The problem is not a power transition
The problem is not a power transition
WRITTEN BY MICHAEL J. MAZARR
31 October 2022
Two important recent events have once again raised the issue of China’s trajectory and its significance for world politics. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 20th Party Congress reaffirmed a bold plan for economic and military development and global influence. Lurking behind the mixture of happy talk, bluster, and specific policies is the shadow of a more forceful conviction that China — in its quest for “national rejuvenation” — is racing to the position of the world’s leading power. US sanctions on China’s high-end semiconductor industry announced at the same time seem to confirm this trend: The United States sees an urgent need to slow the progress of a great power outpacing it in key technologies.
One of the most widely accepted assumptions in contemporary international affairs is that the world is witnessing a power transition in which a rising China is overtaking the stagnant United States. The idea of a power transition can be thought of in simple terms — two lines crossing on a graph. It has a more elaborate conceptualisation in international relations theory, depicting world politics as a hierarchy with a single dominant power and others seeking to surpass it. Once challenger states reach a level close to the dominant state’s power, they will be tempted to launch a transformative war to gain control of the international system.
The belief that just such a transition is underway, with China inexorably surpassing the United States, has become its own reality, with profound implications for influence and reputation. However, by almost any meaningful index of national power, China is not overtaking the United States and those countries supportive of key global norms — and never will. Today, the real dangers do not arise from the overtaking itself, but from the level of dissatisfaction of the rising power — the degree to which it perceives a degrading gap between its rightful place in world politics and its actual status. An American strategy to deal with that kind of rival would be very different from a strategy to deal with a power transition.
China will not overtake the United States
A review of many measures of national power makes it abundantly clear that China is not on a path to attain global leadership in comprehensive national power. Instead, what we are witnessing is a convergence — China emerging to a level of comprehensive power that approaches but does not surpass or even match the US level. More importantly, China’s power will never come close to that of the broader set of countries that support the norms of the current international order.
The US-China relationship is not accurately captured as a power transition, but it is a clash of an often self-righteous leading power and a dissatisfied challenger. That recipe is one of the most combustible in world politics.
China has certainly risen to the top of global rankings in several areas: GDP measured by purchasing power parity, R&D expenditures, total exports, leadership in selected high-technology areas, and others. Yet in terms of comprehensive national power, it has little chance of becoming the predominant global power. This is true for two primary reasons: First, China faces a raft of economic and other challenges that are likely to hamper its growth. Second and more fundamentally, the power transition theory’s binary comparison of an established hegemon versus a rising challenger does not accurately capture the shape of world politics today.
Over the last year, the scope of the challenges Beijing faces in sustaining its global rise has become strikingly evident. A leading example is the development of real GDP. As China’s growth has slowed, the best estimates are now that in real (as opposed to purchasing power parity) GDP, China will not surpass the United States until the mid-2030s or even later, and perhaps never. China’s productivity gains, so essential for its growth, have been ebbing. It faces a series of mutually-exacerbating economic challenges — immense levels of debt, finance shortfalls at the local level, a housing bubble, a decreasing ability to use brute-force investment to pump-prime desired levels of growth, the requirement for liberalising reforms in key sectors (especially finance), and the more comprehensive demand for a complex and costly shift from investment to consumer spending as the primary engine of growth.
A second challenge is demographics. Because of low fertility rates, China’s population is now projected to decline from roughly 1.4 billion to between 500 and 800 million by 2100. A declining population has many second-order effects, from a worsening dependency ratio to weakening growth. One commentator concluded that “a shrinking China can’t overtake America”. Some observers have also stressed the immense gap between the United States and China in accumulated wealth and per capita income. US per capita GDP now stands at USD 69,000 compared to China’s at USD 12,000; in no previous case of power transition has the rising power lagged so far behind the leading power in per capita wealth. Others highlight the anchor of internal security requirements: China spends an immense and growing amount on internal security — by some estimates as much as it devotes to its military.
These and many other issue-specific handicaps — the competitive disadvantages of autocratic rule and ideological orthodoxy, the growing reliance on state-led growth, and the staggering price tag of necessary environmental clean-up — will interact to leave the juggernaut of Chinese material power well short of the United States. The shortfall in Chinese power becomes even more evident if we take a broader view of national influence: China’s soft power is a fraction of America’s, and Beijing seems uninterested in leading in diplomatic terms on global issues in the way the United States routinely does.
The second barrier to power transition is even more significant. China is rising into an international system powerfully aligned with the United States and the goals and norms it favours. For China to acquire geopolitical supremacy, it will have to overtake both the United States and its key allies.
This is not remotely possible. According to the World Bank, China’s real GDP in 2021 reached USD 17.73 trillion; US GDP stood at USD 23 trillion. If we think in terms of a Taiwan scenario and add Japan, Australia, and Taiwan to the ledger, the United States and its allies total some USD 30.7 trillion in national economic clout. The European Union would add over USD 17 trillion to the balance. In military spending, a potential US-Japan-Australia-Taiwan coalition amounts to USD 868 billion in 2021-2022 against China’s official budget of USD 229 billion, with the EU waiting in the wings with USD 378 billion in 2020 spending (now climbing after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). In other words, the United States and its allies spend roughly five times as much as China on military power.
