Rising states and the liberal world order: the case of China

Abstract

Many international relations analysts see rising states as a source of threat to international peace and order. Yet they often fail to provide an explicit logic for their argument or to submit their claim to rigorous empirical verification. As a consequence, existing studies on this topic tend to be based more on rhetorical assertions than careful analyses. We argue that there is a need for greater conceptual clarity, transparent logic and systematic evidence to substantiate the claim that a rising China poses a threat to international peace and stability. This topic is clearly important for verifying theories of war and peace. It also has obvious policy relevance, as an armed clash between China and the United States would be an enormous tragedy not only for the people of those countries but also for the rest of humanity. For these reasons, we discuss the case of China; we place it in the context of prevailing discourse on the sources of war and order, and caution against sweeping generalizations and dogmatic assertions. We offer caveats both for colleagues studying International Relations and those in the policy community. We aspire to encourage greater empathy and introspection in contemplating the issue of rising states and world order.

Which states are rising—and are they more belligerent?

Susan Shirk, an eminent Sinologist and former official of the US State Department, has remarked: ‘History teaches us that rising powers are likely to provoke war’.¹ This is a popular view. However, we contend that such claims require greater conceptual precision, cogent logic and systematic evidence before we can accept their validity. To begin with, how do we define rising states and how do we determine which countries belong to this category? For instance, the idea of the ‘Thucydides trap’ points to ancient Athens as an example of a rising state,² whereas theory of long cycles in international relations goes back to the early modern era, to include Venice, Genoa and Portugal as rising states.³ In contrast, power transition theory is specifically concerned with armed conflicts in the industrial age, and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) was the earliest instance of such a conflict that—according to this theory's view—was initiated by a rising state against an established one.⁴

The problem raised by conceptual vagueness about the meaning and designation of rising states is compounded further in view of more recent developments. When the Soviet Union (USSR) collapsed and the United States ascended by default to become the world's undisputed hegemon, should it have been counted as a rising state? How about post-1945 Germany and Japan, whose economic recovery and resurgence surely increased their international stature, albeit on the basis of their economic rather than military capabilities. This observation suggests that we need to be more explicit about what kind of evidence is to be used to assess upward and downward mobility in the international hierarchy—and which states are being compared against (after all, a state can be said to be rising or falling only with respect to other countries' performance). Depending on which measures we use to determine the relative ranking of states, we can end up with very different conclusions about whether rising states provoke war.⁵ Moreover, a state can be rising compared to some counterparts but declining relative to others. Germany was catching up with Britain during the Wilhelmine era prior to the First World War, but it was experiencing relative decline compared to the US and Russia, which were growing even faster. China's economy has overtaken those of Germany and Japan in recent decades. Should the non-occurrence of war between them count against Shirk's observation? Evading or eliding these important questions renders her claim and other similar propositions unsubstantiated.

Chinese national power has increased rapidly over the past few decades. To make sense of the nature and role of China's rising power, Chinese scholars and policy-makers have engaged in extended debates. There have been divergent views and conceptions of the changing world order and what China could achieve under the current international system, given power shifts and new directions of Chinese foreign policy. Although a variety of realist thinking remains the most referenced theoretical preference, there is also much more than just realism in Chinese thinking and scholarship about China's future global role.⁶ China has transformed from a ‘revolutionary order-challenger’ to a ‘reformist order-shaper’ since the years of ‘opening up and reforms’. As China has become more accepting of the existing world order, its leadership has sought to reform deficient aspects of the post-war order and to promote a vision of a ‘human community with a shared future’.⁷

A rising power does not necessarily have the intention to change the status quo or go to war. Which side provokes and is therefore responsible for war? This is of course a loaded question. We have solid documentary evidence to assert, for example, that German leaders sought war deliberately in 1914 and that Japanese leaders did the same by attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941.⁸ However, even when we are reasonably certain about which side fired the first shot, such as in the case of Pearl Harbor, it is arguable as to which side ‘provoked’ a particular confrontation. The Japanese assault on the United States was, for example, a desperate gamble to escape from the economic stranglehold that the US' embargo of strategic materiel had imposed on Japan. Similarly, although Britain and France invaded Egypt in 1956, their leaders would undoubtedly argue that they were provoked into taking this action by Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal. Should we consider the US to be guilty of instigating the Spanish–American War or initiating the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan? Or would one want to argue, in the latter case at least, that the invasion was provoked by prior actions by those countries' leaders (such as their alleged support for Al-Qaeda)?

