Author: Sourabh Gupta
Affiliation: The Institute for China-America Studies (ICAS)
Organization/Publisher: The Institute for China-America Studies (ICAS)
Date/Place: May 18, 2021/ USA
Type of Literature: Article
Word Count: 2216
Keywords: George Kennan, US-China Rivalry, the Sources of China’s Conduct, Chinese Different Challenge, and New Cold War
Brief:
Over the past few years, a lot of American writings have tried to revive George Kennan’s containment approach as the best strategy for the upcoming long-term rivalry with China, as it was the most successful long-term strategy in dismantling the Soviet Union and winning the Cold War struggle. The most prominent of such attempts was a 72-page document issued by the US State Department in November 2020 titled: “The Elements of the China Challenge” which included a key chapter entitled: “The Intellectual Sources of China’s Conduct,” in a clear imitation of Kennan’s 1947 article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”. In this article, Sourabh Gupta provides a critical reading of such writings, arguing that it is wrong to compare the Soviet Union in the Cold War era with rising China today. As China is not like the Soviet Union, the US cannot revert to Cold War thinking, and yesterday’s tools will not be useful in dealing with China, especially since the US is no longer on top now. After providing a brief explanation of the containment approach, the author clarifies the differences between the Soviet Union’s conduct and China’s. First, the post-reform Chinese Communist Party bears little resemblance to its Soviet predecessor. China does not aim to project its ideology, nor does it work to undermine the governments in its neighborhood, as the Soviets did. The Soviets believed in the impossibility of a lasting peaceful coexistence with the West who sieged them. They saw that getting out of this siege required working to destroy all forms of economic, political, and moral independence in the countries that were in their orbit, making them completely dependent on Moscow. The author disagrees with the West’s comparison of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative to such Soviet conduct. China is not aimed at creating strategic dependencies as much as it is directed at the initiative to recycle domestic surpluses in development projects around the world on mutually beneficial terms. Second, China, unlike the USSR, seeks to enable peaceful coexistence with Western capitalist societies such that its leader Xi Jinping has defined relations between China and the US as relations between “major power” rather than using the term “great power” relations as it was during the Cold War, with the aim of overcoming old rivalries and enabling peaceful coexistence. Third, China does not see a necessity to spite the current international order, especially since it is stable and open—factors that will facilitate its rapid growth during the next three decades. This is in contrast to what the Soviet Union saw as the necessity of destroying the liberal order and establishing a communist one in its place. Fourth, the Kremlin had previously learned to seek security in such patient and deadly struggle only through the complete destruction of competing power, not by making agreements or concessions, because of its fierce and hostile surroundings which made it a country feeling insecure. The Chinese, although also surrounded by ferocious peoples and a hostile environment for thousands of years, see no point of destroying rivals. On the contrary, the Chinese were using political and commercial tools to buy peaceful relations, such as the famous Chinese “tribute system” through which the Chinese granted rich silk, porcelain, and jewelry in exchange for establishing peaceful relations. Also, titles, subsidies, and border markets were granted according to the dictates of power politics in exchange for ensuring secure borders. China today deals with the same logic with the various branches of the West. Fifth, despite the constant skirmishes taking place on its vast land and sea borders, China has always been a restrained power and used force rarely and in limited circumstances. It is often motivated by domestic factors linked to the territory and sovereignty rather than an ideological doctrine or comprehensive strategy or subversive aims such as conquest or domination, unlike the Soviet Union. China is also well aware of the limits of its power, and distant military projects were not part of its playbook as it has not fought a single war for the past forty years. Sixth, during the Cold War, Kennan argued that the dangers of confronting the Soviets could be controlled. At that time, the United States’ share in the Soviet Union was remarkably small, it had no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose or citizens to protect there, as well as there were scant cultural connections between the two powers. However, there are great links between the US and China today, especially in the economic and trade sectors, as the author details by providing figures, which hinders any decisive effort of containing China. Finally, the author concludes by saying that there is a difference between “the yesterday and today’s two threats” in a way that will not enable Washington to engage in the containment strategy and its tools as it did in the past. China will become the largest economy in the world by 2030 that will give its government greater physical capabilities, and China will continue to thrive with or without the Communist Party, thus the US will face – unlike in the past – an unprecedented power that will greatly exceed its capacity. The US should soften its morally flawed criticism of China and its ruling party. Instead, it should believe more in the appeal of the universal values that it espouses so lustily. This would allow the two powers “to remold themselves and manage relations as the trustees of a peaceful, prosperous, and stable Asian order.”
By: Djallel Khechib, CIGA Senior Research Associate