Latest news with #ThucydidesTrap
New Indian Express
22-05-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Border talks with India and Bhutan advancing, says China's white paper on security
Some countries have grossly interfered in China's internal affairs, causing trouble in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and the East China Sea, and frequently causing trouble on issues related to Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, it said. Some external forces are deliberately playing the Taiwan card, and the Taiwan independence forces are stubbornly adhering to their separatist positions and taking risks and provocations. Overseas separatist forces such as Tibetan independence and East Turkestan in Xinjiang are frequently active, it said. While highlighting challenges China faces in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea and the East China Sea, besides Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong-related issues, the paper has stressed the importunate of building a strong military to face the traditional and new security challenges. On Taiwan, which China claims as part of its mainland, the paper said Beijing will never allow any person, any organisation, any political party, at any time, in any form, to separate any piece of Chinese territory from China. We will unswervingly promote the complete reunification of the country, it said. On the strategic front, the paper spoke of challenges posed by the US to contain China and the importance of close China-Russia relations. The Sino-Russia ties are based on non-alignment, non-confrontation and non-targeting third parties, and are not affected by any third party, nor are they interfered with or coerced by external factors, it said. On the China-US rivalry, it said being two major countries neither side can suppress the other from the so-called position of strength or deprive the other side of its legitimate right to development in order to maintain its leading position. The four red lines of the Taiwan issue, democracy and human rights, the road system and the right to development cannot be challenged, it said. The Thucydides Trap (meaning a new power rising to challenge the existing power) is not a historical destiny, it said, referring to the US concerns over China's rise to challenge its global dominance. The new Cold War cannot be fought and cannot be won, it said, adding that the containment of China is unwise, undesirable, and will not succeed. China is willing to work with the US to explore the correct way for the two major countries to get along on this planet, for the benefit of both countries and the world, it added. It also said non-traditional security challenges for China are increasing and listed extreme climate disasters besides terrorism, separatism, religious extremism, and major transnational epidemics as serious security threats. Security issues in space, deep sea, polar regions, and cyberspace were listed as major threats. The Asia-Pacific region has become the focus of great power competition. Some countries have strengthened military alliances in the Asia-Pacific region, wooed regional partners, built exclusive small groups, and insisted on advancing military deployments including the intermediate-range missile system, seriously exacerbating regional tensions, it added, without naming anyone.
Observer
11-05-2025
- Business
- Observer
Middle powers in the US-China trade war
As US tariffs begin to reshape global trade flows, many countries are worried that a tsunami of discounted Chinese goods, originally destined for America, will hit their shores. To keep them out, especially as recessionary pressures mount, some may be inclined to impose their own tariffs on Chinese imports. In that case, China would be cut off entirely from international trade, delivering an unexpected victory for US President Donald Trump, who would undoubtedly claim credit for this new Great Wall. To avert this scenario, China must pursue short-term policies that align with its long-term goal of building a global governance architecture for a multipolar world. China harbours no illusions that it will be the twenty-first century's hegemon. India will inevitably become a superpower by mid-century. Europe might join their ranks, too, as Trump's might-is-right worldview seems poised to accelerate and deepen European integration. The current Sino-American standoff seemingly reflects a shared understanding that avoiding the Thucydides Trap – when tensions between an incumbent hegemon and a rising power lead to conflict – will require an eventual agreement on respective spheres of influence. Both sides' defensive efforts to expand their global reach have devolved into a crude form of imperialism. But it remains to be seen how the trade war will factor into this contest. The tariffs that the US and China imposed against one another have effectively decoupled their trade. Will countries hit by his 'reciprocal' tariffs be cowed into joining the US sphere of influence as part of bilateral trade deals? The answer is no, so long as China respects its trade partners' right to befriend all superpowers. In such a scenario, the benefits of trading with China remain too large to forgo. But to take advantage of these benefits and maintain their autonomy, middle powers will need to pursue multilateral cooperation. As a first step, middle powers must convince China that it is in its long-term interest to stop the potential fire sale of goods intended for the US market, which means voluntary export restraints. But the Chinese government must also focus on boosting domestic consumption by lowering income and value-added taxes, expanding social-welfare programmes (especially for healthcare, childcare and pensions), and easing the hukou household registration system – which regulates access to social services – in major coastal cities. Moreover, China can generate higher demand for services by attracting more foreign tourists and students, and by incentivising Chinese tourists to travel domestically. To cushion the adjustment pains and lower the budget deficit in the medium term, China should double down on supply-side structural reforms and overhaul the financial sector, which would unleash new productive forces. For example, if market-driven medium-size private banks were permitted to emerge, they could nurture the employment-intensive small and medium-size enterprises that large state-owned banks have traditionally discriminated against. Loosening capital controls would also support the renminbi's internationalisation to the status of the dollar and Shanghai's emergence as a global financial centre on par with London and New York. The escalating US-China trade war, and the competing technological standards that stem from deeper geopolitical fragmentation, will cause substantial damage to middle powers. Being forced into a sphere of influence would erode these countries' sovereignty and limit their export markets. To avoid becoming pawns in a proxy war, middle powers should form a union of independent buffer states based on the same principles as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), together with Japan and South Korea, should propose an Atlantic-Pacific Sustainability Pact to the European Union and the United Kingdom. Practicing open regionalism, APSP would have three main tasks. The first would be to create a free-trade area that is open to all countries, with an eye to building the biggest possible integrated market. Asean members, Japan and South Korea could then merge the main Asia-Pacific trade agreements under the economic umbrella of APSP. The second task would be to institute a nonpartisan peace caucus in the UN and other global and regional forums to prevent tensions between the US and China (as well as Russia) from impeding international coordination on shared global problems such as climate change and pandemics. Lastly, APSP would do well to establish a development agency whereby richer members could provide technical and financial support to poorer members' efforts to achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions, protect their biodiversity and accelerate economic growth. This would offset the assistance that competing superpowers use to influence poor countries. As Asean economies catch up with those in the Global North, their combined GDP could equal that of the EU and the UK by 2045. In such a scenario, APSP's economic might would be so great that the US and China would have to join the trade partnership or else risk defeat from self-isolation. Cooperative multilateralism is middle powers' best hope for mitigating the fallout from the Sino-American cold war; and it might even eventually crowd out this conflict. At a minimum, cooperative multilateralism by middle powers would ensure peaceful global governance as the international order transitions from a unipolar world to a multipolar world. @Project Syndicate, 2025 Wing Thye Woo The writer is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of California, Davis, is University Chair Professor at the China Economic Research Institute at Liaoning University
South China Morning Post
08-05-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Why China has refused to back down in the face of Trump's tariffs
Trying to predict any country's international behaviour is fraught with challenges. That is even more the case when that country's political system is opaque, as is China's. We depend on clues, turns of phrases drawn from leaders' speeches, shards of evidence gleaned from people on the ground, and various theories (or biases in disguise). Advertisement We have spent much time analysing China's geostrategic ambitions. Much ink has been spilled on the Thucydides Trap , the notion of 'peak power' or the radical Project 2025 that says the China challenge 'is rooted in China's strategic culture and not just the Marxism-Leninism of the [Chinese Communist Party], meaning that internal culture and civil society will never deliver a more normative nation'. But we have spent more time on China's capabilities than sought out what China actually desires. China wants many things. Most are to some degree debatable, and reasonable people can disagree. But the one thing China has wanted for the better part of the past two centuries is quite simple – to stand up. That is, China desires to re-establish its seat at the table governing the world order, a desire that arose out of an era of colonialism that began China's slide into anarchy and autarky. The country eventually re-emerged from this, but for a long time, China's global re-emergence had an asterisk attached to it; it was conditional. To resist the Soviet threat, China had to establish rapprochement with the United States. To grow out of the planned economy, China desperately needed to draw on the managerial and financial expertise of the West and the East Asian 'tiger' economies Advertisement Even the oft-used prefix, zhongguo tese de ('with Chinese characteristics'), was premised on improving upon something invented elsewhere. This was in line with Deng Xiaoping's caution, tao guang yang hui : keep a low profile and bide one's time.
