Op-Ed: Worried About China's Rise? Beijing's Ambitions are Mostly Regional

 

[By Sam Roggeveen]

Australia’s former prime minister Tony Abbott wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently that “a world dominated by Beijing would resemble China, with the silencing of dissent, the confiscation of wealth, and the brutal exercise of power.” It’s a dark but plausible vision, given Beijing’s treatment of its minorities, its sometimes-violent repression of dissent, the constant surveillance of its people, and its suppression of free speech. If China ever achieved world domination, it could certainly exercise its power the way Abbott describes.

However, what’s left out is a credible account of how China can achieve world domination in the first place. To believe in Abbott’s vision and muster the energy to resist Beijing, we first need to be convinced that there is a realistic path from the world we are in today to the prospect he is warning about.

Three other great powers – India, Russia and Japan – live in the same neighborhood as China and have a vital interest in ensuring that Beijing’s ambitions are permanently frustrated.

This remains a weak point in the more hawkish assessments about China’s ambitions, a lack of detail about how Beijing gets to world domination. One example (you can find others here) is a warning by Hal Brands from Johns Hopkins University, who argues that China threatens America’s way of government and could encourage its slide into autocracy:

If China were someday able to dominate East Asia after American retrenchment, it might gain the power to coerce the United States economically and diplomatically, even if it could never invade militarily. The proliferation of Chinese influence in regions around the world could gradually give Beijing powerful geopolitical and geo-economic advantages, rendering the United States insecure even within its hemispheric fortress. In the meantime, the international economic friction created by protectionism and chaos would drag down American growth, which could exacerbate social and political conflicts at home. And if democracy receded overseas and powerful autocracies advanced, autocratic voices within the United States might be empowered – as indeed happened in the 1930s.

Note the “ifs”, “coulds” and “mights” sprinkled throughout this passage – it takes a series of leaps to imagine a world in which China is so powerful that it can undermine American democracy. But note also that Brands acknowledges the unlikelihood of China ever being able to threaten the continental United States with overwhelming military force. The United States is too big, too powerful, and too far away to ever be vulnerable to Chinese invasion.

Expansive accounts of Chinese capabilities and intentions are not only light on detail, they also draw attention from more plausible and near-term concerns. As I have written in Foreign Policy this week, the military parade staged in Beijing unveiled new weapons systems that appear mostly to be dedicated to tasks in China’s near abroad rather than for a global military posture.

True, the People’s Liberation Army has developed a host of new capabilities to project military power far from home, as Australia discovered in February when a naval flotilla circumnavigated the continent. But the Beijing parade suggests that building a military to rival the United States as a global expeditionary force is far from Beijing’s top priority. Its real focus is to be powerful in the near neighborhood.

That’s bad news for Taiwan, and it is compounded by new assessments such as this one, featured in the latest issue of the journal International Security, arguing that the military balance between the United States and China has shifted so markedly in Beijing’s favor that it is becoming difficult to see how Washington could defend Taiwan.

It will also make life much more difficult for Southeast Asian countries on China’s periphery. China’s military weight, alongside the attraction of its huge economy, will incentivize the weaker countries of mainland Southeast Asia to preemptively bow to Beijing’s preferences. Indeed, we can already see the makings of a Chinese sphere of influence in Cambodia and Laos. Recent Lowy Institute research shows that China is now the leading partner for both countries in joint military exercises and other kinds of defense diplomacy.

Beyond its immediate neighbors, it is difficult to see how China could exercise dominance regionally, let alone globally. And that’s not just because of the United States; indeed, even in a post-American Asia, Chinese dominance seems a long shot. For one thing, China is surrounded by countries with which it has territorial disputes. Furthermore, much of modern Asia is founded on the struggle against colonialism and foreign domination. And finally, three other great powers – India, Russia and Japan – live in the same neighborhood as China and have a vital interest in ensuring that Beijing’s ambitions are permanently frustrated. For all these reasons, it is difficult to see the region meekly acquiescing to Chinese dominance.

In an era of receding US primacy in Asia, it is tempting to assume that the pendulum will swing to the other extreme. Real life is likely to be more complicated – and competitive – than that.

Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace, published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.

This article appears courtesy of The Lowy Interpreter and may be found in its original form here.