ and called for a “ro-

bot revolution.” (In 2016, China employed more robots than any other

country.)s’ He believes that China’s concentration of power in govern-

ment gives it inherent advantages over ‘Western comPetitors because

it “can pool resources in a major mission'”s2 Unlike the US in recent

y””rr, it can also sustain commitments over a decade or longer if re-

quired, as it has demonstrated in becoming the leader in fast trains’ solar

power, suPercomputers, and other arenas’

Xi is equally committed to restoring a livable environment by tack-

lirg ,r*prrrt pollution, estimated by some to kill four thousand Chi-

ot” “””ry day’st Smog in Beijing has become so bad in some seasons

that the government has been forced to close coal plants and factories

before events like the Olympics or the G-20 meeting’ Some rivers are

so saturated with industrial waste that one in Wenzhou literally caught

fue it 2l!4-According to World Bank estimates’ China’s increasingly

unlivable “.rirorr*”ot costs it several Percent of GDP annually’54 To

reverse these trends, China has embarked on what the Natural Re-

sources Defense Council called its “greenest Five-Year Plan ever”: six-

teen of the thirty-three targets concern the environment’ and all are

mandatorY’ss

The IMF describes corPorate debt’ currendy at 145 Percent of GDP’

as “a key fault line in the Chinese economy'”56 But some of this debt

can be shifted to government, which has a much lower debt ratio at

17 percent of GDP.57 China is also moving cautiously toward a more

free-foating currency with fewer restrictions on capital controls’ At

the same time, it,ttk’ to avoid what some Chinese see as dangers in the

W’estern-style unregulated casino that gives the global financial system

too much sway over national economic policy’

Many Western analysts also highlight the consequences of the ruth-

less one-child policy i-po'”d by Deng Xiaoping in 1980′ While it

contributed to the obje;ive of lifting a half billion people up from

abject poverty io a singlt generation’ it has left China with a serious de-

126 DESTINED FOR WAR

by Halford Mackinder, a founding father of geopolitics. In 1919, he named Eurasia the “World Island” and declared famously, “Who rules the World Island commands the World.”60 By 2030, if current targets are met, Mackinder’s conception of Eurasia could for the first time be- come a reality. OBOR high-speed railways will cut the time required to move freight from Rotterdam to Beijing from a month to two days.

Mackinder’s vision may even come to overshadow Mahan’s thesis about

the centrality of sea power that has so dominated the minds of strate- gists for more than a century (as we saw in chapters 4 and 5).

A MESSAGE FOR AMERICA: BUTT OUT

Once both China’s dominant economic market and its physical infra-

structure have integrated its neighbors into China’s greater co-prosper-

ity area, the United States’post-‘World War II position in Asia will be- come untenable. Asked to distill China’s message to the US, a Chinese

colleague answered: Back off. His colleague proposed a more candid two-word summary: Butt out.

As realistic students of history, Chinese leaders recognize that the role the US has played since World War II as the guardian of regional stability and security has been essential to the rise of Asia, including China itself. But they believe that as the tide that brought the US to Asia recedes, America must leave with it. Much as Britain’s role in the ‘Western Hemisphere faded at the beginning of the twentieth century, so must America’s role in Asia as the region’s historic superpower re- sumes its place. As Xi told a gathering of Eurasian leaders in 201,4, “\n the final analysis, it is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia.”61

The attempt to persuade the United States to accept the new real- ity has recently become most intense in the South China Sea. An area approximately the size of the Caribbean and bordered by China, Tai- wan, and six nations of Southeast Asia, the sea includes several hundred

islands, reefs, and other features, many of which are under water at high tide. During the mid-twentieth century, while China was focused

What Xi’s China Wants 1,27 irrrernally, other nadons claimed islands in the South China Sea and .’rrgaged in construction projects there. In 7956, forexample, Taiwan ,x:cupied Itu Aba, the largest Gature in the Spratly fshndq and garri_ ‘,rned hundreds of troops rhere.62 In Septembe r 1973,South Vielnam lirrmally annexed ten of the Spratly Islands and deployed hundreds oflroops to them to defend its claim.63

