The Weird Threat Inflation of 'Peak China' Warnings

What if the original assessment of Chinese ambitions is mistaken and their government isn’t trying to do what the hawks insist that they are?

Most hawkish warnings about China emphasize both Beijing’s ambitions and its growing power, but some analysts have come up with a different interpretation and concluded that China is on the verge of decline and that this is what will cause the Chinese government to behave more aggressively in the near future. The two key assumptions behind this argument are that China has vast ambitions and that their leadership will therefore take huge gambles to achieve their goals before their window of opportunity runs out. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley’s new book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, lays out the argument for this view (an excerpt can be read here), and they presented an earlier version of their argument over a year ago. Others have made similar claims that time isn’t on China’s side and that the Chinese government knows this and will therefore act more rashly as a result. As Andrew Erickson and Gabriel Collins put it, this means that there is “a decade of danger from a system that increasingly realizes it only has a short time to fulfill some of its most critical, long-held goals.”

As exercises in threat inflation go, these arguments are unusual, because they take for granted that Chinese power will wane over the longer term but exaggerate the danger in the near term even more to compensate. Unlike many hawkish warnings about foreign threats, these have a definite expiration date, and if they are wrong we will know it in just a few years.

The reviews of Brands and Beckley’s argument have been mixed. Denny Roy identified a major problem with it earlier this year:

The closing window argument is only persuasive if we postulate that the Xi regime concludes it could win a war of expansion today but could not win the same war 10 years from now. The argument doesn’t work if the Chinese think they would lose the war today but would lose even worse in a decade. 

I would add that if the Chinese government genuinely feared that it was facing decline it would likely be more interested in trying to consolidate its position and husband its resources instead of taking the risk of hastening that decline by gambling on major military adventures. Chinese governments have not embarked on wars of expansion for a long time, and the current government has not fought any kind of war in more than forty years, so it would be strange for them to strike out with desperate attacks in the next decade. That is no guarantee that this can’t happen, but it seems awfully unlikely.

In his review of the book, Andrew Latham found that the authors relied too much on the most convenient interpretations of the historical cases that they used to bolster their argument:

In this case, the authors appear to have fallen prey to the latter type of logical fallacy, very selectively drawing on one theory out of many that purport to explain the outbreak of war in 1914 and 1941 in order to make an argument about the dangers associated with China’s coming decline. Having for many years taught a college course on the politics of the world wars, I can point to any number of theoretical explanations for the causes of those wars that have little or nothing to do with German or Japanese fears of relative decline. 

That the authors treat the most convenient accounts of these wars as simply the way things happened, and then conclude that we are now entering a similar period of heightened risk, may be suggestive but it is far from dispositive. 

For that matter, the Chinese government can see the results of these earlier wars, and it knows how things worked out for Wilhelmine Germany and Imperial Japan. While hawks in every country are inclined to ignore cautionary tales and assume that things will be different for their wars, the examples of what happened to these earlier rising powers would likely give Chinese leaders pause before attempting anything so perilous as launching expansionist wars. They can also see from the contemporary example of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that armed aggression against relatively weaker neighbors has substantial costs and doesn’t yield any of the benefits that its advocates promise. If the Chinese government is concerned that its economic performance is weakening, initiating a costly war that would seriously damage its economy hardly seems like an appealing solution. It is also worth considering that Germany’s Weltpolitik and Japanese empire-building in the 20th century occurred in the context of the competition of great power colonial empires that no longer exist. Brands and Beckley are misreading the causes of those wars, and they are failing to account for how different conditions are today.

China hawks routinely overstate the Chinese government’s ambitions, and then they work backwards from the ambitions they ascribe to Beijing to justify their warnings. Sometimes that comes in the form of claiming that they must be seeking parity with the U.S. in the number of nuclear weapons they have when there is no evidence that this is so, or imagining that they must have plans for an extensive network of overseas bases because that is what a government with globe-dominating ambitions has to do. The absence of any new bases or even plans for bases does not stop the speculation. When the Chinese government doesn’t do what it is “supposed” to do, this doesn’t seem to dent the hawks’ certainty that their ambitions are boundless.

Instead of assessing what the Chinese government is most likely to do, hawks race far ahead of what the evidence supports and draw up worst-case scenarios. Brands and Beckley are doing the same thing. They take for granted that Chinese ambitions are extraordinarily large, so they assume that a declining China must be on course to lash out to realize at least some of those ambitions. How large are these ambitions in their view? This is how they put it in their book:

Chinese grand strategy thus encompasses far more than the narrowly conceived defense of the country and its ruling regime. Those goals are tightly linked to the pursuit of an epochal change in the regional and global rules of the road—the sort that occurs when one hegemon falls and another arises. “Empires have no interest in operating within an international system,” writes former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in his book Diplomacy, “they aspire to be the international system.” That’s the ultimate ambition of Chinese statecraft today.

That sounds ominous, but it also sounds wrong. The Chinese government will bend and break the “rules of the road” like any other great power does, but there is still not much reason to believe that they seek to overturn the entire system or establish themselves as its arbiter. Besides, if the Chinese government truly aspires to “be the international system” it is unlikely to achieve that goal by trying to conquer its neighbors.

What if the original assessment of Chinese ambitions is mistaken and their government isn’t trying to do what the hawks insist that they are? If Chinese ambitions are not as expansive as hawks assume, they will have little “need” to lash out to achieve them. The hawkish warning about “peak China” overstates both Chinese goals and their leaders’ desperation, and U.S. policymakers should not let themselves be frightened into taking more aggressive measures to “counter” something that may not even be happening.