China’s rise may not be antithetical to U.S. interests, scholar says

The U.S. should rethink Chinese perceptions of geopolitical conflict because China brings a fundamentally different perspective to politics than the West, Xinru Ma, a research scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s (FSI) Asia-Pacific Center, said Tuesday.

Ma’s lecture to Stanford affiliates and students at FSI came amid rising U.S.-China tensions, as Chinese economic and military power has been growing. Both countries increasingly clash in security and trade and hold opposing perspectives on resolutions to hot-button issues such as the Taiwan conflict. Ma said that understanding these clashing perspectives is necessary to preventing conflict between the U.S. and China.

The talk was based on the premise of the Thucydides Trap, also known as the Power Transition Theory, which argues that conflict is inevitable when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power. The idea originates from the Peloponnesian War more than 2,400 years ago, when Sparta concluded that war with Athens was inevitable because of the growth of Athenian power. Ma recently explored the idea in a book she co-authored with David Kang, titled “Beyond Power Transitions: The Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of U.S.-China Relations.”

The Power Transition Theory, which has been a guiding theory in the West, should not dictate American policy toward China, Ma said. She selected 53 prominent research articles on the Power Transition Theory and found that only three were not based on European examples, with none looking at examples in East Asian history prior to 1820. 

“The Power Transition Theory can neither explain the war nor the periods of peace in East Asia. This is due to its selection bias in choice of empirical cases — European cases — as evidence,” she said. “We find a very different pattern in East Asia for the causes of war.”

Instead of understanding U.S.-China relations through Thucydides’ lens, Ma argued that looking at East Asia’s history and relationship with internal and external challenges is more productive. 

Examining dynastic changes in East Asia, or periods of time with the largest political shifts, such as the rise and fall of the Song Dynasty, Ma found that only three of 20 dynastic changes between 500 and 1900 resulted from external challenges, and most were instead driven by internal challenges. 

Speaking to The Daily after the event, Ma said the internal coherence of China has always been a central focus for Chinese rulers and that the Song Dynasty itself illustrates “a key pattern where internal threats in China matter more than external threats.”

“If two states share a common conjecture of their goals, then their relations can be stable regardless of the distribution of material capabilities,” Ma said. 

Turning to geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China, Ma argued that today, as was the case for the Song Dynasty, China is focusing on internal issues, not external challenges, and the U.S. should not necessarily view China’s rise as oppositional to U.S. interests.

Ma cited a 2022 speech by People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping, in which he said, “We must take… political security as our fundamental task” and that China views its regional or global influence as dependent on its domestic issues rather than external relations. 

“It is not clear if the U.S. understands the common conjectures in East Asia and is willing to craft one that it can be a part of,” Ma said. 

The talk was followed by an extensive discussion portion during which the audience critiqued Ma’s arguments.

“I don’t think how the Song Dynasty responded to conflict tells us anything specific about how China would respond to conflict today,” Oriana Mastro, Center Fellow at FSI and moderator of the discussion, told The Daily after the event. “But those types of analyses often highlight factors that have not been considered before.” 

“Why something happens may be just as important as being able to predict if something will happen,” she said. “How China’s view of its internal stability impacts its aggressiveness abroad is something important we can gather from these cases.” 

Speaking to The Daily, Kang, Ma’s co-author, said, “The larger scholarly point of our research is to say that if we started in East Asia, we would never have come up with the same theories that we have today.” 

He added: “We want to help people think, ‘Wow, different regions of the world might operate differently.’ Let’s take that seriously instead of only applying European history to our policies.”

Kang said that Xi Jinping’s worldview is as influenced by Chinese history as it is by “what happened between two Greek villages thousands of years ago” and that understanding China’s origins is integral to developing American policy toward China.

The talk came a day after the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who promised during his campaign that he would take an aggressive stance toward China. Trump’s beliefs and those of other American policymakers and researchers regarding the return of great power competition and the possible inevitability of conflict with China stemmed from a Western perspective, according to Kang.

“We’re in danger of making a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “It is not necessarily clear that the U.S. and China are on a collision course.”

The post China’s rise may not be antithetical to U.S. interests, scholar says appeared first on The Stanford Daily.