Fearful that its interests were being trampled by its neighbors, i n 1974 < )hina seized control of the islands .lor”rito irs borcler_the paracels -from Vietnam.6a In 201,2, Chinatook control of Scarborough Shoall}om the Philippines. Since rhen, it has enlarged its claims, .rr”.tirrg

r.xclusive ownership of the entire South China Sea and redefining the ,rrca by redrawing the map with a .,nine_dash line,, that encomparri, ,O l)crcenr of the territory. If accepted by others, its neighboring coun_ rries have observed that this would create a,.South China Lake.,,

China has also undertaken major construction projects on features rlrroughout the sea, building outposts on seven different Gatures in theSlrratly Islands. ByJune 2015, China had reclaimed more than2,900 .rcres of land, compared to Vietnam,s g0, Malaysia,s 70, the philippines, 14, and Taiwan’s g.us As part of irs efforts, China has built portr, ,ir_ strips, radar facilities, lighthouses, and support buildings,66 ,liof *hi.h t’xpand the reach of its ships

“nd military rircraft andlllow Beijing tolrllnket the region with radar and surveillance assers.

The Pentagon has no doubt abour what is driving this undertaking. As a recent Defense Department report notes, China,s ..latest land recla_ rrurrion and construction will also allow it to berth deeper draft ships at,)utposts; expand its law enforcement and naval presence farth.r,outh rrrto rhe South China Sea; and potendally operate a.rcrafr_possibly as .r rlivert airsrrip for carrier-based aircrafrjthat could enable China to , ,rrrduct sustained operations with aircraft carriers in the arca.,,67

China’s longer-term objective is also clear. For decades it has chaGd .rt the operation of US spy ships in waters adjacent to its borders. China ,rsscrrs that under the UN Convention oo th” Lr* of the Sea the United \t;rtes must request permission for these ships to operate in China,s Ex_,lrrsive Economic Zone, which extends two hundred nautical miles

i”$.:$

L28

from China’s shores-a claim the US fatly rejects’ Nonetheless’ the

construction of radar facilities on features in the South China Sea’ as

well as airstrips and ports, will make it easier for China to track (and

harass) US ships conducting surveillance’ The ability to project Power

in the area will also give China greater influence over the $5 ‘3 trillion in

trade that passes through the South China Sea every year’68 As it slowly

muscles the United States out of these waters’ China is also absorbing

the nations of Southeast Asia into its economic orbit and pulling in

Japan and Australia as well. It has so far succeeded without a {ight’ But

if fight it must, Xi intends to win’

..FIGHT AND VIN”

Despite all the other challenges on his agenda, Xi is also simultaneously

reorganizing and rebuilding China’s armed forces’ Russia’s foremost

expert on the Chinese military, Andrei Kokoshin, calls it “unprece-

d.ot.d in scale and depth.”6e The question many have asked is: Why

now? Such a major reorganization is disenfranchising hundreds of in-

fuential generals who have built personal {iefdoms’ carrying signilicant

political risk for Xi. And the sight of thousands of uniformed soldiers

p.ot.rti.rg unemployment and pension cuts, which occurred in Octo-

ber 2016,is not one any Chinese leader wants to see”o

But Xi has judged it necessary to ensure the military’s unquestioned

loyalty to the Party, and speci{ically to its leader’ Expecting that his

other far-reaching initiatives will encounter resistance’ he needs to

know he can count on those who hold the guns from which political

power grows. As China scholar’W.illiam Kirby has pointed out’ “The

military has played a decisive role at every major turning point in mod-

ern Chinese political history.”T’ Xi’s goal is a military command struc-

ture that exerts effective control over the armed forces of the Party’

EIe wants commanders who will “unswervingly adhere to the Party’s

absolute leadership” and specifically to its commander in chief’72 In the

tumult of the anticorruption campaign and subsequent reorganization

What Xi’s China Wants 1,29

.l-the top military brass, he has carefully picked loyal of[cers who he trusts will stand with him, come what may.

Xi also believes that a military that is “able to fight and win wars” is t’sscntial to realizing every other component of the China Dream. “To ,rthieve the great revival of the Chinese nation,” he has argued, “we r)rLlst ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and strong nilitary.”13 While all great powers build strong rnilitaries, the “strong Arrny Dream” is especially imporrant to China as it seeks to overcome its humiliation at the hands of foreign powers.

