In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China.
This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said.
The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past few decades, including a demographic dividend and benign security environment, are becoming headwinds, as its population starts to shrink and the US and its allies step up their containment.
However, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has yet to achieve his ambitious goals of placing China at the heart of a new international order and bringing Taiwan under Chinese sovereignty, they said.
Indeed, foremost on Brands’ and Beckley’s minds was Taiwan. Not only is Taiwanese public opinion trending in the opposite direction for Xi — with those identifying as Chinese at historic lows — but also Taiwan’s long-delayed defense reforms are soon to come online. In addition, allied cooperation to defend the nation is only deepening.
They called this the “danger zone” — a period of near-term maximum danger where Beijing, losing confidence that time is on its side, might strike before the US and its allies have fully prepared to meet the China challenge.
However, these views of China in decline are “both ill-advised and premature,” Georgetown University Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues senior fellow Evan Medeiros wrote in Foreign Affairs this month in “The Delusion of Peak China.”
“Xi still believes China is rising,” Medeiros said, adding that “many Chinese elites, including Xi, believe it is the US that is in terminal decline. For them, even if China is slowing down, the power gap between the countries is still narrowing in China’s favor.”
“Xi remains committed to the idea that China still enjoys what he calls a ‘period of strategic opportunity,’” Medeiros said. “The CCP’s official history of the last 100 years, released in 2021, stated that China is ‘closer to the center of the world stage than it has ever been,’ and that it ‘has never been closer to its own rebirth.’”
For Taiwan, it is good if China believes that time is on its side, as this should forestall Xi from acting rashly. As the recent visit of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) politicians to China showed, Beijing still thinks it can further its “peaceful unification” goals short of war. However, this should not lull the nation into a false sense of security.
Brands and Beckley said the China challenge would be short, sharp and intense, while Medeiros said the China challenge would be a complex competition over the long term.
For Taiwanese, it would be prudent to view the China challenge as an intense, multifaceted, urgent and immediate threat, to spur the much-needed defense reforms, national awareness and diplomatic support for the nation.
Medeiros might be right that Xi feels like time is on his side, but this could change at any moment. With Beijing’s slowing economy, and if the US’ technology controls and allied containment of China have a stifling effect, a sense of malaise and urgency could soon set in.
History is littered with examples — Japan in 1941, Germany in 1914 and Russia in 2022 — of great powers betting the house on an invasion, because they think the alternative is gradual decline. Yes, the China challenge will be long and enduring, but for Taiwan it is also immediate and urgent.
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