{"id":5992,"date":"2022-07-08T00:42:08","date_gmt":"2022-07-08T04:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chinacenter.net\/?p=5992"},"modified":"2023-04-07T09:11:37","modified_gmt":"2023-04-07T13:11:37","slug":"china-ostrichism-why-didnt-the-world-prepare-for-chinas-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinacenter.net\/2022\/china-currents\/21-2\/china-ostrichism-why-didnt-the-world-prepare-for-chinas-rise\/","title":{"rendered":"China Ostrichism: Why Didn\u2019t the World Prepare for China\u2019s Rise?"},"content":{"rendered":"
The rise of China has been one of the clearest, most predicted, and most predictable realities in a century of international politics. Rather than the result of a sudden shift like the decline of Britain after World War I or the rise of the Soviet Union after World War II, it has been gradual, widely foreseen, and was not the result of a conflict that transformed the world. In 1985, Carter\u2019s former Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote in the Los Angeles Times<\/i>, \u201cChina is about to become a superpower.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article will ask: If China\u2019s rise was foreseeable, why was so little done to prepare for it? In answering this question, I will stay neutral on the extent to which China\u2019s rise was a threat or an opportunity, whether preparing for it meant readying the U.S. and allied militaries to fight the People\u2019s Republic tooth and nail, more complex but peaceful options of containment, or highly profitable and amiable engagement. I will argue that the rich world failed to prepare for a rising China for two primary reasons. First, it was distracted, certainly by their own domestic issues, but also by troubles arising in other parts of the world, especially the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Russia\u2019s adventurism. Second, as the cost of engaging, containing, and\/or combating a rising China became more apparent, so did motivated reasoning that downplayed China\u2019s rise and justified taking little action.<\/p>\n
Even if potentially profitable, preparing for the Chinese Century called for huge outlays of resources well in advance of any potential challenge or opportunity that China would offer. While the nature of the threat or opportunity was highly unclear, many investments, such as in Chinese language and country expertise, would have value no matter what shape China\u2019s rise took. In a sense, it was the high probability of China\u2019s rise that has made the rich world\u2019s responses so lackluster. Rather than face that reality and allocate the massive resources necessary to prepare for the rise of China, the West in general and the U.S. in particular preferred China ostrichism: burying its head in the sand, criticizing China, complaining about it not playing fairly economically, inventing reasons it could not compete, and falling back on motivated reasoning to argue that it needed to do little to prepare itself.<\/p>\n
Was China\u2019s Rise Foreseeable?<\/strong><\/p>\n China\u2019s rise has been widely predicted as quick list of the titles of books on the subject makes clear: William Overholt\u2019s The Rise of China: How Economic Reform is Creating a New Superpower <\/i>(1993); Francis Lee\u2019s China Superpower: Requites for High Growth<\/i> (1996); Geoffrey Murray’s\u00a0China: The Next Superpower<\/i>\u00a0(1998); Ted Fushman\u2019s China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World <\/i>(2006); <\/i>Bergsten et al.<\/i>\u2019s China: The Balance Sheet: What the World Needs to Know Now About the Emerging Superpower<\/i> (2007); Susan Shirk\u2019s China: Fragile Superpower<\/i> (2009). In addition to these books, articles with similar titles appeared in publications as diverse as Public Relations Quarterly<\/i> in 1998, Problems of Post-Communism<\/i> in 1996, and the Thunderbird International Business Review<\/i> in 2000, to name a few. Nor was this merely a view held among academics and pundits. A 2011 review of a London kebab shop included the off-topic fear that “China loses patience with the fat and pointless West and just slaughters us all in our beds one bright cold day in April.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> By 2011, Pew found that \u201cin 15 of 22 nations, the balance of opinion is that China either will replace or already has replaced the United States as the world\u2019s leading superpower.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> There were, of course, skeptics of China\u2019s rise. Many of the titles listed above pointed out the ways in which China might not continue to rise. But, by 2012 and the debatably failed pivot to Asia, it was clear that China\u2019s rise to superpower status was a highly probable outcome.