Rush Doshi argues that since the end of the Cold War, the People's
Republic of China (PRC) has seen itself in a struggle to displace the
United States from its perch atop first the regional and now also the
global order. To these ends, Beijing has followed
a three-stage strategy discernible in its party documents, patterns of
international institutional participation, economic statecraft and
military investments. The first stage was ‘blunting’, which sought to
reduce US leverage over the PRC. When the 2008 financial
crisis narrowed the perceived power gap, Doshi argues, Beijing then
shifted to the second stage, a ‘building’ strategy aimed at creating its
own regional order. Now, he claims, Beijing has entered into an
‘expansionist’ stage, seeking to promote its own alternative
to the US-led order on a global scale. Doshi's book is rich with
detail, and the author repeatedly emphasizes that he is drawing on
official policy documents and writings from PRC sources. There is little
doubt this will be a well-read and well-debated contribution,
especially given the author's current position as director for China on
the US National Security Council.
Doshi offers a sophisticated and at the same time simple
story—sophisticated in its sources, but simple in its portrayal of
Beijing as single-mindedly focused on displacing the United States.
Doshi deserves high praise for engaging with PRC policy documents
in the original, but there seems to be little consideration of their
political context: of the possibility the actors he is citing may be
staking positions in internal debates and struggles, seeking to assert
authority or undermine rivals, wanting to justify
or defend desired policies, positing external enemies for internal ends
or articulating aspirations as opposed to facts.
Take, for instance, the evidence Doshi offers for the claim that
‘foreign policy is directed centrally, formulated at the highest levels,
coordinated across state and social sectors, and often long term’ (p.
39). He points to various PRC leaders proclaiming
that the party should play the leading role in foreign policy
formulation, citing Jiang Zemin's statement that ‘all the departments
must resolutely carry out the central government's diplomatic guideline …
they cannot go their separate ways’, and Xi Jinping's
announcement that ‘we must strengthen the Party's central and unified
leadership’ over foreign affairs (p. 38). But if everything is truly so
centralized, why is it that PRC leaders at the highest levels have
consistently been at pains to drive home this message
so explicitly? Why, even now, do we see Xi frequently reiterating how
things ‘must’ be done and pointing out the need to ‘strengthen’ the
central leadership? One could also read these statements as
admonishments, as signs that all is not so harmonious behind
the party curtain. In fact, this latter interpretation would better
align with the predominant view of the PRC as exhibiting ‘fragmented
authoritarianism’. There is a glaring lack of attention to domestic and
distributional politics within the PRC, particularly
as pertains to topics such as accession to the World Trade Organization
and military reform. But that would suggest a messy political reality
that contravenes the singularity of purpose Doshi is trying to convey.
And indeed, Doshi's own apparent singularity of purpose repeatedly
surfaces in how he spins the material he examines. His interpretations
and speculations persistently play to a story of ever-increasing PRC
power and legitimacy at the expense of US influence
and values. He suggests, for example, that the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank could increase the PRC's coercive tools and ‘chip away
at the legitimacy of the liberal values that undergird much of the
West's power and influence’ (p. 225), while offering
no concrete evidence that this has yet happened. And he presents PRC
investments in projects under the rubric of the Belt and Road
Initiative, such as the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, as evidence of the
PRC ‘embarking on building the military forms of control
need[ed] to sustain regional order’ (p. 207); this narrative runs
against much of the existing scholarship on Hambantota, not to mention
the fact that the PRC proceeded with the Hambantota deal despite facing
prohibitions on military-related activities.
Potentially most problematic are Doshi's equation of international
order with the maintenance of US ‘forms of control … coercion, consent,
legitimacy’ and his assertion that ‘competition over order revolves
around efforts to strengthen or weaken these
forms of control’ (p. 20). This is a very thin and wholly US-centric
view of order. By definition, it renders any state that seeks to fortify
itself against US interference or intervention—which Doshi so
convincingly demonstrates has been a key PRC fear—or
to build institutions without US participation as a challenger to the
international order more broadly. It replicates the very ‘zero-sum’ (p.
300) view he attributes to Beijing. Accordingly, his policy
recommendations primarily focus on maximizing US ‘forms
of control’ while diminishing those of Beijing in a global superpower
version of ‘king of the hill’. If—despite an opening disclaimer—this
does reflect the views of a key figure shaping current US policy towards
the PRC, we will indeed be in for a long, ugly
game.