China may soon become convinced that it has a short runway to manifest its destiny. Washington and its allies should be prepared.
Jim Geraghty outlines this morning China’s increasingly bleak economic outlook, but he also notes the degree to which the menace posed by the perception of Chinese decline will not be contained within and limited to the People’s Republic. He’s correct.
There is a temptation to revel in the implosion of analyses forecasting a coming Chinese century based on straight-line projections. That urge notwithstanding, the West may soon be confronted with the sobering conditions that accompany the attenuation of China’s fortunes. If China’s leadership is sensitive to and accepts as legitimate the conclusions drawn by, among others, Bloomberg Economics, which now believes China’s gross domestic product is unlikely ever to overtake that of the United States, the Chinese Communist Party may be spooked enough to take risks it had previously rejected.
That matter of perception is important. When the Chinese perceived their country’s ascension to hegemony as inevitable, Beijing could afford to bide its time. That outlook created the conditions for competitive but still predictable and stable relations with its Western counterparts. If the Chinese internalize the notion that they now have a limited window of opportunity to seize and secure the geopolitical objectives Xi Jinping’s regime has staked out, it will behave more impetuously. That is how the Russian government behaved when it began operating on similar assumptions.
In his analysis of 174 conflicts between 1816 and 1999, University of Georgia professor Jeffrey Berejikian found that hostilities were generally not inaugurated by the stronger power capable of deterring its adversaries. Rather, “as the security position of a state erodes, it’s more likely to initiate a dispute.” Behavioral economics suggests that, because humans are hardwired to fixate more on perceived losses than to take stock of perceived gains, people and the institutions they control become less risk-averse when the need to forestall future losses is most acute. That is especially true of irredentist regimes, which Russia and China most certainly are. The narratives they retail, respectively, are that a variety of illegitimate historical forces have stolen from them that which is their due. It is, therefore, proper to use all available means in their efforts to restore the rightful status quo. Declining powers that know they are declining powers and will, therefore, have access to fewer of those means in the future are dangerous powers.
Americans can be forgiven for taking a moment to delight in the prospect of China’s truncated economic clout (though the West is not insulated from the fallout that would settle over the global economy in the event of a real Chinese slowdown). But that is cold comfort. Beijing long ago subordinated the goal of economic growth to the social solidarity and authoritarian power it derives from re-Sovietizing its economy. Xi sees a richer, broader Chinese middle class as a threat, which should temper the enthusiasm of the Chinese Communist Party’s opponents in the West for what seems, on a superficial level, like a growing Western advantage over its East Asian competitors. More urgently, because “Chinese leaders are convinced they’re in a cold war with us,” as Jim notes, we can expect more belligerence from Zhongnanhai as the Chinese people descend upon it in search of an explanation for their diminished prospects.
The pursuit of lost empire has proven a powerful organizing principle for Vladimir Putin’s regime. Indeed, as organizing principles go, it’s about all the Russian state has left, and that sentiment has manifested in some of the worst atrocities Europe has seen since World War II. The same inducements already grip the Chinese state. China is a nation in the grip of a vigorous Maoist resurgence. It is a country glutted with an excess population of unemployed working-age men without any prospects for marriage. It has designs on territories in its periphery and may soon become convinced that it has a short runway to manifest its destiny. Washington and its allies should prepare accordingly.