The Necessary War

America’s Collision Course With China
By JUDITH SHAPIRO

EVERYTHING UNDER THE HEAVENS
How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power
By Howard W. French
Illustrated. 330 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

DESTINED FOR WAR
Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?
By Graham Allison
364 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books. $28.


The Chinese superpower has arrived. 

Could America’s failure to grasp this reality pull the United States and China into war? 

Here are two books that warn of that serious possibility.
Howard W. French’s “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power” does so through a deep historical and cultural study of the meaning of China’s rise from the point of view of the Chinese themselves. 

Graham Allison’s “Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides’s Trap” makes his arguments through historical case studies that illuminate the pressure toward military confrontation when a rising power challenges a dominant one. 

Both books urge us to be ready for a radically different world order, one in which China presides over Asia, even as Chinese politicians tell a public story about “peaceful rise.” 

French says in his exhaustively researched and fascinating account of geopolitics, China style, that the Chinese era is upon us. 

But, he asks, “How will the coming China-driven world look?” 

To what extent will China support the international order that emerged when it was suffering humiliation at the hands of foreign powers? 

What are the drivers and motivations for the new ways China projects its power? 

How best should its neighbors and its rival North American superpower respond?

French, a former reporter for The Washington Post and The New York Times, argues that China’s historical and cultural legacy governs its conduct of international relations, a legacy that sits uncomfortably with the Western notions of equality and noninterference among states. 

China’s relations with its neighbors in Japan and Southeast Asia were for millenniums governed by the concept of tianxia, which held that everything “under the heavens” belonged to the empire. 

A "superior" civilization demanded deference and tribute from vassal neighbors and did not hesitate to use military force. 

China’s testy relationship with Vietnam became fraught whenever a Vietnamese leader dared to demand equal footing with a Chinese emperor; the Japanese claim to divine origins was unacceptable.

When China lost its regional dominance at the hands of colonial powers and invading armies, it saw the situation as temporary. 

The struggle in the East China Sea over the Senkaku Islands claimed by Japan since 1895, for example, has long been a sore point in Sino-Japanese relations. 

But the reform-era strongman Deng Xiaoping advised China to “hide our capacities and bide our time” on this and many other issues. 

Hostility between China and Japan simmers in disputes over hierarchy, wartime apology and historical narrative, with the two “in a situation resembling galaxies locked in each other’s gravitational fields, destined to collide repeatedly only to sail past each other after wreaking their damage.” 

French shows convincingly that China’s goal is now to displace the American "barbarians" and correct historic humiliations imposed by those who dethroned China from its rightful position at the center of the world.
China’s recent spectacular land grab in the South China Sea is a fait accompli, given China’s superior power in the area and its assertion that the region is a core national interest. 

Arbitrators for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea issued a 500-plus-page decision against China and in favor of the Philippines in a dispute over the definitions of islands versus rock formations; they concluded that Chinese arguments had no legal basis. 

But China has unilaterally determined to claim much of the sea as its own. 

The country rejected the arbitration tribunal, knowing that its growing surface naval power and nuclear submarine capability support a highly uneven contest. 

Oil rigs have been established in contested waters, while artificial “islands” constructed from coral reefs are serving as military bases just miles from the Southeast Asian coastline. 

Similarly, China’s projection of economic might through the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and One Belt, One Road initiative, which intends to bind a huge swath of Asia to China economically via new land infrastructure and consolidated control of the seas, generates “a kind of fatalism or resignation about the futility of trying to defy it.”

“Everything Under the Heavens” is splendidly elucidated by a series of maps that show the world from China’s perspective; the South China Sea is compared to a cow’s tongue or “enormous blue banner” that can be drawn as a logical continuation of China’s southeastern coastline. 

French’s book was written before Trump’s repudiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, but clearly the resulting power vacuum is nothing short of a gift to an empire bent on restoring its tributary realm.

Graham Allison’s “Destined for War,” also helpfully illustrated with maps and charts, reinforces French’s arguments with wide-ranging, erudite case studies that span human history. 

