New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022. xix, 275 pp. US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 9781324021308.
The notion of China’s impending decline or even outright collapse has long captivated Western strategic elites. In 2001, Gordon Chang published his blockbuster book The Imminent Collapse of China, thereby prophesying judgment day by 2011. Yet by 2011, as China was still growing solidly, Chang nevertheless argued that he was only off by a year. Of course, not only did China not collapse in 2012, by 2014 it had also overtaken the US economy by PPP GDP metrics. While Chang is inarguably not the most authoritative expert on China, other well-acknowledged experts like Bill Kirby of the Harvard Business School argued in 2014 that China could not innovate. If collapse was not in the cards, then stagnation or anaemic growth was unavoidable. But by 2020, China had leapfrogged the internal combustion engine to become the world leader in electric vehicles, leaving even Germany in its shadow. China did not stagnate; rather, it has innovated its path forward to become a techno-industrial leader in sectors of great strategic significance.
Hal Brands and Michael Beckley’s book The Danger Zone: Imminent Conflict with China is yet another unsophisticated treatise enriching the “getting China wrong” genre. The book bandwagons on the “demography is destiny” hypothesis, which contends that China will grow old before it grows rich. Because of its ageing population, China is a “peaking power” that will soon decline, or so the argument goes. China thus has an optimal window of opportunity to invade Taiwan and achieve a strategic fait accompli before declining and seeing the correlation of forces working against it. Taiwan is “the epitome of a place where China’s leaders might think that near-term aggression could radically improve their country’s long-term trajectory vis-a-vis the United States” (129–130). To be sure, as Jonathan Kirshner has recently written, in political realism, the future is unwritten. Chinese leaders could commit grave mistakes and crush the ship of state due to mismanagement or even invade Taiwan because of megalomaniac mentality. In that case Brands and Beckley will be right but for the wrong reasons: China will act not out of fear of decline and secular trends but because of hubristic overconfidence of its leadership.
Substantively, the argument of “peaking China” is unidimensional and simplistic. While demography constitutes an important variable in assessing national power, it remains the least important. What matter the most are economic growth, industrial output, and technological innovation. In combination, this formidable triad reveals the latent military strength of a nation. Establishment institutions, ranging from the IMF to the World Bank to global investment banks, predict that the Chinese growth rate will surpass the US growth rate well into this decade by at least a factor of two. As for innovation, the US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo has openly called for an effort to slow down China’s innovation rate. If China is faltering, then why should the US try to slow down its innovation? The authors argue that China has only achieved excellence in “pockets of innovation,” but this is inaccurate. The automobile industry, which China now leads by a large margin due to its innovation in batteries, constitutes the backbone in the techno-industrial ecosystem—not an isolated pocket. And even if Brands and Beckley see China reaching its peak, the 2023 US National Intelligence Report clearly states that China remains a formidable rising power.
The authors also assume a deductive approach and argue that the “peaking power” thesis constitutes a coherent theory explaining the occurrence of hegemonic wars. This seems a laudable attempt in theory building. The authors, however, use the so-called “Thucydides trap”—the default historical analogy to describe the ongoing Sino-US rivalry—as the core case study for their “peaking power hegemonic war theory.” They see Athens as a “peaking power” that initiated the Peloponnesian War because “it feared rapid decline” (83). However, notions of Athens being a peaking power are nowhere to be found in Thucydides. If Graham Allison’s Thucydides trap constitutes a facile analogy capturing the applause of the moment, then Brands and Beckley’s explanation of the Peloponnesian War as a peaking power war defies the historical record.
If The Danger Zone, however, were simply a book engaging in positive analysis (that is, explaining why hegemonic wars occur), then one could read it and speculate on potential cases of hegemonic wars as, in actuality, being wars caused by peaking powers. The book, however, is problematic because it uses the “peaking China” thesis (which is not fully corroborated by the data presented) to engage in normative stratetic prescriptions. To prevent “a peaking China” from waging an imminent offensive, the authors argue that the US must urgently expand its forward posture in the Indo-Pacific region and encircle China with more military bases. The authors further suggest that this encirclement would strengthen deterrence and preserve the peace. Of course, this judgement is not how the Chinese would see it. China knows well that it is not a peaking power and that time is on its side. While Brands and Beckley regard encirclement as deterrence, China denounces it as containment or even roll-back. If Washington pushes aggressively in the region, then China will push back in response. A perfect spiral of increasing securitization would take both sides into a self-fulfilling prophesy of war—and in the case of Taiwan, that could even entail nuclear war. The Brands-Beckley arguments about China declining today echo Mao Zedong’s wrong arguments about the US declining in the 1950s. Mao’s misperceptions of the US as a paper tiger and his aggressive pushback against Washington almost brought the world into a nuclear war. In realism, it is important to get the power trends right and to plan prudently.
Here is where the book falls really short. Beckley has a PhD from Columbia University’s political science department, where the late Robert Jervis worked for decades. Jervis’s seminal work on perceptions and misperceptions, as well as the security dilemma, remains central in understanding China-US relations: defensive actions that the one side takes are perceived as offensive by the other side. An arms race and spiral of escalation thus ensue. In the nuclear era these are dangerous paths. In his American University commencement address 60 years ago, JFK stressed the need for nuclear powers “not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.” Instead of peddling facile narratives of an authoritarian China on the verge of decline being ready to attack with the corollary of conflict being inevitable, the Western strategic community has a responsibility to get China right and to think of ways to compete by avoiding the catastrophe of self-fulfilling prophesies. The true danger zone lies in fear-mongering ideology, which sensationalizes the other side’s weaknesses and prevents a pragmatic approach in dealing with the consequential challenges of hegemonic transition.
Vasilis Trigkas
Tsinghua University, Beijing