Then there is the question about the definition of war. Would the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 count as an instance of war, even though this campaign was brief and resulted in relatively few casualties? How about the bombings of Serbia and Libya by NATO? Or covert actions, such as the US' role in the Bay of Pigs invasion carried out in 1961 by Cuban exiles, or in its supporting the contras in Nicaragua to fight against the Sandinista government? In short, until we settle issues such as those we have just raised, it is difficult to accept generalizations such as Shirk's, which is made with such certitude. It is not clear whether she would include the US during Theodore Roosevelt's administration in the category of a rising state, or how she would judge its foreign policy. Graham Allison has warned Americans about wishing the Chinese to be ‘more like us’, pointing out that:

The US [had] declared war on Spain, expelling it from the Western Hemisphere and acquiring Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; threatened Germany and Britain with war unless they agreed to settle disputes on American terms; supported an insurrection in Colombia to create a new country, Panama, in order to build a canal; and declared itself the policeman of the Western Hemisphere, asserting the right to intervene whenever and wherever it judged necessary—a right it exercised nine times in the seven years of TR's [Theodore Roosevelt's] presidency alone.⁹

It is instructive that discussions about the ostensible bellicosity of rising states often fail to mention the US in this context. Moreover, researchers rarely make explicit comparisons between the conduct of rising states and their established counterparts, even though such comparison is implicit in the claim that states of the former type are more likely to provoke war than those of the latter type. Shirk clearly had China in mind when she remarked about rising states provoking war. It would therefore be informative to compare China as a rising state against the US as an established state. In this regard, Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former permanent representative to the United Nations, has observed that even during the relatively peaceful administration of Barack Obama, the US dropped 26,000 bombs on seven countries in 2016 alone, whereas China has not fired a single shot across its border since 1979.¹⁰ As remarked earlier, the US became even more powerful after the demise of the USSR. Although undertaking intervention abroad is not the same thing as waging war, incidences of US military intervention increased rapidly after the end of the Cold War, rising from 46 in the period between 1948 and 1991 to 188 between 1992 and 2017.¹¹ It is not clear whether Shirk had the US in mind when she made her remark about rising states, but it is ironic that as it became even more powerful, the lone, hyperactive superpower was more inclined to throw its weight around.

Arguably, the rises and falls of great powers have been associated in some fashion with the occurrence and outcome of wars. Some such violent episodes involved foreign conquests during the era of colonialism and imperialism. Others were interstate wars that raised the stature of winners and demoted that of the vanquished (such as the demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire after the First World War, and the rise of the US and USSR after the Second World War). Still others involved the conclusion of struggles for national unification (as in the cases of Germany and Italy), and the settlement of civil wars (including those for the US, the USSR and China). Thus, while war can be a result of interstate power shifts as implied by Shirk's remark, it can also be the cause of interstate power shifts. Reciprocal influence is present in the relationship between power shifts and war occurrence (or outcome). Significantly, China's recent rise has been due exclusively to the growth of its domestic economy. This remark does not deny the fact that China has historically waged many wars of aggression and conquest. But it does suggest a certain irony when the danger of war is raised with respect to China's rise—when so many of its predecessors became great and established powers due to war. Not to put too fine a point on it, western commentators on the threat to peace posed by a rising China often appear to have a selective amnesia about how their own countries had risen to join the ranks of great powers.

Rising states and revisionist motivation

The idea of revisionism provides the critical linchpin connecting rising states to their alleged challenge of the international order. Rising states are supposed to be motivated to alter the rules and norms of this order: hence, they are characterized as revisionist. It is critically important to underscore that revisionism is what connects rising states to their ostensible threat to the international community. In this view, changing power distribution among states does not in itself cause war; rather, war happens when those states dissatisfied with the status quo have gained capabilities to alter it. Yet one rarely hears about a definition of revisionism, and one is seldom given a checklist of traits that describes revisionist states. Analysts use the term ‘revisionism’ as if everyone will agree on its meaning and therefore no clarification is required. The word ‘revisionism’ is more often deployed as a code word to indicate that a commentator is critical of the country being assigned this label, rather than as an analytic concept deserving serious research consideration.¹²

How are revisionist states in general supposed to look or act? How are they supposed to be different from the ‘status quo countries’? We do not have any explicit—not to mention consensual—benchmarks for assigning countries to these categories. It appears in current discourse that most rising revisionist states have one characteristic in common: they are usually defeated states that have lost wars fighting established powers, a characteristic attributed to them retrospectively after the identity of the belligerents and the outcomes of wars have become known. This tendency in turn raises the question of whether states are considered revisionist because they had started wars—or because they had lost wars. Alternatively, in applying this label to China, Iran and North Korea, it is simply used to designate an enemy or troublemaker, suggesting that this country is not ‘one of us’.

