London: Hurst & Company, 2020. xi, 306 pp. US$34.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78738-383-8.
The Great Decoupling is a broadly scoped, ambitious work written for a sophisticated but non-specialist audience. It is essential reading for anyone who wants a tour d’horizon of China’s ambitions explained through the lens of its history, and for those who want to know how China and the United States resumed butting heads, and why they will continue to butt heads. Unsurprisingly for an author with such lengthy experience and deep insight into China, Nigel Inkster provides a masterful summary of political and ideological developments. The book is not primarily about decoupling, but an impressive tour of Chinese culture, politics, and policy.
There are the occasional criticisms and mocking asides directed at the United States, reasonable enough given its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, but at times this comes across as the exasperation of a former colonial power. It can also lead the author into a too-great willingness to take some Chinese claims at face value, such as an assertion of how American Internet companies were outperformed in China. A more accurate portrayal might conclude that the Chinese government went out of its way to stifle competition, acknowledged by China’s former internet chief, Lu Wei, who once said that if China had not blocked Google, there would be no Alibaba.
The book’s handling of technology is one of its strengths. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “knitting together a suite of administrative and technological capabilities designed to address the challenges of maintaining social order in a modern consumer-driven society” (96). Inkster’s contention that most Chinese citizens are content with the Party’s ability to deliver services and stability—“areas in which the performance of Western liberal democracies is coming under question” (107)—is probably right, at least in the near term. Inkster identifies surveillance and control of the online narrative as central to the Party’s response to the greatest threats to its continued unchallenged rule – economic growth and technological change. Silencing Jack Ma removed a powerful critic of the Party, but did not solve the CCP’s central dilemma. The price of continued growth and an expanded ability to innovate is allowing greater freedom of thought, but this means the emergence of powerful actors who are not part of the Party or State. This would create dangerous political forces for rulers unaccustomed to dissent outside of the CCP and its byzantine internal political processes (which themselves, as Inkster points out, have become inhibited under Xi).
There is a tendency to take at face value some of the truisms of Western analysis of modern China. References to a “middle-income trap” or a “Thucydides trap” are perhaps intended to lend a patina of analysis. These catchphrases, which we could also describe as “Thycydides Claptrap,” act as analytical allegories, shortcuts rather than a analysis. The case for a “Thucydides trap,” for example, is open to question (no matter how illustrious its academic authors), but its shortcomings are not discussed.
But this does not detract from the book’s keen assessment of trends in Chinese policy and the inevitable movement they create towards confrontation rather than cooperation between China and the United States. Inkster’s discussion of the practical implications of Xi’s calls for a “community of common destiny” is exceptionally important, and sketches out what a world under Chinese hegemony would entail: an acceptance of the legitimacy of the CCP, a world in which China’s interests and priorities would be adopted by other states and not contested by them, and where the interests of China would take precedence over the rule of law so cherished by American and European policy makers.
Written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Great Decoupling does not discuss the sympathetic Chinese response. After all, Xi agrees with Putin that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster of geopolitical significance—as the book makes clear, when Xi wakes up screaming in the night, he is dreaming of Gorbachev. The fundamental tension between a China that portrays itself as the victim of foreign invasion and aggression, and the Party’s need to support Putin and avoid defending an international system, where the rule of law takes precedence over sovereign interests, puts China in an awkward place. This is a symptom of much deeper contradictions in the CCP’s policies the book makes clear. It is here that Inkster’s long experience with the thinking of the CCP provides insights into why China is supporting Russia.
The last two chapters bring us to decoupling. They provide a masterful summary. The book’s strength lies in describing the trajectory of Chinese history that led to unavoidable confrontation. It is a powerful antidote to nostalgia among some in the US and Europe for the 1990s and a naïve reluctance to recognize the inevitability of conflict. The book raises troubling questions about the likelihood of an accommodation between the West and a China led by Xi, who sees Chinese ascendency both as inevitable and crucial to the Party’s own hold on power.
China is not going away, nor do we want to repeat the Chinese miscalculation that historical determinism means our opponents are in inevitable decline. This is the greatest error of Chinese strategy and one reason why the swift response of the democracies to the Russian invasion shocked the CCP. The United States is also not going away, and while China is not yet ready for accommodation, some accommodation between opponents will be necessary. Those who read The Great Decoupling will be well prepared to navigate the difficulties of reaching some balance of interests between China and the West for what is likely to be a long contest.
James Andrew Lewis
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC