China seeks strategic balance, not global domination

Over the last decade or so, a new conventional wisdom has come to dominate the U.S. foreign policy establishment — that China has a grand strategy to displace the U.S. as the world’s preeminent power or hegemon. Whether framed as a “hundred year marathon” or a more modest three-decade “long game“; whether characterized as a “final struggle” or a sinister “plan to Sino-form the world,” the upshot of this new common sense is that Beijing is, and long has been, committed to displacing the United States as the apex power in the international order and taking its rightful place as ruler of all under heaven.

But is this actually the case? Is China really committed to achieving global domination? Has Beijing really embarked upon a final struggle to assert the Chinese Communist Party’s mastery of the globe?

Fortunately, the answer is no.

While it is of course possible to parse supposedly secret and never-before-translated-into-English official documents and find all sorts of lurid statements that would seem to support the “long-march” thesis, if we look at China’s existing grand strategy, a clear, and far less ominous, pattern comes into view: balancing.

Balancing, of course, is a strategy used by states to manage power relations between themselves and other states or groups of states. It involves using the instruments of hard, soft and sharp power to maintain a stable distribution of power — that is, a distribution of power in which more powerful states have neither the ability nor incentive to threaten or dominate the balancing one.

So how has China employed balancing strategies in the past? And how has it adapted its grand strategy of balancing to the challenges of the present? Four brief snapshots tell us all we need to know.

Ideological Balancing. During the early Cold War, the newly formed People’s Republic of China (PRC) found itself caught up in an emerging bipolar order defined by strategic competition between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. During this era (1950-1972), the principal source of threat to the new regime was the United States. And as a result of decades of civil war and foreign invasion, China was relatively poor and weak, a non-nuclear power unable to defend itself against an ideologically hostile United States.

As a result of these factors, China sought to balance against the United States by turning to the only superpower capable of both defending it and helping it develop economically: the ideologically compatible Soviet Union. The result was a grand strategy of defensive balancing against Washington under Moscow’s tutelage.

Geopolitical Balancing. Later in the Cold War (1972-1990), as the balance of threat shifted, China’s grand strategy evolved. Still caught in a bipolar field of geopolitical forces, growing ideological differences transformed its erstwhile patron and benefactor, the Soviet Union, into a more pressing threat than the United States. Still relatively weak in terms of both economic development and military power, Beijing turned to the only other superpower partner available and aligned itself geopolitically with the United States against the Soviet Union. The resulting grand strategy remained one of balancing, but now it was balancing against what Beijing called the “socialist-imperialist hegemon” — the Soviet Union.

Balancing within Unipolarity. As the Cold War ended, the correlation of geopolitical forces shifted once again, giving rise to a new variation on China’s grand strategy of balancing. Most importantly, during the post-Cold War era (1990-2008), bipolarity gave way to unipolarity. The United States emerged from its “long twilight struggle” with the now-defunct Soviet Union as the sole superpower dominating a global order largely organized along (neo) liberal lines.

At the same time, Beijing adopted economic reforms that both encouraged it to integrate into that liberal international order and, over time, dramatically increased its national power. And the balance of threat during this era was one in which the United States loomed large, but against which there was little prospect of organizing a balancing coalition. This resulted in a grand strategy of “balancing within unipolarity” — a hedging strategy in which China chose to integrate itself into the U.S.-dominated liberal order, reaping the benefits of economic liberalization and increasing its national wealth and power, while keeping a wary eye on Washington’s efforts to impose liberal political norms on China.

In the security space, this strategy translated into a concerted effort to balance against the latent American threat by attempting to blunt Washington’s efforts to dominate the western Pacific security order and by beginning to build alternative economic and security institutions (like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) in and beyond that region.

Great Power Balancing. Since about 2008, China’s rise to the rank of undisputed great power, coupled with the transition from unipolarity to multipolarity and the shifting balance of threat (in the form of intensifying U.S. efforts to “contain” China) has produced a new variant of China’s traditional grand strategy of balancing. This new variant has three elements.

First, it involves creating a Chinese sphere of influence in East Asia. China is seeking to establish itself as the dominant power in its geopolitical neighborhood, including Southeast Asia, the South and East China Seas and Central Asia.

Second, it involves balancing the United States in parts of the world that are economically or geopolitically important to China, including the Persian Gulf, Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Arctic. In all these regions, China is working to establish itself as an important player and to blunt what it perceives to be U.S. efforts to maintain its dominant role in those regions.

And finally, the new variant of China’s balancing strategy (can we call it “balancing with Chinese characteristics”?) involves balancing the United States in the space of global governance. This entails Chinese efforts to play a more assertive role in established international organizations and to establish new organizations that it can control and that constitute a counterbalance to established, U.S. dominated, institutions.

Does this look like the culmination of a 100-year marathon to Sino-form the planet? Well, I guess that’s partly in the eye of the beholder. But to this observer, it looks like something very different — nothing more or less than the latest variation on a practice of strategic balancing that began with the founding of the PRC and has continued to evolve as geopolitical conditions have evolved ever since.

Strategically challenging for Washington? Yes. The final struggle in an existential competition between the forces of good and evil? Definitely not.

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter @aalatham.