In 1,997, Chinese leaders were stunned by the devastating effec- tiveness of the US military during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. ‘l’lrese views were reinforced in 1.999 during NATO’s Kosovo cam- peign (when US stealth bombers accidentally bombed the Chinese crnbassy in Belgrade). And the Chinese military conrinues studying Arnerica’s latest advances in warfare, including the use of drones for lroth intelligence and air strikes. ln 1991, the US defeated Saddam I lussein’s military forces in a month with fewer than 150 US combat tleaths. In this brie{ lopsided war, Americans enjoyed what military planners call “full-spectrum technological dominance” by combining rrcw technologies like space-based navigation and surveillance systems, long-range precision-guided bombs, and radar-evading stealth aircraft. Arnerica’s ability to exploit rhese new tools was bolstered by otganiza- tional changes that allowed the three military services-army, navy, :rud air force

– to operare with greater synergy. The United States also

sLrrgically targeted the Iraqi military’s command-and-control sysrems, cssentially leaving Iraqi commanders blind and deaf.Ta Watching that spectacle, Chinese leaders determined ro acquire the technical capabil- ities to counter and ultimately surpass what they sometimes refer to as “American magic.” Those ambitions are captured in China scholar Mi- chael Pillsbury’s oft-cited assessments for the Department of Defense.Ts

Other lessons for the Chinese military emerged from the 1996 Tai- wan Strait Crisis. Fearing that Taiwan was straying toward indepen- tlence, Beijing sought to discipline Taipei by a show of force in which

DESTINED FOR \VAR

130 DESTINED FOR WAR

Chinese “missile tests” bracketed the island, threatening the commer-

cial shipping on which Taiwan’s economy depends. ‘W’hen President

Clinton responded by sending two aircraft carriers to the area in the largest deployment of US military power in Asia since the Vietnam ‘W’ar, the Chinese government had no option but to retreat. The epi-

sode made few waves in the United States. But in China it dredged up painful memories of the century of humiliation and shook the confi- dence of military leaders, who pledged to do whatever was necessary to avoid such an indignity again.

Xi’s military reforms today largely mirror those of the Goldwater- Nichols Act of 1986, which the US successfully implemented to im- prove joint operations prior to the Gulf ‘War and other military con- ficts of the 1 990s. China is integrating its intelligence, surveillance, and

reconnaissance capabilities across the full spectrum ofland, air, and sea

weaponry. And it has already replaced its traditional seven internally- focused military regions with five new theater commands charged with joint operations against external enemies.T6

Spotlighting corruption as an existential threat to the military, Xi has taken bold steps to crack down on rampant graft, which had in- cluded the outright buying of rank. Under that banner, Xi has made the

historic-and previously autonomous-power centers in the People’s Liberation Army once again fully accountable to the Party. He elimi- nated the military’s four General Departments, which under HuJintao

grew dangerously independent and notoriously corrupt. The overhaul

reorganized the General Departments into fifteen separate bodies that

all report directly to the Central Military Commission-the chairman of which is again XiJinping.

Such bureaucratic reshufling is not usually a portentous event. But

in Xi’s case it underscores Beijing’s deadly serious commitment to build-

ing a modern military that can take on and defeat all adversaries-in

particular the United States. ‘While Chinese military planners are not

forecasting war, the war for which they are preparing pits China against

the US at sea. The powers that dominated China during the century of humiliation all relied on naval supremacy to do so. As one Chinese ana-

lysr warns: “Ignoring the oceans is a historical error we committed, and u()w even in the future we . . . pay a price for this error.,,77 Xi is deter_ rrrined to not make the same mistake, strengthening the naval, air, and rrrissile forces of the pLA crucial to controlling the seas, while cutting i00,000 army troops and reducing the ground forces’ rraditional dom_ irrance within the military.7S Chinese military strategisrs, meanwhile, :rrc preparing for maritime conflict with a .,forward defense’, strategy based on controlling the seas near China within the ..first island chain,;, which runs from Japan, through Taiwan, to the philippines and the South China Sea.7e US Naval ‘Ufar College professors James Holmes :rnd Toshi Yoshihara note rhat, like the German kaiser and Theodore l(oosevelt before them, “the Mahanian conceit that national greatness rlerives from sea power beguiles many Chinese strategists.’, We should tlrerefore expect China to “attach extraordinary value to fighting :rnd winning in the waters that fall within the near_seas,,, they con_ clude.80

