The era of US-China “great-power competition” began at the end of the Barack Obama administration and gained intensity throughout the Donald Trump administration. It now has become common to hear Cold War analogies to understand the nature of US-China relations. But such comparisons are misplaced. At the same time, the US and China remain deeply interconnected and are competing within a single international system. Any effort to revive a “containment strategy” holds little purchase anywhere in the world. Although the risk of conflict remains deadly serious, the military domain is not likely to be where competition will be adjudicated. Instead, the crux of competition will be over which governance, social, and economic system will prove capable of outperforming the other.
Both countries are striving through words and deeds to burnish an image of themselves as the power best poised to lead in the 21st century. At the same time, US-China competition is occurring against a backdrop of rising global challenges, including climate change, pandemics, mass migration, food and energy insecurity, and widening social inequality. These challenges will shape the contours of US-China competition. They may also present opportunities for Washington and/or Beijing to flex global leadership muscle by demonstrating capacity to deliver solutions.
Ultimately, neither side will be capable of imposing its will over the other at acceptable cost or risk. Instead, each side will seek to outpace and outperform the other as part of a long-term geopolitical contest for recognition as the world’s leading power. Prestige will derive from performance.
Understanding the Current Moment: Intensifying Geopolitical Competition
The US-China relationship during the latter years of the Obama administration was characterized by steadily rising strategic competition. This competition was concentrated in — but not isolated to — the Asia-Pacific. Tensions around regional flashpoints such as the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and Taiwan all rose during this period. There also was growing friction in the cyber domain, mutual wariness of each other’s space ambitions, and mutual concerns about each side’s efforts to harness new and emerging technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons systems, life sciences and quantum computing) for strategic advantage. Then US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter captured the cumulative intensification of these trends with his introduction of the term “great power competition” to describe relations between the world’s two most capable powers.1
This intensification of competition was obscured somewhat during that period by at least three factors. First, there was a dense architecture of diplomatic interaction that pushed both countries into direct dialogue with each other on a near daily basis. This density of interaction dampened pressure for escalation of tensions, since there frequently was an opportunity to raise concerns and clarify intentions without having to resort to military signaling or public condemnation to register objections.
Second, both sides pursued efforts to bound competition in areas that were largely zero-sum in nature. There were, for example, efforts to establish rules of behavior for air and maritime encounters between both countries’ military platforms in international waters and airspace. There also were deliberate efforts to deal directly with differences on cyber issues, and to address concerns through diplomatic channels over cross-Strait and other sensitive matters.
Third, both sides sought to co-ordinate efforts to address common global challenges. For example, in the wake of the 2008-09 global financial crisis, US and Chinese economic officials synchronized policy actions to restore global growth. US and Chinese scientists and health workers stood together on the front lines of the fight against Ebola. And in the run-up to the Paris climate summit, US and Chinese leaders and climate negotiators jointly pushed other countries to embrace a global accord.
As a consequence, the US-China relationship of early 2017 was broadly perceived to be tense, but not teetering on the brink of runaway competition. Five years later, the picture has changed markedly. Talk of a “new Cold War” has now become cliché. The competitive space of the relationship has become nearly all-encompassing, covering diplomacy, development, technology, values, and military domains. In many of these areas, the competition increasingly has come to be viewed as zero-sum, with China’s gains being interpreted as America’s losses, and vice versa.
With uneven consistency, the Trump administration pursued an ideological approach toward China. The Trump team sought to generate opposition to any developments that would make the world more receptive to China’s governance system or its major initiatives, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and Huawei’s attempts to corner the market on 5G build-out.
China’s actions and rhetoric during this period generated a tailwind for the Trump administration’s efforts to constrain China. From its suppression of dissent to its crackdown in Hong Kong, its repression in Xinjiang, its threats against South China Sea claimants, its drawing of blood at the Sino-Indian border, its hostage diplomacy with Canada, its removal of term limits for China’s top leader, its roiling of relations with Australia, its tightening squeeze on Taiwan, and its adoption of a sharp nationalist edge in its diplomatic conduct around the world, China’s actions alerted the world to the need to protect against negative externalities from its rise.