<\/p>\n The Motivated Reasoning of China Ostrichism<\/strong><\/p>\n As the scale of China\u2019s growth and influence became clear, it was increasingly evident that it would be expensive to deal with China, whether that meant increasing engagement and both competing and cooperating economically with China or employing more confrontational approaches that might include armed conflict. From the over 5,000 sailors that could be lost on a single aircraft carrier in the Taiwan strait, to the $250 billion price tag of the China competitiveness bill, to the 2,200 hours it takes to become proficient in Chinese, governments and individuals were reluctant to make the investment necessary to prepare for China\u2019s rise. Instead, the rich world preferred to make the increasingly unlikely bet that they would never really need to deal with an authoritarian Chinese superpower. This meant indulging in China ostrichism, of which I identify three types. First, China would democratize and therefore no longer prove a challenge to the rich democratic world. Second, China would stagnate. Third, China would collapse. In the subsequent paragraphs I will consider each flavor of China ostrichism in turn.<\/p>\n The most Pollyannaish school of China ostrichism predicted that China would soon democratize, and this author should admit his own weakness for this line of thinking. In 1998, Chinese dissident\u00a0Juntao Wang argued in the Journal of Democracy<\/i> that \u201cmost Western observers believe that China will democratize, although they do not expect this to happen anytime soon.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup> In 2011, a Tsinghua University Professor published an article with a colleague from Macau entitled \u201cWhy China Will Democratize.\u201d There were good reasons to believe this might be true. Most countries democratize as they grown rich. China\u2019s neighbor South Korea democratized at a per capita income of around $5,000 (in current U.S. dollars) and Taiwan at a bit more than twice that level. A decade ago, when China was just approaching Korea\u2019s level of development and a new generation of leadership was taking over it seemed reasonable to think that medium term democratization was likely. Just a few years later, however, it became evident that Xi was consolidating power and democracy was not the direction that China was headed.<\/p>\n China will stagnate might appear the most reasonable camp of China ostrichism. \u201cIf the development model doesn\u2019t change, China will stagnate,\u201d wrote Derek Scissors in 2015 while discussing China\u2019s very real environmental problems.4<\/a><\/sup> Yet, this school also seemed prone to be victim of motivated reasoning and debatably even a type of Orientalism that views China as static, undeveloped, and unchanging. Following the financial crash of 2008, pundits and businesspeople increasingly sought to explain why China\u2019s economic model would not allow it to overtake rich democracies. Many settled on the idea that China could not innovate. In 2014, the Harvard Business Review<\/i> published an article entitled: \u201cWhy China Can\u2019t Innovate\u201d and Kerry Brown of King\u2019s College London argued that \u201cThe Chinese government under Xi can pour all the money they want into vast research and development parks, churning out any number of world-class engineers and computer programmers. Even with all of this effort, however, China is likely to produce few world-class innovative companies.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup> The logical conclusion of this was supposed to be that China would not be able to compete with developed democracies and that its economy would stall at a middle-income level. Yet, in some ways this thinking seems even more wishful than the argument that China will democratize, because the reality was that China had been innovating economically in meaningful ways for two decades. By the time this argument was being made, fairly similar East Asian economies, thousands of small manufacturers, Tencent, Didi, and Alibaba had already proved it incorrect.<\/p>\n The \u201cChina will collapse\u201d school of China ostrichism is probably the most perennially popular. Since the economic slowdown, runaway inflation, and massive protests of the 1989-90 era until this year, China\u2019s growth has never dipped below a robust six percent and it has never appeared to be particularly close to collapse. Yet, this has not stopped an endless parade of predictions of China\u2019s eminent demise. The problems these predictions cite generally include some combination of: succession problems, corruption, lack of rule of law, lack of democracy, land expropriations, slowing economic growth, economic overheating, real estate bubbles, environmental degradation, lack of innovation, income inequality, export dependence, a bottomless appetite for natural resources, large numbers of executions, organ harvesting, sex-selective abortions, ghost cities, unemployment, lack of intellectual property protections, the arrest of foreign executives, inflation, and unrest among or the mistreatment of: workers, criminal suspects, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, activists, lawyers, and\/or journalists.<\/p>\n