The book asks why, when a new superpower threatens to displace a ruling power, the clash of hubris and paranoia often results in war. 

Allison’s examples include the Sparta-Athens conflict of the famous “Thucydides trap,” when both sides labored strenuously to avoid war but were seemingly driven to it by forces beyond their control, as well as Germany’s challenge to the dominance of its neighbors at the start of the 20th century, which led to two world wars. 

Allison’s 16 cases also include four examples of power shifts in which war was avoided, as when Britain adjusted to the rise of the United States in the Great Rapprochement of the turn of the last century, choosing forbearance and eventually reaping great rewards through the countries’ “special relationship.”

Allison, the director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, resurrects the Samuel Huntington thesis of a coming clash of civilizations to explain that China thinks in longer time frames and with a greater sense of hierarchy than the United States. 

In order to avoid the Thucydides trap, he writes, American policy makers must reject the tendency to think that China is like us and that it will respond as we would to identical provocations. 

Numerous situations could spark military conflict between the United States and China despite efforts on both sides to maintain peace, from accidental collisions at sea to misunderstandings caused by cyberattacks to actions taken by third parties like North Korea or Taiwan. 

“Will it be more difficult for the Chinese to rationalize a cosmology in which there are two ‘suns,’ or for the U.S. to accept that it must live with another, and possibly superior superpower?” 

Allison asks in a discussion of the need for both sides to bring their brightest minds to the challenge ahead.
Both of these fine books show that China intends to evict the United States from Asia in order to restore its dominance over what it considers its historic spheres of influence. 

Unfortunately, Washington is poorly prepared to deal with a China that strategizes in terms of the symbolic undercurrents and sensitivities illuminated so dramatically by both French and Allison. Whether the resurgence of China will mean tragedy in the form of armed conflict will depend on how China, China’s neighbors and the United States understand and manage the deeper motivations and structural forces in play.

China's Historical Mythomania

Howard W. French's Everything Under the Heavens, reviewed: The last empire

By DAVID MULRONEY

Title Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shapes China’s Push for Global Power
Author Howard W. French
Genre Non-Fiction
Publisher Knopf
Pages 330
Price $36.95

Donald Trump isn’t the only global leader with wall-building ambitions. 

Xi Jinping recently called on his officials to encircle restive Xinjiang province, home to China’s Muslim Uyghur population, with a “Great Wall of steel.”
Trump’s Great Wall can be dismissed as an opportunistic policy gambit, but Xi’s wall-building impulse has deeper roots. 

The default symbol for the United States is the Statue of Liberty, which famously welcomes the huddled masses. 

China’s most notable structure, the Great Wall, was built to keep the masses out, particularly those with dynastic ambitions.
For China’s mandarins, trouble typically arrives in the form of the twin calamities captured in the gloomy couplet, “Nei luan, wai huan”: chaos at home and invasion from abroad.
Avoiding these linked perils remains a priority for Xi, a preoccupation that shapes his foreign and domestic policy. 

Xi presides over the world’s last surviving empire, a country that has devoured ethnic rivals such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans whole, and that treats neighbouring states as vassals to be kept in line. 

All non-Han “Others” are expected to understand and appreciate the concept of tian xia, or “everything under heaven,” the rather ambitious zone of influence that China has traditionally attributed to itself.
Living up to this imposing mandate means that China is forever managing others, walling them in or fending them off, hoping to pacify them with the offer of membership in a China-dominated order.
In his new book, appropriately titled Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Shapes China’s Push for Global Power, former New York Times journalist Howard W. French makes it clear China’s sense of national superiority is of more than historical significance. 

While China’s power has waxed and waned, its sense of being the Middle Kingdom has remained constant. 

So, too, has its inclination to manage those who lie outside the centre. 

Living up to its awesome self-image has required China to dispatch fleets and armies, and to develop a highly sophisticated diplomatic stagecraft of flattery and intimidation. 

For centuries, exercising this mandate of heaven has meant relentless efforts to manage and cajole, to pacify and control.
Nothing is quite what it seems. 