The Biden administration inherited these trend-lines. They accepted that China’s overall pattern of conduct would not offer many near-term opportunities to moderate tension in the overall relationship. Chinese leaders’ triumphal rhetoric about the “rise of the east and decline of the west” and President Xi Jinping’s assertion that “time and momentum are on China’s side” during the early months of the Biden administration effectively foreclosed opportunities for a moderation in tensions.2 At the same time, the Biden team also understood that embarking on a strategy of unvarnished ideological confrontation would carry two risks.
First, it would alienate allies and partners, whose buy-in for greater co-ordination in dealing with challenges posed by China they deemed vital to the effectiveness of their strategy. Washington views such co-ordination as a competitive advantage, since Beijing lacks meaningful international partners. Most American allies and partners in Europe and Asia have their own specific concerns about China’s conduct that overlap with US concerns on a case-by-case basis, but none presently appear open to entering an anti-China bloc to contain China or constrain its rise.
Second, the Biden team recognized that an overly ideological framing would inhibit prospects for US-China co-ordination on shared global challenges, such as climate change, global economic recovery and pandemic disease control. It also would limit co-ordination on security challenges, such as halting Iran’s nuclear program and limiting North Korea’s nuclear expansion.
Seeing little room for moving toward a more constructive US-China relationship but not wanting to do lasting damage, the Biden team used their first months to prioritize efforts to address America’s domestic crises and to restore a favorable balance of power in East Asia. Throughout its first year, the Biden administration sought, albeit unevenly, to maintain connectivity with China’s leadership, viewing such efforts as necessary to control the temperature in the relationship and avoid unwanted escalation.
The Nature of US-China Geopolitical Competition
The US and China are both central powers within a single global system — and they compete for leadership in virtually every domain within that system. Both sides recognize the dense connectivity that binds them together within the existing system (e.g., supply chains, financial flows, knowledge production, scientific exchanges, ecological interdependence, etc.). Even as each side seeks to limit vulnerabilities from dependence on the other, neither side views it as plausible to disentangle entirely from the other at tolerable cost or risk.
In addition, neither side views it as possible to overcome challenges from the other through the use of force. While the risk of conflict remains real, particularly over Taiwan contingencies, it is not the plan for either country to employ force against the other to achieve its national ambitions. Any conflict between the US and China would mark the first war in human history between two nuclear-armed countries with high-end cyber and space capabilities as well as globe-spanning long-range strike capacity. There is little reason for confidence that either country would be able to control escalation or keep a conflict localized. Any such conflict likely would bring about immense devastation for both countries and for the global economy but would not likely deliver a clean winner and loser. Given America’s and China’s national identities as singular powers, it is unlikely that either would accept receiving a bloody nose and then retreat behind their national borders to nurse their wounds.
Unlike during the Cold War, there will not be neatly demarcated international blocs led by the US and China. As Singaporean scholar Bilahari Kausikan has observed, “Few countries are likely to consider it wise — or even feasible — to neatly and permanently align all their interests across all domains with one or the other. The result will be greater fluidity and complexity in international relationships. On certain issues, some countries will tilt one way. On other issues, they will lean the other way.”3
At the same time, both the US and China are deepening their respective diplomatic, economic, development, and public health engagements on every continent. Both countries now are the two major actors in virtually every corner of the world. Neither are prepared to cede any region to the other. Nor are they prepared to risk conflict by pursuing a closed sphere of influence anywhere that excludes the other.
Given these circumstances — the US and China residing within a single system, both deeply interconnected, neither capable of imposing its will on the other through threat or use of military force, and neither capable of mobilizing a bloc to counter the other — both sides will be pushed to find opportunities to gain relative advantage over the other in long-term competition. This is where the bulk of both countries’ efforts are likely to be focused for the coming decades.
Beijing would like to seed a narrative that China enjoys momentum and will continue to rise. It wants to be perceived as being guided by scientific judgments about how best to control Covid-19 and combat climate change. China’s leaders also want their country to be seen as the principal engine for global economic growth and the most important source of investment and know-how for tackling the world’s infrastructure bottleneck. They would like to benefit by contrast with the US through their involvement in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and their desire to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade accord, while the US pursues self-imposed isolation from regional economic integration trends.