But why should rising states in particular have a revisionist motivation to challenge and undermine the existing international order? Unlike most other researchers, Organski and Kugler explained their logic explicitly.¹³ According to them, rising states want to replace the existing international order because they were not at the table when the rules of this order were decided and because they see these rules as having been deliberately rigged to favour the established states. Seeing them in this light, it becomes immediately evident that it is one-sided to assert that rising, revisionist states are responsible for destabilizing international order; indeed, ‘it takes two to tangle’. Why do the established but declining states refuse to accommodate the rising states' demand for greater recognition? The blame for starting war should be shared by these states to the extent that they decline to adjust their privileges and trim the sense of entitlement that is no longer warranted in view of their recent or ongoing decline.

The logic implicit in the view that rising states are revisionist and thus prone to provoking war is that as dissatisfied states they have the incentive to challenge the international order, and that upon gaining the capabilities to actually undertake such a challenge they become a source of instability. This argument, however, overlooks the possibility that as rising states, they also acquire a larger stake in the status quo. Moreover, why should they overthrow the international order that has facilitated their ascendance? Conversely, why should the established states be forever committed to the defence of the existing order, since the rules of this order have not prevented their relative decline? Shouldn't they want to revise these rules to arrest and reverse their decline? The logic implicit in the argument that rising states provoke war contradicts common sense. With their rise, the newcomers should become more satisfied and established powers should become more dissatisfied.

Organski and Kugler's logic noted above is helpful, because it reminds us that rising states are not hardwired to be aggressive and provocative. There is a reason for their dissatisfaction because they are undercompensated for what their capabilities and achievements would entitle them to. The opposite of this observation is, of course, that the established but declining states are overcompensated in terms of various tangible or intangible benefits that the international order extends to them. This understanding is in turn important in suggesting that it is not the fact that some states are rising that makes them aggressive or provocative. It is rather the discrepancy between their capabilities and the benefits (or recognition) that they receive from the international system that is the source of their grievances.

If the distribution of benefits mirrors the distribution of power, no state can credibly threaten to use force to change the status quo and the risk of war is smallest. If, however, there is a sufficiently large disparity between the distribution of power and benefits, the status quo may be threatened regardless of what the underlying distribution of power is.¹⁴

Parenthetically, the concept of revisionism is sometime deployed in a second way to mean efforts to change the existing distribution of power among states. When this concept is used in this way, it resorts to definitional fiat so that all states that try to improve their international position—and hence all rising states—are ipso facto revisionist and a threat to the existing order. In the context of power transition theory, this view conflates or comes close to duplicating this theory's other variable, namely, shifting power balance to explain systemic war. Besides, which state does not wish to increase its influence and expand its power?

If Germany had already overtaken or was poised to overtake Britain, why should its leaders not simply bide their time and expect to gain mastery of Europe without having to fight a war? According to this logic, rising states should let the ongoing trend be their friend and ride it to gain further advances in their international stature. Declining states should instead be more desperate as they worry about being overtaken by latecomers. Thus, to explain Germany's decisions leading to the First World War, some scholars have argued that it was worried about a rising Russia that could shortly pose a threat to it, thus inclining it to launch a preventive war before it lost its advantage.¹⁵ The key to explaining Germany's decisions, in other words, was not its ambition to replace Britain as the world's premier power. Rather, it was Berlin's worry and even alarm that it was poised to decline relative to a rising Russia (and again, relative to the USSR in the context of the Second World War in 1941).

Conventional discourse has things wrong: war between Germany and Britain occurred in 1914 not because the former had wanted to challenge the latter, but because Germany's diplomacy had failed to keep Britain from getting into a confrontation. As in the Second World War, Germany's primary concern was about a rising Russia/USSR to its east. By extension, if China should get into a war with the United States, it would not be because it wants to fight the US, but rather because it has failed to keep the US on the sidelines in a crisis involving Taiwan. Certainly, neither Germany in 1914 nor China today was/is interested in establishing a new world order. For China, the resolution of Taiwan's status and the cause of national reunification constitute the highest priority in its foreign policy. For both Germany in 1914 and 1938 and China today, it was/is not world domination but rather regional mastery in their respective neighbourhood that was/is their priority. After establishing its own regional hegemony in the western hemisphere, an abiding principle of US foreign policy has been to prevent another country from reaching the same status in Europe, east Asia or the Middle East.

Here again, popular narratives circulating in the West, alleging China's ambition to displace the US as the global hegemon, are greatly exaggerated, seriously misinformed and intended largely for domestic consumption. China is not trying to take over the US' role in world affairs and replace the existing order with a China-centric order. Even though China has made great progress in improving its national capabilities, it is still primarily a regional power whose military reach does not extend very far from its borders. Only one country in the world—the United States—is capable of invading and occupying another country and fighting a long war far away from its home base. Although an armed clash between China and the US is possible, it will not be over which one of them gets to decide the international order as power transition theory suggests. It will also not be about which country should be the global hegemon. Rather, it will be over more tangible disputes such as Taiwan's status. If the reader needs any reminder at all, these two countries had fought before in Korea. That conflict happened long before there was any talk of a rising China seeking to unseat the US from its pre-eminent international position. Wang Jisi, a prominent Chinese scholar in International Relations, observes that the current China–US rivalry is driven by a set of compound causal logics. The driving factors include the shifting balance of power, ideological and civilizational differences, global trends and domestic politics. Among these factors, domestic politics is probably the most crucial variable that may bring the two countries into a conflict.¹⁶ In other words, it is not the shifting balance of power at the systemic level but rather domestic politics in both countries that would determine whether the two powers would go to war. A power transition is not necessary for war to happen, nor does a war between these two countries have to be about which one of them should be the global hegemon.

Theoretical rationale and empirical evidence

Realists emphasize the role of power in international relations. Why do rising latecomers that manage to catch up to the front runners threaten peace? Balance of power is an axiomatic tenet of realism, claiming that when there is an equal distribution of power among states, international peace and stability tend to prevail.¹⁷ If realism stands for anything, it stands for the proposition that states should pursue a policy of balancing power. Much discourse on rising states, however, upends this traditional realist view, arguing instead that when a rising state approaches the power of an established, dominant state, peace and stability are threatened. In short, this is the key claim advanced by power transition theory and the idea of the Thucydides trap: namely, that a rising China threatens not just US preponderance in international affairs, but also global peace and stability.

Realists who truly believe in balance of power should welcome rather than worry about China's rise, because this development produces a situation of more balanced power between China and the United States. Yet in the current prevailing discourse, commentators use the word ‘balance’ to refer to US efforts to check a rising but still weaker China, and they point to a rising but still weaker China seeking to balance against a preponderant US as proof of its aggressive intention seeking to overturn the status quo—or, in other words, as evidence that China is trying to upset the ‘balance of power’. When speaking about US policies seeking to ‘balance’ against a rising China, these commentators really have in mind maintaining, even increasing, an imbalance of power in US favour. As Waltz has observed:

When Americans speak of preserving the balance of power in east Asia through their military presence, the Chinese understandably take this to mean that they intend to maintain the strategic hegemony they now enjoy in the absence of such a balance.¹⁸

Again, words do not mean what they say.

Where should one look for signs of international order, and how should one identify aggressive states that threaten international peace and stability? A naive person may refer to the United Nations and, more specifically, to the resolutions adopted by its General Assembly as the best representation or reflection of an international order's norms and rules. Yet few Americans who write about international order turn to this source of empirical record, perhaps because the US and its principal western allies are regularly outvoted in the UN, showing that they are the ones who are out of step with the international community's consensus.¹⁹

A naive layperson may also want to know which countries have resorted more frequently to arms when they are asked to identify the chief source of possible threat to international order and stability. Which countries have been involved in more wars, armed interventions, or the invasion and occupation of other countries? Systematic evidence on this question is readily available from sources such as the University of Michigan's Correlates of War Project.²⁰ China has not been implicated in any effort to overthrow foreign governments or engage in unconventional warfare or extrajudicial killings such as those carried out by the US in drone attacks abroad. China has also not been implicated in plots to assassinate foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro.

