The Danger of China's “New Type of Great-Power Relations” Slogan
By Andrew S. Erickson and Adam P. Liff
OCTOBER 9, 2014
Ever since his February 2012 visit to Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has championed his vision for a “new type of great-power relations” between China and the United States. The Obama administration, in an apparent desire to avoid conflict with a rising China, seems to have embraced Xi’s formulation. In a major speech last November, U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice called on both sides to “operationalize” the concept. And during a March 2014 summit with Xi, U.S. President Barack Obama declared his commitment to “continuing to strengthen and build a new model of relations.”
In uncritically signing on to the “new type of great-power relations” slogan at the Obama-Xi Sunnylands summit in June 2013, the Obama administration fell into a trap. It has what is most likely its last major chance to dig itself out when Obama visits Beijing next month for a follow-up summit. And he should make use of the opportunity. Although some U.S. officials dismiss rhetoric as insignificant and see this particular formulation as innocuous, Beijing understands things very differently. At best, U.S. acceptance of the “new type of great-power relations” concept offers ammunition for those in Beijing and beyond who promote a false narrative of the United States’ weakness and China’s inevitable rise. After all, the phrasing grants China great-power status without placing any conditions on its behavior -- behavior that has unnerved U.S. security allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific. At worst, the formulation risks setting U.S.-Chinese relations on a dangerous course: implicitly committing Washington to unilateral concessions that are anathema to vital and bipartisan U.S. foreign policy values, principles, and interests.
Already troubling, each additional invocation of a “new type of great-power relations” grows more costly. Instead of reactively parroting this Chinese formulation, Washington must proactively shape the narrative. It should explicitly articulate and champion its own positive vision for U.S.-Chinese relations, which should accord China international status conditionally -- in return for Beijing abiding by twenty-first-century international norms, behaving responsibly toward its neighbors, and contributing positively to the very international order that has enabled China’s meteoric rise.
[size=12pt]THUCYDIDES TRAP
The “new type of great-power relations” concept is appealing to so many policymakers and scholars in both countries because of a misplaced belief in the Thucydides Trap. This is a dangerous misconception that the rise of a new power inescapably leads to conflict with the established one.
The Chinese side has exploited this oversimplified narrative to great effect: Xi himself has warned of such confrontation as “inevitable,” and leading Chinese international relations scholars claim that it is an “iron law of power transition.” Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. secretary of state, echoed the sentiment at the 2012 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue when she said that the United States and China’s efforts to avoid a catastrophic war are “historically unprecedented” and that both sides need to “write a new answer to the age-old question of what happens when an established power and a rising power meet.” A year later, at the Sunnylands summit, Tom Donilon, then the U.S. national security adviser, explained that efforts to reformulate the U.S.-Chinese relationship are “rooted in the observation … that a rising power and an existing power are in some manner destined for conflict.”
Such sentiments are puzzling, especially coming from Americans. They deny human agency (and responsibility) for past -- and possibly future -- disasters. And they reject progress. Further, they are based on a selective reading of modern history, one that overlooks the powerful ways in which the norms that great powers have promoted through their own rhetoric and example have shaped the choices of contemporaneous rising powers, for better or for worse. Most problematic, the narrative of needing a “new model” to avoid otherwise inevitable conflict is a negative foundation, a dangerous platform on which to build the future of U.S.-Chinese relations.
To be sure, Clinton, Donilon, and their successors might understand all this but are prepared to dismiss rhetoric and focus instead on action. This is surely what U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had in mind at the 2014 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue when he noted that “a new model is not defined in words. It is defined in actions.”
Even so, flirting with the Chinese-proposed slogan for bilateral relations, as the administration has done, while dismissing it in private is dangerous. Chinese leaders take such formulations extremely seriously: the phrase “new type of great-power relations” appears repeatedly in their speeches, and permeates Chinese media and public discourse on U.S.-Chinese relations. Uncritical embrace creates an unsustainable situation wherein each side mistakenly expects unrealistic things of the other, worsening the consequences when those expectations are ultimately dashed.
Even worse: There doesn’t even seem to be a clear consensus within Washington about what exactly “new type of great-power relations” actually means. Interviews suggest that the administration’s definition hinges on two prongs: cooperation in areas where U.S. and Chinese interests overlap and constructive management of differences where they don’t.
