Advertisement
US-China relations
ChinaDiplomacy

Is strained China-US relationship spiralling towards a Thucydides Trap scenario?

  • President Xi Jinping has warned of the danger of strategic miscalculations
  • Observers say Taiwan issue still poses biggest risk of armed confrontation

Reading Time:10 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
77
Illustration: Henry Wong
Shi Jiangtao
Ahead of this year’s 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, we take a look at how the country is responding to three potential traps highlighted by President Xi Jinping in the past decade. In the second of a three-part series, we examine the Thucydides Trap and what it means for China’s relations with the US.
Advertisement
When American scholars began talking about the Thucydides Trap – the seeming inevitability of confrontation between a rising power and a dominant one – about a decade ago, China’s then vice-president, Xi Jinping, proposed “a new type of major power relations”.

The US president at the time, Barack Obama, initially responded positively to Xi’s vague and all-encompassing proposal, made during a 2012 visit to Washington and partly aimed at breaking free of such historical patterns.

Obama publicly welcomed China’s peaceful rise and said in 2013 that “it is in the United States’ interest that China continues on the path of success”.

His national security adviser, Tom Donilon, said the administration disagreed with the premise “that a rising power and an established power are somehow destined for conflict”.

Advertisement

“There is nothing preordained about such an outcome,” he said.

The Thucydides Trap is a concept named after the Greek historian who wrote History of the Peloponnesian War over 2,500 years ago, recounting the 27-year conflict between a rising Athens and a declining Sparta.

SCMP Series
How China is responding to 3 potential traps
[ 2 of 3 ]
Advertisement