Self-Betrayal: How the West Failed to Respond to China’s Rise

ABSTRACT

From the 1980s, it was clear that a rising China would challenge the interests and core values of the United States and the European Union. Cables and intelligence reports that were recently disclosed reveal numerous warnings about a future Chinese authoritarian pushback. The Western political leadership, however, brushed them aside. While paying lip service to constructive engagement, it was business first. The downside of that policy became clear too. But it took several years for the Western political leadership to recognise it and shift to balancing. Early balancing efforts, though, again seem inconsistent.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• United States
• Europe
• balancing
• constructive engagement

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Sven Biscop and Øystein Tunsjø for commenting on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ The estimations by Angus Maddison, for instance, show that China represented about 36 per cent of Asia’s wealth around 1700, 44 per cent in 1600 and 38 per cent in 1500.

² Data from UNCTAD STATS Database, Trade in services, Licenses for the use of outcomes of research and development.

³ Data from Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and Eurostat for 1995-2019. No consistent aggregated EU data are available.

⁴ The share of the Republic of Korea (ROK) exports in EU Asian imports remained flat at around 4.9 per cent after 2015.

⁵ The share of ROK in US Asian imports remained flat at around 7.5 per cent.

⁶ Consistent data do not exist for EU foreign direct investment (FDI) in ASEAN as a whole. ASEAN’s share in US FDI in Asia decreased from 9 per cent in 2009 to 7 per cent in 2019 (source: BEA and Eurostat).

⁷ Conversation with senior South-Korean official, Brussels, 2 June 2015.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Holslag

Jonathan Holslag teaches International Politics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium.