Book Review - The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power
The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power
Written by: Hugh White,
Black Inc, 2012,
ISBN: 9780199684717, 208 pp
Reviewed by: Andrew O’Neil, Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University and Director of the Griffith Asia Institute
After a period in which numerous observers claimed that relations between states were becoming a secondary consideration with the rise of globalisa- tion and its symptoms such as jihadist terrorism, geopolitics has returned to international relations with a vengeance. Predictions that states would be rendered marginal actors in a system dominated by supranational forces have (once again) proven premature. In terms of the forces shaping the key dynamics of international relations, the biggest game in town (once again) is relations between great powers, and there is nothing bigger in the current context than the relationship between the US and China.
Hugh White is Australia’s leading strategic thinker and subscribes to a defensive realist perspective of international relations. Defensive realists believe that states jockey to maximise their power in an anarchic international system, but they claim that states only seek as much power as they need to defend their sovereignty and national interests. This is in contrast to offensive realists of the John Mearsheimer variety, who maintain that structural anarchy impels states to accumulate power for offensive purposes, in order to dominate others. For Hugh White and other defensive realists such as Charles Glaser, great power rivals are capable of managing the security dilemma without spiralling into conflict, whereas offensive realists believe that conflict between rival great powers is inevitable.
The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power represents an important contribution to the literature on US-China relations. Anyone remotely familiar with Hugh White’s writing will appreciate the book’s strengths: crisp prose, plain, jargon-free, language, and incisive analysis that draws on deep experience in govern- ment where a premium is placed on writing that ‘cuts through’— the book’s very subtitle captures White’s thesis. Those who have read White’s 2010 Monthly Essay will recognise the book’s central argument: the US is losing ground to China and Washington must cut a power-sharing deal with Beijing to avoid conflict, which will be the likely consequence if the US attempts to preserve its post-1945 strategic dominance in Asia. White’s preferred modality for achieving this power-sharing arrangement is an Asian concert of powers based on great powers agreeing that they will ‘not try to dominate one another’ (p. 136).
White has clearly sought to address the criticisms of his 2010 essay with a more nuanced description of the dynamics of Sino-American relations and a fuller intel- lectual engagement with the concert of powers idea. The final substantive chapter also addresses some of the major counter-arguments against his proposal, including the one that got the most popular airplay in 2010 — that his argument is tantamount to appeasement. He does this largely successfully, albeit too briefly for this reviewer who would have preferred to see a more detailed outline of the counter-arguments, especially the tricky challenge of bridging the democratic-authoritarian governance divide between the US and China to avoid mutual misperceptions.
The China Challenge is a stimulating read. However, it does contain flaws. White (like many others) equates China’s economic power with crude GDP growth and identifies this as the clinching evidence that China will surpass the US in the next decade or so. Yet, there are many other qualitative indicators of economic strength that are not addressed, including the capacity for world class innovation in key economic sectors, something the Chinese are still getting their heads around. Many Chinese themselves readily concede in private conversations that they still lag behind Japan in terms of the quality of the outputs they produce. Another shortcoming of the book is its tendency to dismiss arguments against the concert of powers proposal. One of Australia’s other leading strategists, Hedley Bull, wrote about the danger of great power concerts for middle and small powers in the early 1970s—that they faced being marginalised and dominated by stronger states. There is no compelling reason to think that an Asian concert of powers would be any less stifling for Australia than it was for secondary states in 19th century Europe. Finally, on the subject of middle powers, it is curious that The China Challenge essentially overlooks the pivotal role of Indonesia (which rates a single mention, on p. 61), the country that Beijing prefers to deal with in relation to all ASEAN-related issues regarding the South China Sea dispute.
All of these shortcomings are real, but at the end of the day do not detract from White’s ability to craft a strong narrative, backed up by intellectual rigour and analytical precision. Indeed White’s arguments provide hope that there is still the potential to have a sensible conversation about how America’s changing role in Asia in the 21st century can be managed in the context of its relative decline.