It might be reasonable, moreover, to look to military spending by various major states and their record of joining international institutions and treaties for clues to identify those countries that are likely to be aggressive and pose a threat to international peace and stability. Yet current discourse on revisionism and threats to international order rarely refer to these indicators, even though the pertinent data are readily available. In this context, we can note that data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute show US spending on its armed forces in 2019 as being greater than the combined defence expenditures of the next ten countries in the rankings, including China.²¹

One can also easily refer to systematic data indicating which countries have more often ratified (or abandoned) international treaties, accords and organizations. For instance, we could investigate which countries have joined or refused to join (or have withdrawn from) the League of Nations, the International Criminal Court, the Paris climate agreement, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the respective Conventions to protect the rights of women and children, the Iran nuclear deal, the international agreement banning landmines, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) or its successor, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership? As the reader may guess, those who opine on threats to world order almost never consult such systematic evidence to support their assertions. There are important exceptions to this generalization, but such empirical studies based on systematic data and transparent logic are relatively rare.²²

When states observe rules that limit the arbitrary use of force, respect the sanctity of treaties, acknowledge the legitimacy of ruling elites in other countries and refrain from infringing on each other's traditional spheres of influence, we have a more restrictive international order that enhances the prospects of peace and stability.²³ Conversely, when states disregard or reject these norms, we have a more permissive order that is less likely to prevent the occurrence of wars and crises. It is not so difficult for researchers to determine which states in recent years have acted more in compliance with the traditional pillars of a restrictive international order.

The implicit link between rising states and threats to the ‘liberal world order’ presumes a causal claim that is very much subject to challenge. Much of the recent impetus to deglobalize or to disengage from the liberal world order has come from the West, exemplified by Brexit and by Donald Trump's demand, during his first presidency, to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, his abandonment of the TPP and the Paris Agreement, and his withdrawal from many international treaties and organizations such as the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, and the World Health Organization (Joe Biden subsequently decided to return the US to these three international organizations and to the Paris Climate Agreement; however, Trump again withdrew the United States from the Paris Accord on the first day of his presidency). The US owes the largest amount of its dues to the UN, even though it urges its allies to pay more for collective defence. In contrast, China has now become the leading state contributing personnel to UN peacekeeping missions. President Xi Jinping has proclaimed China's continued commitment to globalization and the longstanding principles originating from Westphalia. Naturally, states act both offensively and defensively. They all seek to defend and uphold some international rules and norms while at the same time trying to alter and replace other rules and norms. It is too facile to classify states into the binary categories of defenders and challengers of the international order.

At a meeting of top Chinese and US diplomats held in March 2021, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticized China, claiming that its actions ‘threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability’.²⁴ Yang Jiechi, the leader of the Chinese delegation, retorted that the US ‘does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength’, suggesting that even many Americans have questioned the state of democracy in their country. Yang in effect challenged Blinken to specify which and whose rules of world order Blinken had in mind when criticizing China, stating that China would only follow ‘the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called “rules-based” international order’.²⁵

When celebrating the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, President Xi stated pointedly that ‘China welcomes helpful suggestions, but will not accept sanctimonious preaching’.²⁶ These remarks reflect a more confident belief on the part of the Chinese leadership and the general public that China's rise to great power status entitles it to more respect from the rest of the world, and especially from the West. China finds itself playing a new role shaping the world order and enjoying a new opportunity to promote its vison of a rejuvenated Chinese nation.

The definition of what the US claims to be the ‘rules-based international order’ is not clear and even some of its allies and partners are confused by these claims. China rejects those ‘rules’ determined only by the US and western countries while other countries do not have a seat at the table. To the Chinese leadership, such ‘rules’ are ‘house rules’, not international rules. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian characterizes the rules-based international order as the United States' ‘house rules’ to dominate the world.²⁷ However, China does not intend to upend all aspects of the rules-based international order. Yan Xuetong, a well-known Chinese realist scholar, believes that China's newfound confidence does not mean that it will challenge the US on all issues. In his view, China will challenge the US on some issues but limit its contestation on others. China wants to compete with the US in those areas where it has advantages.²⁸

The Chinese believe that their country has worked within the framework and rules of the United Nations Charter, and that the US has little respect for the international order and laws underpinned by the UN Charter, often acting unilaterally or with like-minded allies, for example in using military force on various occasions in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Somalia and Syria without UN approval. A quick review of the veto records of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council suggests that the US is more out of touch with international opinion, such as in its recent resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The nature of international order

One of the major problems in the current discourse on international order is that its rules and norms are never fixed, static or a settled matter; they are always evolving. Moreover, they are the result of continuous negotiation and renegotiation. There is rarely, if ever, complete consensus on these rules and norms, which are being constantly challenged and contested. Most countries agree with and support some of these rules and norms, while objecting to others. Therefore, their compliance is selective and contingent. Even though proponents of power transition theory and many US officials and scholars try to draw a causal connection between rising powers and the disruption or dismantlement of international order, they overlook a more fundamental phenomenon: this order has always been buttressed by power. The stronger states always have a dominant voice in deciding international rules and institutions. According to Stephen Walt, ‘international orders inevitably reflect the underlying balance of power’.²⁹

