Recently I participated in a BBC/Carnegie Endowment debate on the U.S. presidential campaign and policy toward China with the eminent and estimable former U.S. Ambassadors Chas W. Freeman, Jr. and J. Stapleton Roy, and Tsinghua University scholar Yan Xuetong. The full debate is available here.
The discussion was wide-ranging but what struck me most was an assertion by one of the panelists that the next U.S. president will have to deal with the fact that China has surpassed the United States as the number one power (based on the size of its economy). As a result, in his opinion, China will no longer feel the need to defer to the United States and the current arrangement of international institutions.
On the face of it, it is not an unreasonable assertion. After all, there has long been a view espoused in and outside Beijing that China has somehow suffered under the yoke of institutions that it did not help create. On closer examination, however, it’s not clear when China ever has deferred to the United States and the current global system. True, China has joined a number of multilateral institutions and treaties, but it did so not out of deference to the United States but because it believed it would benefit from participating. When China has determined that its interests are not served by following Washington’s lead—witness the two sides lagging, flagging, or non-existent cooperation on Libya, Iran, North Korea, climate change, cyber-security, etc.—it goes its own way.
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