19th-century US world view has no place in Asia’s vibrant, China-led future

The world is moving beyond the order the Biden administration is cultivating, and no restoration or normalisation can bring back the old status quo
Competitive coexistence is a reality for China but a new strategy for the US, and while America searches for a renewed role in the region, China already has an established position

Shirley Ze Yu

Published: 9:15am, 27 Jan 2021

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“Competition without catastrophe” is how then national security adviser nominee Jake Sullivan defined the US-China strategic landscape. Kurt Campbell, US President Joe Biden’s “Asia Tsar” nominee, paralleled the 19th-century world order to illuminate 21st-century US foreign policy for the Indo-Pacific.

Both represent the ideal of Pax Americana elitism: cultured, restrained and alliance-minded. Both are Kissingerian pundits of balance of power.

One precondition predicates a Kissingerian world – US hegemony is perceived to be over. Unipolarity has been conceded. In the age of transcendence, strategic vision must begin with judgment of the current state and the other side.

Biden-era foreign policy is styled to suit a construct of norms more than a contest of wills. But the world is moving beyond the order Sullivan and Campbell are cultivating. Therefore, no restoration or normalisation can bring the world back to the old, let alone define the new.

“The forces of the times are with us, yet by no means will we settle with the status quo,” President Xi Jinping said at the Central Party School on January 11. “This age calls for the reconstruction of a new development paradigm with a new development theory. The key word is ‘new’.”

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While the US restores the old, China is constructing the new. If that’s the best the US can offer the Indo-Pacific, it will hardly excite Southeast Asia. People in the region have a median age of 30.2 years, they bear no memories of the Cold War and their lives are intricately intertwined with China’s rise.

China wants to double its gross domestic product by 2035 and could reach economic parity with the US as early as 2026. However, economic parity with the US is but one step on China’s economic continuum.

Justin Yifu Lin, one of the masterminds behind China’s new economic theory, has laid out China’s long-term vision. He says that when China’s GDP is twice as large as America’s and its GDP per capita is half that of the US, American hegemony will end. This is the end goal of China’s national rejuvenation.

What will America be like in 2035, and what about its relationship with the world? The US administration no longer tries to define a vision longer than four years.

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Campbell proposes “to persuade China that there are benefits to a competitive but peaceful” Indo-Pacific. The truth is competition has always been behind China’s economic ascendance. China is the biggest beneficiary of a peaceful region. Competition and peace are the natural order of Asia. China needs no further persuasion.

China has a legitimate place in the Indo-Pacific as its indigenous economic leader, with 50 per cent of the region’s GDP. It has memberships in the region’s primary institutions and has invented its own parallel regional institutions, from development banks to security pacts.

China’s commercial clout within Southeast Asia has been strengthened by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) members imported almost three times as many goods from China as from the US in 2019, and Asean was China’s largest trading partner in 2020. Chinese infrastructure is changing the face of business and the land itself in the Indo-Pacific.

China aims to establish leading technology standards for the 21st century by 2035, from telecoms to quantum computing and AI. There can be only one set of standards for global technologies.

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Competitive coexistence is China’s reality but a new strategy for the Biden administration. Sullivan seeking the space between “neo-containment” and a “grand bargain” only reveals a disequilibrium. The US is searching for a renewed role in the Indo-Pacific while China already sits in its place.

With peace assured by US foreign policy, China could feel more secure and focus more on growing its economy. It could also feel more assertive and advance its regional strategic position. With avoiding catastrophe as the bottom line, China could well accomplish both.

In 2014, Xi said Asian affairs should be determined by Asians, his version of a Monroe Doctrine for Asia. In China’s view, the Indo-Pacific is a self-governed sphere, separated from the US by an ocean and a new century.

Therefore, the best historical example to illuminate the Indo-Pacific’s future is not 19th-century Napoleonic Europe but 19th-century America, an America there once was.

Dr Shirley Ze Yu is a political economist, an Asia fellow at the Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation and a former Chinese national television (CCTV) news anchor