It is also important to acknowledge that Walt goes on to say that ‘no single power can write and enforce all the rules of an order’. This being the case, the maintenance of international order requires not only leadership from strong states but also followership from other countries whose support of the order depends on their perception of its legitimacy. Thus, coercion is not enough to sustain an international order, as is sometimes implied in the current popular western discourse. This discourse seriously distorts the fundamental realities. It also often presents false dichotomies, suggesting that the only alternatives are the current international order and one that is dominated by China—or chaos or disorder. Furthermore, the idea that the world's two most powerful states would go to war to fight over which one of them should decide the nature of international order is too facile and far-fetched.

The idea of world order dates back to the work of Hedley Bull,³⁰ while John Ikenberry is more responsible for the idea of a liberal order.³¹ Ikenberry originally argued that the US-dominated liberal world order is easy to join and hard to resist, but he has recently become more concerned about threats that may end this order. This order has enabled China's rise. The challenges to liberal internationalism come not only from rising non-western states, but also—and even more so—from developments within the western countries. It is being jeopardized by Trumpism and its ‘America First’ policy and by an agenda to push aggressively for regime change abroad. The naive assumption that a rising China would be naturally incorporated into the US-dominated international order has proved to be wrong. Liberal democracy itself appears fragile and polarized, vulnerable to far-right populism and backlash politics in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia. The West has lost the moral high ground, for example by its handling of international refugees and its protectionist economic policies; and, in the case of the US, by Trump's supporters storming the Capitol on 6 January 2021, Trump's denial of the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and the Black Lives Matter movement which protested against pervasive police brutality towards minorities.

The Biden administration claimed that the US is leading the world in strengthening the rules-based international order while China is violating and dismantling this order. It professed to defend this order, but often applied double standards to itself and others. Even though Biden proclaimed that might does not make right, as mentioned earlier with respect to the empirical record of the historical incidence of military assaults on various countries, the US has resorted to force far more frequently than China. Walt has argued that the issue is not the United States' preference for a rules-based order and China's alleged lack of interest in it; rather, in his view it is more a question of who will determine which rules pertain where: ‘The question is who gets to write the codes—and whether the United States will live up to its own.’³² We have questioned earlier whether such ‘rules’ can be dictated by any one country, even a superpower.

The US notion of a rules-based order does not always bring peace and stability to the world. From its ‘war on terror’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to its policies toward the former Yugoslavia, Nicaragua and Cuba, the United States has attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments and has intervened to some extent in democratic elections in at least thirty countries since the end of the Second World War even though it routinely complains about Russian, Chinese and Iranian efforts to meddle in its political processes.³³ According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the total death toll in the post-9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen could be at least 4.5–4.7 million and is likely to be higher, although the precise mortality figure remains unknown.³⁴ Some of these people were killed in fighting, but far more, especially children, have been killed by the reverberating effects of war, such as the spread of famine, malnutrition and disease. These ‘indirect deaths’ were estimated to number 3.6–3.8 million, with roughly 900,000 deaths occurring in a period of almost 20 years following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.³⁵ This record should have seriously discredited American moral authority but is rarely acknowledged in western discourse on the rules-based international order.

Although the international order and the international balance of power are two distinct concepts, they are closely related to each other. Order does not simply mean peace and stability; but, as already mentioned, international order reflects the underlying international balance of power. Without power, it is difficult to achieve order, at the regional or global level—although legitimacy is also important, because coercion alone is never enough to sustain an order over time. As US economic power declines, international trade and monetary rules have become increasingly strained. This phenomenon is demonstrated in the status of the US dollar, which has dominated international currency markets and settlement for international trade since the end of the Second World War. ‘The US share of currency reserves by central banks [has fallen] from over 70% in the early 2000s to under 60% today’.³⁶ Most of the world's oil trade is conducted in US dollars, but this situation is changing rapidly as more and more countries are settling their accounts in local currencies. Large amounts of global oil reserves are under US sanctions, and this situation creates enormous pressure on oil producers and buyers to shift away from the US dollar. The United States' freezing of accounts held by foreigners in its banking institutions and its frequent and blatant resort to SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) to impose economic sanctions and financial blockades against regimes that it dislikes have caused its actual and potential targets to seek alternative institutions and currencies to conduct their transactions. In these and other ways (such as the delinking of the dollar from gold, or the invasion of Iraq without UN approval), ironically what other countries—including US allies—‘really want is for the United States to take its oft-repeated commitment to a “rules-based” order more seriously’.³⁷

