REVIEW: ‘Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China’ by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley
When it comes to the China problem, most Americans have seen the challenge as containing a steadily rising China as the United States declines in relative power. In their new book Danger Zone, Michael Beckley and Hal Brands argue that this framing is off. “China will be a declining power much sooner than most people think,” they write. And that means problems.
His book challenges an important part of the conventional wisdom, that rising powers like China are more likely to fight established powers like the United States when they are on the rise, but tend to back off when they are past their peak. Brands and Beckley show that this is not necessarily the case. Realizing that time is no longer on their side, some countries are making ever bigger bets to try to avoid stagnation. Germany before World War I and Japan before Pearl Harbor are just the two most dramatic examples they list.
China’s rise has been remarkable since the death of Mao Zedong, but Beckley and Brands point out that many advantages China enjoyed in this period have eroded. The United States and its allies embraced China and hoped to reform it through trade for decades; today, China’s aggressive behavior is alarming its neighbors and causing the strategic encirclement that Beijing has long feared. Mao’s successors, especially Deng Xiaoping, promoted economic reforms and ruled through inter-party consensus, but Xi Jinping’s one-man rule threatens to return China to the days of Mao’s erratic and often catastrophic leadership, and the brutal power struggles when the strong man dies.
What Beijing Marxists can appreciate most clearly is the change in material factors. China’s huge demographic dividend has already expired: in the early 2000s, there were 10 workers for every retiree, but by 2050 there will be only 2. “To prevent the elderly from dying on the streets,” China will have to devote 30 percent of its GDP to care for the elderly, as much as it spends today on its entire government. China also squandered its once abundant natural resources: it has about as much water per person as Saudi Arabia, became a net food importer in 2008, and was the world’s largest agricultural importer in 2011. Taken together, these trends “imply that China will be economically sluggish, internationally hated, and politically unstable by the 2030s.”
Without an insight into the high-level conversations inside the Zhongnanhai, it can be difficult to know what China’s top leadership is really thinking, but there are some signs that they realize that all is not well. China’s military has grown significantly, but the budget for “internal security” is higher. The authors note that “careful analysts of Chinese politics detect a subtle anxiety in government reports and statements.” Other signs, such as Xi’s guidance to ensure that “no one can beat or choke us to death,” are less subtle.
This means we have entered the “danger zone,” a period where China can take risks to lock in gains before its power declines. An attack on Taiwan is the most familiar scenario, and in many ways the most worrisome, but Brands and Beckley describe other possibilities.
To prevail on China without a catastrophic war, the authors draw lessons from America’s latest experience in the danger zone. During Harry Truman’s presidency, the Soviet Union had some major military advantages and Western Europe was about to fall into Moscow’s orbit. Truman and his staff ruthlessly prioritized, made major changes in American foreign policy, and took calculated risks to consolidate America’s strategic position and set the stage for victory in the Cold War. Beckley and Brands offer a range of policies, from increasing the defense budget to removing China and its fellow autocracies from the global Internet.
We know how the first Cold War ended, and that analogy may be comforting to Americans, but the confrontation with China will be more serious than many imagine. Brands and Beckley warn that even a successful “danger zone strategy” will “fundamentally alter the structure of world politics, and not entirely for the better.” The world is getting harder and harder and we need to act accordingly.
Danger zone: the next conflict with China
by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley
