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The danger is that at some point the United States and China will be drawn into the kind of arms race that characterized the Cold War and which produced such a climate of fear. There is no doubt that the United States feels rather more comfortable on the terrain of hard power than China, first because its military superiority is overwhelming and secondly because the language of hard power is deeply inscribed on the American psyche — partly as a result of the Cold War and partly as a consequence of the violent ma
These four issues — the United States ’ attitude towards globalization; the shift in the balance of power in East Asia; China ’s emergence as an alternative model to the US; and the issue of military power — do not lie at some distant point in the future but are already begi
Potentially overshadowing all these issues in the longer run is the growing threat of climate change and the need for the world to take drastic action to reduce carbon emissions. Under the Bush administration the United States adopted a unilateralist position on this question, refusing to be party to the Kyoto Protocol or accept the near-universal body of scientific opinion. As a developing country, China was not required to sign the Kyoto agreement, but now that it is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases its exclusion is unsupport able from a planetary point of view. [1206] Any new climate treaty will be meaningless unless it includes the United States, China and India. But any agreement — involving inevitable conflict between the interests of the developed countries on the one hand and the developed on the other, with China the key protagonist for the former and the United States for the latter — will be very difficult. [1207]
If relations between the US and China should seriously deteriorate, any attempt that might be entertained to exclude China from the present international economic system would simply not be an option. China has become so deeply integrated into global production systems that it would be well-nigh impossible to reverse that process. Chinese manufacturing has become a fundamental element in a complex global division of labour operated by the major Western and Japanese multinationals, which presently account for a majority of Chinese exports. The fact that the value added in China (30 per cent or less) is only a small proportion of the total value added because of the extremely low cost of Chinese labour means that any attempt to impose sanctions on Chinese exports, for example, would inflict far greater economic harm on the many other countries involved in the production process, especially those in East Asia, than on China itself. [1208] Powerful evidence of China ’s integration has been furnished by the global recession: from the outset its involvement was regarded as fundamental to any solution and its continuing rapid growth has been seen as vital in limiting the severity of the recession. One might add that the US ’s options are also limited in East Asia. If it decided to start pressurizing its East Asian allies — such as the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia — to move away from China, it is not at all clear that it would meet with a positive response; indeed, it is conceivable that such a move might even be counter-productive because, in the event of being forced to choose, these countries might opt for China as the rising power in the region. Finally, if the United States chooses to become more confrontational with China and engages it in an arms race, this could well harm the US ’s global standing rather more than China ’s, which is what happened in the case of the invasion of Iraq; and China, for its part, might simply refuse to be drawn into such a military contest. [1209] The problem for the United States, meanwhile, is that China ’s relative economic power, on which all else depends, continues to grow in comparison with that of the US.
[1199] Lampton, ‘ China ’s Rise in Asia Need Not Be at America ’s Expense’, p. 318; Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2004), Chapters 1, 2; Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600-1898 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
[1200] For example, Ferguson, Colossus, Chapter 8.
[1201] Howard W. French, ‘Is the US Plunging into “Historical Error”?’, International Herald Tribune, 1 June 2006; Lampton, ‘What Growing Chinese Power Means for America ’, pp. 2-12.
[1202] ‘Chinese Fund Takes $5bn Morgan Stanley Stake’, Financial Times, 19 December 2007. As of mid December 2007, the Chinese enjoyed stakes of 20 %, 9.9 %, 10 %, 2.6 % and 6.6 % in Standard Bank, Morgan Stanley, Blackstone, Barclays and Bear Stearns respectively; ‘Morgan Stanley Taps China for $5bn’, Financial Times, 19 December 2007. This, of course, was before the credit crunch.
[1203] This has already happened in a limited way with China demonstrating its ability to destroy a satellite and then the US doing likewise; ‘Chinese Missile Test Against Satellite Was No Surprise to US’, International Herald Tribune, 24 April 2007; ‘US Missile Hits Defunct Satellite’, Financial Times, 21 February 2008.
[1204] Martin Wolf, ‘Why America and China Ca
[1205] Shell, Shell Global Scenarios to 2025, p. 93.
[1206] ‘Reaching for a Renaissance: A Special Report on China and Its Region’, The Economist, 31 March 2007, p. 13.
[1207] Elizabeth C. Economy, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), Chapter 8; ‘China Wants Others to Bear Climate Curbs’, International Herald Tribune, 7 February 2007; ‘Politics Shift as the Planet Heats Up’, International Herald Tribune, 7–8 April 2007.
[1208] Lampton, ‘What Growing Chinese Power Means for America ’, p. 10; Lampton, ‘ China ’s Rise in Asia Need Not Be at America ’s Expense’, p. 321; Kynge, China Shakes the World, pp. 160-61.
[1209] Levine, ‘Sino-American Relations’, p. 110.