Apart from industrial democracies largely aligned on key norms, China also confronts neighbouring countries which increasingly view it as a major threat. While nations like India, Vietnam, and Indonesia are unlikely to ally formally with the United States, they have no desire to allow China hegemonic regional authority. They also add to the counterbalancing side of the power ledger. The countries more sympathetic to China tend to be smaller, less strategically significant, and aligned with Beijing almost entirely on transactional grounds. Their support will be strictly limited: They may decline to condemn China’s human rights at the UN, but will not actively align with a China engaging in military aggression — or even tolerate Chinese meddling in their societies.
Classic power transition theory assumes that the rising power seeks fundamental changes to the existing world order and measures its burgeoning potential against the dominant hegemon. In the present case, though, should China wish to overthrow those rules and norms, locally or globally — promoting Orwellian autocratic systems, militarily coercing its neighbours, stealing technology, and launching aggressive wars — it will run up against the combined power of dozens of countries, not only the United States. The post-war international order generates a context for power measurement starkly different from the one assumed by power transition theory.
China’s recent behaviour has exacerbated these structural disadvantages. Stacie Goddard argues that rising powers need a legitimation narrative — a story that justifies their claim to authority and influence. China has tried to cobble together such a story out of bland phrases like a “community of common destiny for mankind”, but its belligerence is undermining its case. Confidence in China as a global actor has tanked. Other major actors in the region are boosting defence spending: Japan alone is considering doubling its defence budget. European states have gotten tougher, on trade and military issues alike, and the United States is rushing to invest in key technology fields to retain its advantage.
The problem of the dissatisfied power
China’s emerging place in world politics therefore does not meet the portrait of a power transition as traditionally understood. Yet one aspect of power transition theory does remain relevant to China’s future: The problem of the dissatisfied rising power, which plays a critical role — if not always precisely specified — in generating the risk of war in that concept. The theory suggests that only dissatisfied emerging powers seek to overturn the existing order.
A nation’s degree of frustration and grievance, which spurs an angry search for dignity and a grinding sense of status inconsistency, turns up again and again in the national mindset of emerging powers which initiate wars. Power transition theory was thus onto something, but the emphasis was in the wrong place. It is the intensity of dissatisfaction, and not the overtaking itself, that sparks conflict. This was the recipe for disaster, for example, with inter-war Japan, which was repeatedly excluded from what it saw as its rightful role in world politics and ended up as a grievance-fuelled aggressor.
The institutionalist theory of John Ikenberry once mapped a route out of this dilemma for China. If Beijing could be persuaded to pursue its interests within the existing order, from which it benefited tremendously, it could rise as a satisfied nation. Yet, China’s sense of exceptionalism and belief in its rightful place as a regional leader — combined with US reluctance to grant what Beijing sees as legitimate accommodations (and others often see as rapacious demands) — are spoiling that possibility. China is now, in the words of one scholar, “a strongly dissatisfied power” which sees many aspects of the current order as biased against it.
One great risk of such a moment is that the previous overly optimistic assumption, that China could be satisfied with a subsidiary role in a US-led order, will be replaced by a categorically pessimistic one — namely, that it is now impossible for China to be satisfied short of war because its ambitions are so inconsistent with prevailing norms that the gap could never be meaningfully closed. To the extent that the conviction prevails, the United States will have no incentive to concern itself with China’s grievances. Its only recourse will be to suppress China’s power at every opportunity — an approach that Beijing surely must notice, for example, in the recent US semiconductor ban.
Accepting that a classic power transition is not underway produces two imperatives for US policy. First, US officials (and analysts) should be much more direct about this emerging reality. As the Rhodium Group’s Daniel Rosen argues: “By not challenging the narrative of the inevitable rise of China and the inevitable decline of the United States, Americans are needlessly doing the CCP’s marketing work”. Puncturing the myth of power transition will affect perceptions in Asia and around the world. This will be challenging at the same time the United States is trying to educate the world about the threat China poses — and given its historic reluctance to admit, let alone broadcast, the weaknesses of its rivals. But taking a measured view of Chinese power is a strategically sensible approach in any case.
Second, the task for the US and its allies now is to figure out, against the odds, a strategy for allowing China to become at least a partially satisfied power within the constraints of the most important norms in world politics. As Jessica Chen Weiss has recently argued, this means working much harder to find areas of common cause and even identifying issues on which Chinese leadership is welcome. Amid a growing impulse to constrain China’s capabilities, this will not be easy, but it is essential. The US-China relationship is not accurately captured as a power transition, but it is a clash of an often self-righteous leading power and a dissatisfied challenger. That recipe is one of the most combustible in world politics.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Michael J. Mazarr is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Image credit: Flickr/The White House.