For its part, the US sees its relative advantages as residing in its resilience at home, its innovative capability, its global network of allies and partners and its ability to rally efforts to address global challenges. The Biden team’s early focus has been on controlling the spread of Covid-19 at home, serving as the “arsenal of Covid-19 vaccines” for the world,4 striving to demonstrate that its democratic institutions remain capable of solving national challenges, pooling capabilities with allies to accelerate technological breakthroughs and bolstering the US and allied military presence in Asia as a bulwark against perceptions of China expanding its power at America’s expense.
Ultimately, the crux of US-China geopolitical competition is over which country’s social, political and economic system will demonstrate capacity to outperform the other. Both Washington and Beijing believe their governance system holds inherent advantages over the other in the 21st century. Both recognize that prestige in the international system will be derivative of performance. Both want to demonstrate their superiority.
Peering into Future US-China Geopolitical Competition
Predictions of long-term structural enmity or conflict between the US and China all struggle with a shortcoming. They all extrapolate from the present to predict the future without accounting for the past. The modern history of US-China relations is one of zigs and zags, from the estrangement during the early Cold War years to the cautious opening in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. From the early optimism of “Reform and Opening” to the deep disappointment caused by the Tiananmen massacre. And most recently, from the trend of deepening social and economic ties to talk of “decoupling” and a “new Cold War.”
Historical amnesia is required to believe the future of US-China geopolitical competition will travel a straight downward line from the present. Some may counter that Xi Jinping renders comparisons to the past moot since he is a singular leader with aggressively illiberal ambitions and control of the levers of power as far out as the eye can see. This is certainly a possibility. It is impossible to prove or disprove. Time (and actuarial tables) will tell.
Over time, each country’s trajectory will be defined foremost by how well they address their own vulnerabilities, nurture their strengths, and demonstrate through tangible actions their capacity to lead on the world stage. The more that leaders in both capitals focus on this task, and the less they fixate on competition with the other, the greater the space there will be for the two countries to find a new equilibrium for managing the relationship. Elements of such an equilibrium may come to include an ability to deal forthrightly with differences; effectively manage zero-sum areas of contestation; separate out issues that are positive or negative sum from those that are zero-sum; and act on those issues that are positive or negative sum in ways that accrue benefits to both sides.
Leaders in Washington and Beijing may get nudged by circumstances in this direction. For much of the rest of the world, the current moment is more an era of mounting global challenges than one of great power competition. As the effects of climate change, pandemics and widening social inequality become more acutely felt, other world leaders and opinion-shapers may become more forceful in urging Washington and Beijing to look beyond each other to contribute their unmatched capabilities to addressing the world’s challenges. Even as leaders in both countries will be focused foremost on domestic imperatives, they also likely will be attentive to opportunities to bask in the glow of global leadership.
This growing demand for global public goods may create opportunities for the country that meets the geopolitical moment. In other words, the path to global leadership may not run through any attempt to “win” the US-China great power competition, whatever that entails. It may be the result of which power proves most capable of delivering solutions to challenges at home and abroad.
1 Ashton Carter, Testimony to Senate Armed Services Committee, March 17, 2016, www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Carter_03-17-16.pd
2 Kinling Lo and Kristin Huang, “Xi Jinping says ‘time and momentum on China’s side’ as he sets out Communist Party vision,” South China Morning Post, Jan. 12, 2021,
www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3117314/xi-jinping-says-time-and-momentum-chinas-side-he-sets-ou
3 Bilahari Kausikan, “In U.S.-China Standoff, Is America a Reliable Ally?” Foreign Policy, Oct. 18, 2021, foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/18/us-china-asia-pacific-geopolitics-alliances
4 “Fact Sheet: President Biden Announces Major Milestone in Administration’s Global Vaccination Efforts: More than 100 Million U.S. Covid-19 Doses Donated and Shipped Abroad,” Fact sheet, The White House, Aug. 3, 2021,www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/08/03/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-major-milestone-in-administrations-global-vaccination-efforts-more-than-100-million-u-s-covid-19-vaccine-doses-donated-and-shipped-abroad/