To give one example, the United States has blocked Chinese companies such as Huawei from accessing its market and technology, and it has also lobbied other countries to ban Chinese telecommunications firms from participating in their 5G networks. US officials and legislators have claimed that certain Chinese-owned social media companies with a presence in the US market can conduct espionage and disclose their American users' confidential information to the Chinese government. Most recently, in 2024 the US Congress passed a law providing for the video-sharing platform TikTok to be banned in the US unless it divests itself from its parent company, ByteDance.³⁸ That these claims are made by the US is often viewed as ironic, given that in 2019 the German federal minister for economic affairs and energy, Peter Altmaier, reiterated claims that US intelligence services had surreptitiously recorded Chancellor Angela Merkel's telephone conversations in 2015, and he stated that ‘the US also requires its companies to provide certain information needed to fight terrorism’.³⁹ In 2013 Edward Snowden disclosed that surveillance was conducted on a massive scale by the National Security Agency with the cooperation of US telecommunication companies and European governments.⁴⁰

Conclusion

Scholarship often follows changes in official policy, reflecting the twists and turns in states' changing official relations. For example, Wilhelmine Germany was once held by many Americans, including the then future president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, as a paragon of bureaucratic efficiency, a model of constitutional monarchy, and an example par excellence of the rule of law. But as the First World War approached, Americans' image (held by scholars, officials and the mass public alike) changed abruptly to depict German leaders as Teutonic warlords bent on aggrandizement and destruction.⁴¹ This major and swift change demonstrates how quickly elite—and scholarly—consensus can break down and transform. One may also recall the days of ‘panda mania’ following President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to Beijing, and the days when the US and China were practically strategic allies in their opposition to the USSR during the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations.

A moment's reflection tells us that since those days China has not pursued a more belligerent foreign policy and that its society and economy have become more open. Indeed, if the objective of US policy on engaging China is to integrate China in the international community, it has largely succeeded. China is today deeply embedded in the global economy, and it is an active participant in international organizations and multilateral diplomacy (compared to the Maoist era, when China espoused the doctrine of proletarian revolution, supported insurgency movements abroad, denounced the UN and other western-dominated institutions, and rejected international agreements to control nuclear arms). One may therefore be confused by the evolution of elite and mass opinion in the West, depicting a more assertive—even aggressive—China in recent years.⁴² China was much more isolated and bellicose during the Maoist years that predated its recent rise. Its policies and conduct have since become more moderate. For example, as it becomes stronger, China has less frequently resorted to coercion in its sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea.⁴³ This phenomenon contradicts the suggestion that as China gains more power, it has become more aggressive.

Certainly, China has resorted to military and economic coercion against Taiwan. But has this coercion been more egregious than aspects of US conduct in recent decades, such as invading Grenada and Iraq, deposing foreign leaders such as Panama's Manuel Noriega, and mining Nicaragua's ports? Why should China care less about the geostrategic importance of Taiwan than the US did about Cuba? Recall the US naval blockade of that island and its threat in 1962 to escalate the missile crisis to the brink of nuclear war. We have not seen similar behaviour by China, at least not for almost three-quarters of a century since the establishment of the People's Republic. China has been patient. One can of course argue that this patience has been due to its lack of capabilities thus far, and that therefore the jury is still out. But the same logic would argue that when a state with the relevant capabilities has used them in attacking various other countries as the US has done, the jury seems to have spoken.

Relations between the US and Cuba are fundamentally different from those between China and Taiwan, which are a legacy of their unfinished civil war. Taiwan continues to exist as a self-governing entity because of US protection. In 1950, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet of the US Navy to intervene in the Taiwan Strait to prevent a communist takeover of Taiwan. Had it not been for this intervention and continued US support since then, Taiwan would have been reunited with China. The US of course also had its own civil war, which was settled by bullets rather than by the ballots. As Buzan and Cox remark:

Parallels could in fact be drawn between the ruthless military anti-secessionism and rejection of self-determination that underpinned the US civil war, and China's similar current attitudes towards Tibet, Taiwan, and Xinjiang. Abraham Lincoln and the Chinese Communist Party would perhaps have understood each other quite well on this question. The United States has been more fortunate in that its unity question was largely laid to rest after the Civil War, and did not much affect its peaceful rise. For China, the unity question is still not fully resolved, especially over Tibet and Taiwan. It plays significantly into China's international image, and therefore into its wider foreign policy and IR [International Relations].⁴⁴

US Senator Frank Church from Idaho stated at a hearing on the Vietnam War:

… had England, which favored the South, adhered to the same principle that now seems to govern American policy, and had sent troops in the name of self-determination into the Confederacy, I think the English Government would have been hard put to convince Abraham Lincoln that there should be an election to determine the ultimate outcome of the war.⁴⁵

In 1971 Gramsci wrote about the power of ideas in maintaining and perpetuating the rule of the dominant class over the underclass.⁴⁶ To the extent that the ideas propagated by the elites are accepted and internalized by the masses, the underprivileged (such as slaves) come to view their life conditions and fate as inevitable, natural and even legitimate. There are few instances in systematic scholarship inquiring about how and why the Kaiserreich and Imperial Japan's policies of colonial conquest and foreign expansion, and their armament programmes, were different from or more egregious than those pursued by their predecessors or contemporaries—other great powers such as Britain, France, Russia and the US. Indeed, Germany's territorial acquisitions before 1914 look puny when compared to those of the United States.

Current narratives that cast the US in the role of a defender of the status quo—presumably the existing international order, even though this order is always in flux and being negotiated and renegotiated⁴⁷—and China in the role of a challenger to this order testify to the enormous wealth of soft power commanded by the US.⁴⁸ This power seeks to perpetuate the dominant positions of the established states without, however, answering the question why the status quo is necessarily conducive to stability, justice or fairness. Rarely does one hear that some practices, such as racism and colonialism, were once widely accepted norms of the prevailing order which current western narratives tend to sanctify. For instance, the victorious allies meeting at Versailles after the First World War refused to recognize the principles of equality among races and states. Should those who call for overthrowing racism, colonialism, apartheid and other injustices—or, for that matter, those who introduced new principles such as crimes against peace and humanity at Nuremberg after the Second World War and the idea of the Responsibility to Protect more recently—be labelled as ‘revisionists’ and criticized for trying to upend the existing international rules and norms?

Current discourse does not address why the introduction of some new idea, norm or principle, including those justifying regime change and preventive war—even if one happens to agree with them—should be considered as moves to defend the existing order rather than to alter it. Such logical and empirical inconsistencies are rarely brought up in prevailing narratives concerning a rising China's prospective attempts to revise world order.

In a moment of candour or bravado, Barack Obama professed in 2015 that ‘America should write the rules. America should call the shots. Other countries should play by the rules that America and our partners set, and not the other way around’.⁴⁹ How should the world react to such a statement? He was also quoted as saying in 2010, ‘If over a billion Chinese citizens have the same living patterns as Australians and Americans do right now, then all of us are in for a very miserable time. The planet just can't sustain it.’⁵⁰ How should the Chinese people have interpreted this remark? Does it suggest that Americans and Australians should reduce their consumption levels, or conversely that Chinese people should be prevented from improving their living conditions?

Much of the current discourse on China's rise and its alleged threat to the liberal world order reflects ideational construction. Ideational constructs are themselves reflective and indicative of power relations among social actors, including scholars and researchers who are inevitably embedded in the social structures and power relations that they study. Foucault insisted that ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge’, nor is there ‘any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’.⁵¹ More recently, George argued that ‘the process of discursive representation is never a neutral, detached one but is always imbued with the power and authority of the namers and makers of reality—it is always knowledge as power’.⁵² Hagström and Jerdén agree that ‘knowledge production, including scholarship, plays an important role in promoting collective understandings in which certain ideas are seen as “legitimate” and others as “outlandish”.’⁵³ Social science scholarship is never a detached exercise, but is always deeply entangled in power politics.

All of this explains our dismay that not much scientific progress has been made in the study of China in the past fifty years. As Walker has remarked: ‘Theories of international relations are more interesting as aspects of contemporary world politics that need to be explained than as explanations of contemporary world politics.’⁵⁴ If we appear to be too strident in expressing our views, it is because in academic discourse, as in popular discussions on international affairs, dissident voices are rarely heard. To use the analogy of Hans Christian Andersen's famous folk tale, scholars all too often turn out to be industrious tailors for the naked emperor.

Footnotes

Author notes