But Beijing could intend any number of things. A theoretically benign interpretation is reflected in former State Councilor Dai Bingguo’s remarks at the fourth U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue: “respect each other and treat each other as equals politically; carry out comprehensive, mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation economically; build up mutual trust and tolerance and share responsibilities in security matters; learn from and promote each other culturally; and seek common ground while reserving differences and live side by side in peace with each other ideologically.”
For others, the dirty secret is that “new type of great-power relations” isn’t that new. It is disturbingly redolent of a very old type of values and order, in which spheres of interest, zero-sum gains, and great-power exceptionalism ruled the day. Indeed, Shi Yinhong, a leading Chinese IR scholar and counselor to China’s State Council, has characterized it as a call for America and China to “respect each other’s interests and dignity” as both a “nation-state in the traditional sense” and a “rare and special” great power.
An even more cynical interpretation -- and one supported by interviews with current and former U.S. officials -- is that, under the new formulation, Xi expects the United States to make certain accommodations concerning China’s “core interests.” Indeed, in the February, 2012, speech in which Xi first introduced the concept, he explicitly identified “respect for each other’s core interests” as one of four areas constituting a “new type of great-power relations.” But no U.S. administration is likely interested in making such accommodations. And there is no evidence that Beijing would be willing to make meaningful concessions of its own; in a July 2012 paper, Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the United States, claimed that “China has never done anything to undermine the US core interests” and that, even in its own neighborhood, China is merely a “victim on which harm has been imposed.”
Whatever Chinese leaders’ intentions in promoting the concept actually are, in other words, they don’t look good.
TROUBLING TERMINOLOGY
The Obama administration’s continued flirtation with the “new type of great-power relations” concept appears to have been misunderstood in Beijing and beyond, and risks being misperceived as a precipitous change in U.S. power and policy.
First, the terminology paints an absurd picture of a United States too feeble to articulate, much less defend, its own vision for promoting peace, stability, and prosperity in Asia -- only furthering perceptions of U.S. decline in China and its neighbors. The Obama administration’s rhetoric, however well intentioned, sometimes exacerbates this misperception. A case in point: Kerry’s statement to his Chinese counterparts at the 2014 U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue that “there is no U.S. strategy to try to push back against or be in conflict with China.” The Obama administration is certainly right to try to allay concerns -- unfounded but extremely prevalent in China -- that the United States is attempting to “contain” China. But it is ill advised to do so in a manner so easily heard as an apology.
Second, Beijing’s interpretation of “new type of great-power relations” appears to be linked to an assumption that China’s growing material power has made a power transition inevitable, compelling Washington to accommodate Beijing’s claims in the South and East China Seas now. Such arguments reveal ignorance, first, of fundamental changes to the international order since the days of might makes right and, second, of the manifold sources of U.S. power and preeminence. By allowing the terms “great-power relations” and “equality” to permeate official discourse on bilateral relations, Washington risks tacitly condoning such anachronistic views of international politics.
Third, China’s economic growth is slowing, and the country’s future is ever more uncertain as various societal and other domestic headwinds strengthen. Decades of extraordinary economic and military growth make many Chinese assume that the rapid increases in material power will continue indefinitely. That is unlikely, but the consequences of such bullishness are real and unsettling: growing expectations within China for U.S. concessions and anachronistic calls for “equal” treatment and “space.”
If that weren’t enough, the “new type of great-power relations” concept is also unnerving to U.S. allies and partners in the region. If fears of abandonment grow, some may seek other -- potentially more destabilizing -- options for deterring China.
Such concerns are particularly intense in Japan -- arguably Washington’s closest ally and the best situated to stand up to China independently, if necessary. Xi has already attempted to exploit the Obama administration’s embrace of the “new type of great-power relations” concept to score a victory in the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands dispute. During a September 2012 meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Xi invoked the “important consensus” he claimed that the two had reached in defining their relationship and then pivoted immediately to the most critical flashpoint in Chinese-Japanese relations: “We hope that the U.S., from the point of view of regional peace and stability, will be cautious, will not get involved in the Diaoyu Islands sovereignty dispute, and will not do anything that might intensify contradictions and make the situation more complicated.” The record of China’s Japan policy during the past two years suggests the Xi administration is intent on isolating Japan -- bypassing Tokyo while engaging Washington -- and keeping the country relegated to a status inferior to China and the United States. Indeed, as Australian scholar Amy King argues, China’s conception of a “new type of great-power relations” leaves little room for Japan.