Former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft was the first to ex_ plain the consequence of the humiliation of 1996 when American car_ riers forced China to back down. Its military shopping list was thereaf_ tcr predictable: weapon systems to ensure that if such a confrontation with the US happens again, Beijing will prevail. Today, China,s arsenal ,rf more than one thousand antiship missiles based on the mainland and its coastal feet make it impossible for any US warship to operate safely within a thousand miles of China,s coast. Sixry_two submarines patrol :rdjacent waters armed with torpedoes and missiles that can attack sur_ f ace ships. An array of antisatellite weapons gives China the capacity to .iem or even destroy US intelligence, surveillance, and communication satellites over rhis area. Together, these capabilities have degraded the position of Pacific military dominance to which the US had become ,rccustomed since the Battle of Midway in 1942. No longer does the United States have uncontested control of the sea and air along the thousand-mile-wide corridor of ocean bordering China. Exploiting esymmerric advantages, China has capitalized on its geographic prox_ irnity to the battlefield, which provides, as one naval planner notes, a

What Xi’s China Wants 131.

132 DESTINED FOR WAR

landmass equivalent of a million aitctaft carriers’ ‘With an arsenal of

million-dollar missiles, it can attack and sink multibillion-dollar car-

riers.

Fielding “anti-access/area-denial” (A2/AD)military capabilities that

threaten IJS carriers and other capital ships, China has been steadily

pushing the US Navy out of its ad;acent seas’ American ships continue

to show their fags, conducting occasional freedom-of-navigation pa-

trols into the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea’ The US has also sig-

naled that, in case of war, its carriers would remain behind the lirst

island chain-putting them beyond the reach of Chinese land-based

missiles. From that distance carrier-based aircraft would be unable to

reach targets on the Chinese mainland’ Thus the US Navy has been

struggling to find a way these arrctaft carriers and their planes can re-

main relevant. The Pentagon’s main effort to do so is outlined in a doc-

trine called Air-Sea Battle.Bl This calls for the air force to send long-

range bombers with stand-off missiles to destroy Chinese land-based

antiship missile batteries-allowing uS carriers to saGly move up

close enough to China’s borders to join the {ight’ As discussed further

in chapter 8, Air-Sea Battle has many drawbacks, not the least of which

is its dramatic escalation of any standoff.

As discussed in chapter 1, the authoritative 2015 RAND study “The

U.S.-China Military Scorecard” found that by 2017 Chinawill have an

” advantage” or “approxim ate patity” in six of the nine areas of conven-

tional capability that are critical in a showdown over Taiwan, and four

of nine in a South China Sea confict. It concludes that over the next

five to {ifteen years, “Asia will witness a progressively receding frontier

of US dominance.”S2 This will pose for the US the prospect of a con-

ventional conflict it could actually lose.

Of course, just because China wants rc be able to “fight and win”

does not mean that it wants to fight. Clearly, it does not’ But as it pur-

sues its objectives, its rivalry with the IJS is exacerbated by deep cul-

tural differences. This clash of cultures has never been more consequen-

tial for the world than it is todaY.

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

We have a form of government that does not emulate the practices of our neighbors . . . In our approach to warfare, we also differ from our opponents . . . In matters of goodness, we also contrast with most people . . . Our efforts have no equivalent among peo- ple who do not share these values.

– Thucydides, Pericles’s funeral oration, 43 1 scn

Contemplate the great contrast between the two national charac- ters, a contrast ofwhich you have little perception, having never yet considered what sort of antagonists you will encounter in the Athenians, and how widely, how absolutely different they are from yourselves.

-Thucydides, Corinthian ambassador addresses

the Spartan Assembly, 432 ncn

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new worid will not be primarily ideological or economic. The great divisions among humankind will be cultural . . . The ciash of civilizations will dominate global politics.

– Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilization s?,” 1993

7

WH ;T: ff;il,T.;ffJ :::.’l::’ffi :: ffi :::ff 😕 I(ing George III, he was on a mission to establish diplomatic relations between Great Britain and Qlng China. But the Chinese o{ficials with