New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xvi, 297 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 9780197603994.
Much of the current thinking in the US, and in Washington in particular, about the world’s future focuses on the challenges posed by the rise of China. In his latest book, Scott M. Moore makes the case that this is a mistake. In China’s Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China’s Rise and the World’s Future, Moore directs America’s gaze elsewhere to the global ecological sustainability and technological innovation that are urgent challenges to the world’s collective future. To be sure, policy makers and scholars alike recognize China’s outsized impact on these issues. But Moore believes that Washington’s antipathy towards cooperation with Beijing is precluding pragmatic collaboration on the management of global public goods at great cost to both the United States and the world.
At the same time, Moore’s book is far from a paean to US-China partnership. The volume grapples, for example, with how the growth of assertive nationalism in Chinese politics frustrated expectations not only in Washington but in many capitals that China was a reliable and constructive partner in meeting global challenges. Recognizing this reality, Moore contends that, with respect to climate change, cooperation is generally preferable to competition but “virtuous competition” is also possible. In some arenas, US competition with China promises a race to the top for both sustainability and technological innovation. Moore points to US-China competition in the areas of both clean technology development and its deployment as an opportunity for positive-sum “green geopolitics” that can have a catalytic effect on countries and firms around the world placing ambitious bets on clean technologies.
But, Moore observes, competition is not always virtuous. It can harm the provision of global public goods like climate protection, pandemic prevention, and knowledge production—benefits that, in his definition, accrue to citizens of all countries, yet typically cannot be provided by one country alone. Competition over some global challenges may even carry existential risks. As a case in point, Moore describes the threats inherent in many emerging technologies, especially those with few barriers to acquisition and use. In the absence of shared global ethics, norms, and regulations, unrestricted deployment of potentially destructive new technologies could prove economically, politically, and environmentally devastating. Moore refers to the case of Chinese geneticist He Jiankui’s use of CRISPR to edit the human genome as one example, also laying out how, in the wrong hands, gene editing and other technologies could have catastrophic consequences. US and Chinese leadership in the development of many of these technologies, including artificial intelligence, means that the adoption by the two countries of a common set of values and rules could prevent their abuse.
Moore punctuates his policy analysis with engaging stories in lively, readable prose. That said, the academic reader may be frustrated that Moore wades only shallowly into the turbid waters of Chinese politics. Waves of scholarship over the last four decades have explored the many subnational entities, state-owned enterprises, diverse governmental and party bodies, and other actors that inundate China’s approach to global policymaking. Instead of diving wholesale into the policy structures and related processes that might offer further context for China’s policy choices and behaviour, Moore treats China, more often than not, as a unitary actor. Nevertheless, his book remains a strong piece of China scholarship with commendably meticulous documentation of the diverse sources that buttress his arguments.
The book contains timely discussion of issues that are of interest to both policymakers and scholars. In dedicated chapters, Moore examines the US-China dynamic and China’s role in global health cooperation, environmental policy, transnational knowledge production (i.e., the flow of ideas between China and other countries), competition for new technological development and deployment, data security, and regulations for emerging technologies. For example, readers will find a fresh, even provocative, analysis of China’s role in global public health in the volume’s second chapter. As Moore writes, China is a “pandemic hotspot.” Two recent global public health emergencies, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, originated in China; to prevent the next pandemic requires finding ways to do more to integrate China into the global health landscape. However, to make progress toward this goal entails rejecting stereotypes of China as prone to spreading disease or viewing China’s public health crises through a securitized lens. Rather, a necessary starting point is the understanding that such factors as China’s population density, backyard farming practices, and biodiversity make it a natural incubator for new infectious diseases. At the same time, with a decentralized and poorly funded domestic healthcare system, China remains ill equipped to marshal a response to outbreaks of infectious disease. Added to this, as COVID-19 showed, bottlenecks in information flows to officials who have authority but often lack the capacity to respond, and so are incentivized to conceal disease outbreaks, makes for a risky mix.
China’s politicized reaction to the spread of COVID-19 reinforced its political system’s preference for secrecy in ways that hampered efforts to manage the disease through international scientific cooperation. Yet, as Moore points out, the rapid spread of the virus across China and beyond its borders was, ironically, enabled by China’s openness at the time. Indeed, at the outset of the pandemic Chinese scientists communicated with their international counterparts as they sought to understand the disease and China released the full SARS-CoV-2 genome not long after the virus was identified. Moore argues that support for global scientific networks by the United States and China in combination with backing from other governments around the world would go far to facilitate the data collection and sharing needed to prevent and manage global public health crises. Moore makes clear that he does not think China’s political system is likely to adopt a more transparent approach to public health challenges nor does he think that public health concerns are likely to become a vector for greater political openness in China. Nevertheless, Moore argues that expanding China’s international cooperation to improve transnational public health capacity for disease surveillance and detection as well as vaccination is possible.
In short, Moore makes a compelling case that China’s “next act” may prove to be less about its rise to global economic and political power than about its ability to grapple more effectively with global problems that also confront the United States and other countries. Moore does not dispute that China will remain a source of many vexing challenges for the rest of the world, liberal values among them. But he reminds us that there are existential challenges that we all face—and, crucially, can only face together.
Carla Freeman
Johns Hopkins University and the US Institute of Peace, Washington, DC