The United States, China and the Dispersal of Power

Abstract

Globalisation and related mutual dependencies have challenged the historical and strategic assumptions of both the United States and China, and reshaped traditional paradigms in international relations. Furthermore, in an increasingly multipolar world, hegemony is not a guaranteed outcome. Neither the US nor China has prepared itself for the limitations imposed by the changing structure of global networks, under which the ability of any single actor to influence linkages within the system has been greatly reduced and peripheral players are beginning to enjoy greater freedom of action.

Key words:

• China
• Chinese Communist Part (CCP)
• dual circulations
• economic reform
• globalisation
• great-power conflict
• hegemony
• Jiang Zemin
• self-strengthening
• United States
• World Trade Organization (WTO)

Notes

1 See, for example, John King Fairbank, The United States and China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); and Jonathan D. Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China 1620–1960 (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1969).

2 See Junyu Shao, Chinese Learning for Fundamental Structure, Western Learning for Practical Use? The Development of Late Nineteenth Century Chinese Steam Navy Revisited, PhD dissertation, King’s College London, August 2015, https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/46323975/2015_Shao_Junyu_11380711_ethesis.pdf.

3 See Sheng Zhang, ‘Protection of Foreign Investment in China: The Foreign Investment Law and the Changing Landscape’, European Business Organisation Law Review, vol. 23, no. 4, April 2022, pp. 1,049–76.

4 See Shin Oya, ‘What China’s “Dual Circulation” Strategy Means for the World’, Japan Times, 3 November 2020, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/11/03/commentary/world-commentary/china-dual-circulation-strategy/.

5 The reconciliation of socialist planning with market economics was elucidated as early as 1957, by Chinese economic planner Chen Yun by way of the concept of ‘cage economics’: the bird of the market is free to fly, but only within the cage of planning. See David M. Bachman, Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 152.

6 See David H. Autor, David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson, ‘The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade’, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 21906, January 2016, https://www.nber.org/papers/w21906.

7 Quoted in Joseph Fewsmith, ‘China and the WTO: The Politics Behind the Agreement’, NBR Analysis, vol. 10, no. 5, 1 December 1999, https://www.nbr.org/publication/china-and-the-wto-the-politics-behind-the-agreement/.

8 See Thomas G. Moore, ‘China and Globalization’, Asian Perspective, vol. 23, no. 4, 1999, pp. 65–95.

9 Paul J. Heytens, ‘9 State Enterprise Reforms’, in Wanda Tseng and Markus Rodlauer (eds), China: Competing in the Global Economy (Washington DC: International Monetary Fund, 2003), pp. 124–48.

10 See Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN, ‘Statement by H.E. Jiang Zemin, President of the People’s Republic of China, at the Millenium Summit of the United Nations’, 6 September 2000, http://un.china-mission.gov.cn/eng/zt/qiannianfenghui/200009/t20000906_8414140.htm.

11 The product-life-cycle theory developed by Raymond Vernon suggests that early in a product’s life cycle all the parts and labour associated with that product come from the area where it was invented. After the product becomes adopted in world markets, production gradually moves away from the point of origin. In some situations, the product is imported by its original country of invention. See Charles W.L. Hill, International Business: Competing in the Global Marketplace (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011).

12 See, for example, N.S. Lyons, ‘The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning’, Palladium, 11 October 2021, https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/; and ‘Wang Huning’s Career Reveals Much About Political Change in China’, The Economist, 12 February 2022, https://www.economist.com/china/2022/02/12/wang-hunings-career-reveals-much-about-political-change-in-china.

13 See Xi Jinping, ‘Speech: Work Together to Build a Community of Shared Future for Mankind’, Xinhua.net, 18 January 2017, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-01/19/c_135994707.htm.

14 John King Fairbank, ‘Reflections on “The China Problem”’, Diplomat Magazine, vol. 17, 1966, pp. 37–9.

15 On the network properties of power in international networks, see Hilton L. Root, Network Origins of the Global Economy: East vs. West in a Complex Systems Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 227–52. In computing closeness (how tightly connected a node is to the network) and betweenness (the degree to which a node is a boundary-spanner) over time, both the US and China show signs of diminishing centrality, affording peripheral players more freedom.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Baocheng Liu

Baocheng Liu is founder and director of the Center for International Business Ethics, as well as the Center for Green Entrepreneurship.

Hilton L. Root

Hilton L. Root is a professor of public policy at Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and a visiting adjunct professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.