The generous offer of inclusion in a Chinese world masks a condescending disregard for partially sinicized neighbours, such as the Vietnamese and Tibetans, and contempt for the barbarians beyond. 

The offer of a peaceful place in a Chinese world is inevitably backed up by the sword.
French’s account, not surprisingly, runs counter to the official Chinese narrative. 

Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch who led a Chinese armada to Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and the east coast of Africa, is lauded in China as an unconventional explorer. 

Unlike his Western counterparts, whose voyages were marked by greed, violence and conquest, Zheng, the story goes, was an ambassador of Chinese benevolence. 

The reality, as French reminds us, is that Zheng’s massive ships were actually troop carriers, whose menacing arrival conveyed a distinctly different message about the nature of the Chinese deal on offer.
Modern China continues to proclaim this theme of "benevolent" internationalism, something French challenges with numerous examples. 

The most chilling is his account of the Chinese navy’s 1988 massacre of flag-waving Vietnamese troops on the disputed Johnson Reef in the South China Sea. 

The Vietnamese protest is captured on a grainy YouTube video that is suddenly interrupted by Chinese naval gunfire. 

When the smoke clears, the Vietnamese are, shockingly, gone. 

It’s worth noting this happened just a year before the Chinese military perpetrated another massacre, this time of student protesters in Tiananmen Square. 

Nei luan, wai huan.
China is clearly in the midst of a new period of exuberance and expansion, and, as French makes clear, this inevitably involves friction with the two powers, Japan and the United States, that have come to dominate its neighbourhood over the past 200 years.
In recent decades, Japan, seduced by the lure of the China market and by the friendly pragmatism of previous (and needier) Chinese leaders, played down territorial disputes as it helped to rebuild China. The tables have since turned. 

All things Japanese are now demonized by China, which evokes past Japanese aggression as it steadily encroaches on the rocky outcroppings that mark the beginning of the Japanese archipelago.
Even more worrisome is China’s growing rivalry with its most formidable adversary, the United States. 

China is rapidly acquiring the weapons and technology to make it highly risky for the U.S. Navy to operate in the western Pacific, an ambition furthered by China’s construction of military airstrips on artificial islands in the South China Sea. 

French ominously quotes another Chinese aphorism: “When two emperors appear simultaneously, one must be destroyed.”
French suggests the current period of Chinese expansionism is particularly dangerous not just because it involves a clash between two nuclear-armed powers, but also because China’s leaders are in a race against time. 

The window on their ambitions for regional and broader domination is closing. 

China’s slowing economy means less money for military modernization. 

Worse for China is the fact its population will likely peak by 2025, while the United States will continue to enjoy a steadily increasing population, and resulting economic growth, for a long time to come. 

Much of this U.S. population growth will be powered by immigration. 

Trump may wish to rethink his wall.
All of this matters for Canadians. 

Any armed clash between the United States, our closest ally, and China would be devastating. 

Even if conflict is avoided, we can expect China’s larger ambitions and anxieties will influence the way it manages relations with Canada. 

The carrots and sticks are familiar.
Trade is one potential motivator. 

Even though it flows in China’s favour, its partners, Canada included, are all-too-easily persuaded that permission to do business is a benefit conferred only on those who agree to play by China’s rules. And access to China’s leaders is so carefully meted out and stage-managed that it becomes an objective in itself. 

Leaders refuse to kowtow at their peril. 

Recall that former prime minister Stephen Harper was widely castigated for declining to attend the Beijing Olympics in 2008, which took place only months after ugly scenes of unrest and repression in Tibet.
For Canada, managing relations with an expansionist and impatient China will not be easy. 

French’s closing words seem particularly apt for us. 

He notes, reasonably enough, that China has much to contribute and deserves to be treated as an equal. 

That’s not a problem. 

It’s the next part of French’s formula that Ottawa so often either avoids or gets wrong. 

It is also important, he says, to approach China with “understated but resolute firmness.”
That’s another way of saying that, like China, we need to align our international strategy with a hard-nosed reading of national interest. 

Let’s hope Ottawa’s mandarins are paying attention.