Abstract
There is no such thing as ‘Asia’. The term refers to an arbitrarily drawn space on a map. Asia does not exist as a coherent cultural and historical area in the way that Europe or even Latin America exists.
This is one reason why China views its position and strategies in Asia only in a global context. That global context is conditioned, first and foremost, by the United States of America: China’s largest partner and competitor in just about every dimension. These partners differ, of course, in one crucial respect. The US is currently the dominant world power, presiding over a global architecture that encompasses all aspects of world affairs – political, economic, military and even cultural. The United States led the design and building of this global architecture after the Second World War and the Cold War, and the Asia-Pacific is a part of that architecture. China, by contrast, is a rapidly rising power, but it only became the powerhouse that it is today in the past generation.
China does not view the United States as an enemy, and the widespread notion that it does is one of the greatest of contemporary misperceptions. Nor, in my view, does the United States view China as an enemy. These two countries are enormously intertwined, though their relations do have obvious elements of tension. Such tensions are arguably inevitable at a time when the post-Cold War architecture appears to be breaking down. It is breaking down for two reasons. Firstly, the United States is in trouble. It is suffering from internal contradictions and the grave consequences of external overreach. The internal difficulties are perhaps the most serious America has faced in 100 years, and they are structural. The American political system has found itself captured by special interests; ideological partisanship has polarised the two-party governance structure; economic and social ills, such as the declining middle class, are not being addressed; much-needed reforms are stalled. And external overreach has led to failures and exhaustion.
The second source of breakdown is the so-called ‘rise of the rest’, of which China is the most prominent example. America’s share of the world’s GDP has significantly declined, and this trend will continue. When you are the dominant shareholder in a company – I’m a venture capitalist, so I use those terms – a shareholder who owns, let us say, 80% of its shares, you are likely to act in the best interests of the company. But when you own 30%, you are more likely to act in your own best interests. The United States, by this logic, will be a decreasingly reliable custodian of global order. At the same time, of course, the ‘rest’ are making claims that are often in conflict with the way that the global architecture was set up.
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