spoiler
I recently participated in a daylong conference focused on the question “If China succeeds, what are the implications for our security, prosperity, and freedom?” My colleagues attempted to devise win-win scenarios in which China’s rise could be consistent with the continued flourishing of the United States and its allies.
I took a more direct approach. I started instead by asking how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself defines success. Contrary to my colleagues’ rosier assessments, that exercise reveals that the CCP’s success would likely result in a more dangerous, impoverished, and tyrannical world for everyone else.
Let’s begin by examining U.S. success over the past 80 years. After World War II, the United States and its allies constructed a so-called liberal international order. The system was based on strong U.S/ military alliances in Europe and Asia, the expansion of free market economic systems at home and abroad, and the (sometimes inconsistent) promotion of democracy and human rights. The system was imperfect to be sure, but it still resulted in one of the most remarkable transformations of the human condition in world history. Since 1945, there have been 80 years of great-power peace, standards of living globally have increased fivefold, and the number of democratic countries has multiplied by nearly eight times. That is quite a record.
But a successful CCP would structure the world differently. Chinese President Xi Jinping has railed against U.S. alliances in Asia as relics of the Cold War that should be replaced by an “Asia for Asians” approach to regional security. China’s success in that regard, therefore, would mean breaking U.S. alliances in Asia, removing the U.S. military presence in the region, and leaving regional states, such as Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, vulnerable to Chinese military coercion.
Taiwan would be most exposed. The CCP has insisted that Taiwan’s unification with China is “inevitable.” China’s success, therefore, would mean that, like Hong Kong before it, Taiwan would fall under Beijing’s control. A once vibrant free market democracy would become indistinguishable from the rest of Communist China. Beijing would prefer to win without fighting, but it has also said it will use force if necessary. It is hard to imagine Taipei voluntarily conceding to this future, so unification could likely only be achieved through military conquest. China’s success, therefore, likely means a major war in Asia.
It would also mean that the United States failed in its decade-long effort to prevent a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Either the U.S. president decided not to intervene militarily or—even worse—Washington did intervene and lost to Beijing. China’s success, therefore, would mean a major blow to U.S. military power and credibility.
Former U.S. allies would feel vulnerable and need to seek new means of security. This would be most pronounced in the Indo-Pacific, but America’s NATO allies might also look for a plan B. Some could seek their own independent nuclear arsenals. China’s success, therefore, might mean widespread nuclear proliferation and the weakening of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Xi has said China will have a “world-class military” by 2049. Today, the United States is the only power with a military that can credibly fight in all regions of the globe, including in the backyards of other great powers. To join these ranks would mean that the People’s Liberation Army has also become a global military power with the ability to fight major wars in every region, including the Western Hemisphere.
How would the CCP use this newfound military power? We don’t need to stretch our imaginations. Just look at how it treats countries within its military sphere of influence today, engaging in almost daily military coercion against Taiwan and the Philippines. As China’s military sphere of influence expands, so too would the number of countries exposed to such treatment.
Turning to economics, a successful China would employ its economic weight to pursue a closed economic trading system that locks in preferential terms of trade for itself at the expense of others. The United States is the odd superpower that, after World War II, used its power to create a free and open international economic system. Most great powers throughout history—even the British Empire in the late 19th century—preferred closed imperial blocs.
Indeed, Beijing says it is pursuing a “dual circulation” strategy that seeks to ensure that other countries are economically dependent on China while China secures economic independence for itself. Again, we don’t need to stretch our imaginations too far to envision what this world might look like. China already uses its economic leverage to arbitrarily coerce vulnerable trading partners, such as when it cut off Chinese tourism to South Korea in 2017. China’s success, therefore, would mean the end of an open global trading system and a fragmentation of the global economy into those within Beijing’s economic bloc and those outside it.
In the technological domain, the United States has been the world’s innovation leader since the late 1800s. This has provided it with enormous military, economic, and soft-power advantages. Through its program, formerly known as Made in China 2025, the CCP says it will claim those advantages for itself in new technologies from artificial intelligence to green energy and quantum computing. China’s technological edge would reinforce its military and economic advantages. It would also be a major boon for Chinese intelligence as the world’s data flows over Chinese networks straight to Beijing’s spy ministries, raising privacy concerns for everyone else.
The United States has naturally embedded its values in technology, including a preference for openness and transparency, such as in developing the protocols for the World Wide Web. The CCP’s autocratic values are similarly reflected in its technological priorities. It uses AI for facial recognition software that it uses to spy on its own citizens and that it exports to dictators around the world. It tightly policies the internet to control the information its public can access online. China’s success, therefore, would mean that the rest of the world could only access advanced technology through—and crafted and controlled by—an Orwellian dictatorship.
While much of the free world has blocked the deployment of Chinese 5G technology, Chinese companies such as Huawei are making inroads in the global south, including Brazil. These countries have wanted to avoid choosing between Washington and Beijing, but dependent on China for 21st-century technologies, they will have a hard time maintaining autonomy and face pressure to align with Beijing.
Some say that the U.S.-China rivalry is not about ideology, but they should have asked Xi. He frequently speaks about the decline of Western democracy and the superiority of China’s governance model. China uses its power to curtail freedoms in other countries, including in the United States. It has set up police stations to spy on Chinese citizens and employs economic threats to pressure corporate America and Hollywood to self-censor speech offensive to Beijing.
Western conditionality on trade and aid has nudged countries toward democratic reforms over the years. Developing countries have also sought to emulate the United States’ successful democratic model. China’s rise is already reshaping these patterns. Developing countries prefer aid from Beijing over lectures from Washington and Brussels. And would-be dictators are aping China’s state-led capitalist model.
This is a problem.
China’s rise has contributed to the decline in global democracy over the past 20 years. China’s continued success, therefore, would mean a more autocratic world with fewer freedoms in the United States and Western democracies.
Ultimately, however, the stakes are no less than the leadership of the global system. Xi has argued that by 2049, China will be a leading global power in the center of the international system. Like other global powers before it, Beijing will likely want to reshape this order to be more consistent with its interests and values. That would be understandable—but also calamitous.
Some may object that Washington itself is doing more than any other country to destroy the old international order. They have a point, but two wrongs don’t make a right. China’s success is still problematic for the rest of us.
Fictional alternative histories, such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, have imagined what the world might have looked like if the Axis powers had won World War II. Creative authors should get to work on imagining and warning the public of the dangers that await if the CCP wins the new cold war. Envisioning this frightening future may be what it takes to motivate Western policymakers to adopt the strategies and policies necessary to ensure that the CCP fails—and the rest of us succeed.
humanoid they could find to deliver this fuckin Hitlerian stinker