Asia Times
17-04-2025
- Business
- Asia Times
Chinese dragon elegantly twirled around American eagle's neck
There is an image that likely increasingly haunts the minds of US strategists: a Chinese dragon, no longer just coiled in defense but elegantly entwined around the neck of the American bald eagle. Not to suffocate but rather to regulate the bird's breath. The symbolism is not hyperbole. It captures a world where China, long caricatured as the imitator, has now morphed into a systemic rival, outrunning and outgunning the United States in critical business and security sectors. From technology to trade, currency to cyber power, the Chinese state has mastered the long game. As Graham Allison warned in 'Destined for War', the Thucydides Trap is not only about the inevitability of conflict between rising and ruling powers. It's also about the erosion of assumptions that the West has long taken for granted—namely, that liberal democracies will always innovate faster and govern better. That assumption is collapsing under China's weight. Let us now turn to the strategic sectors where China has not just caught up, but, in many instances, sprinted ahead. 1. Semiconductors: from dependency to near parity Semiconductors, once China's key vulnerability, are now the arena of its most dramatic gains. Despite Washington's embargoes on Huawei and export bans on advanced lithography equipment, Beijing has poured over 1.5 trillion yuan into its domestic chip ecosystem. China's 14nm chips are now being produced domestically at scale, and according to Dr Dan Wang of Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic consultancy, 'China is only a node or two behind global leaders, and catching up fast.' This acceleration is powered by 'dual circulation'—a policy that embeds state subsidies across the entire supply chain, from rare earth mining to chip design. In contrast, the US remains fragmented. The CHIPS and Science Act is slow-moving and could be scrapped while American fabs are still dangerously dependent on geopolitical choke points like Taiwan. And it's not clear that forcing Taiwan to build fabs in the US will even remotely work due to a lack of skilled labor and relevant supply chains. 2. Electric vehicles: Tesla in the rearview mirror China's BYD, not Tesla, is now the world's top EV manufacturer. In 2023, it overtook Tesla in global sales and its footprint now spans Latin America, Europe and Southeast Asia. Why? Because China owns the supply chain. From lithium in Bolivia to cobalt in the Congo, Chinese firms like CATL dominate the upstream. They also control over 75% of global lithium battery production. As Professor Tu Xinquan of the China Institute for WTO Studies notes, 'Beijing treats EVs as the next strategic industry, not just a consumer product.' The result? China is setting the global terms for green mobility. 3. Artificial intelligence: authoritarian efficiency at scale While Silicon Valley battles over ethics and data privacy, Chinese AI firms race ahead by leveraging the scale of their digital ecosystems. With 1.4 billion citizens contributing to vast data pools, firms like SenseTime and iFlytek are training machine learning models at a rate unimaginable in the US. Stanford's AI Index 2024 noted that 'China now publishes more peer-reviewed AI papers than the US and the EU combined.' More importantly, the integration of AI into national surveillance systems—facial recognition, behavioral analytics and even predictive policing—is an institutional advantage in authoritarian governance. 4. Space & hypersonics: leaping over the Pentagon's horizon In 2021, China tested a hypersonic glide vehicle that stunned Pentagon officials. It circled the globe before hitting its target—a demonstration of capabilities that America did not anticipate and does not have. Today, China launches more satellites than any other country, and its Tiangong space station functions independently of NASA. This is not just about prestige. It's about owning low-Earth orbit (LEO) infrastructure and building an integrated command architecture. According to James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment, 'China's civil-military fusion in space tech gives it a decisive asymmetry—the ability to repurpose civilian launches into military capacity overnight.' 5. Quantum computing and cyber sovereignty China's quantum leap is not metaphorical. It has already built a city-level quantum communication network in Hefei and launched the Micius satellite to demonstrate secure quantum encryption. While the US still grapples with theoretical breakthroughs, China is operationalizing quantum networks—one step closer to unhackable communication. Simultaneously, China's cyber units under the PLA Strategic Support Force have matured into a formidable force. As cybersecurity expert Adam Segal warns, 'Unlike the US, where cyber operations must go through inter-agency review, China's centralized command is more agile, more ruthless and more strategic.' 6. Infrastructure diplomacy: steel, fiber and sovereignty The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was once dismissed as 'debt-trap' diplomacy. Yet in 2025, it has morphed into a network of real-world influence. Over 70 ports, 150 countries, and countless rail links are now locked into Chinese logistics systems. Malaysia's ECRL and industrial parks under the 'Two Countries, Twin Parks' initiative are cases in point. In contrast, America's Build Back Better World (B3W) never took off due to a lack of institutional backbone and material delivery. 7. Financial innovation: dollar dependency, yuan strategy Though the dollar still dominates, China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) now clears over US$400 billion in yuan-denominated transactions annually. As Professor Eswar Prasad of Cornell observes, 'CIPS, when coupled with the digital yuan, offers China a way to de-dollarize bilateral trade without directly challenging the dollar's global reserve status.' Even in ASEAN, Indonesia and Malaysia have signed local currency settlement agreements with Beijing. The implications are serious: the US no longer controls the plumbing of international finance unilaterally. 8. Pharmaceuticals and public health diplomacy Sinopharm and Sinovac may have drawn Western skepticism during Covid-19, but they reached over 80 countries. China became the pharmacy of the Global South, capturing new health markets. Meanwhile, China controls up to 70% of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) exports—vital for antibiotic and chronic disease drugs. Even the US Food and Drug Administration has flagged this as a national security risk. 9. Maritime dominance: steel leviathans in Asian waters The People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is now the largest navy in terms of number of vessels, with China launching new destroyers, frigates and carriers at an unmatched pace. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), China's naval shipbuilding capacity exceeds the US by a ratio of 3:1 annually. This has strategic consequences: with militarized reefs and carrier-killer missiles, Beijing is remaking the Indo-Pacific naval order—challenging the US Seventh Fleet's dominance. Conclusion: The end of complacency, the beginning of multipolar discipline The Chinese dragon did not roar its way to supremacy. It studied the American system—its think tanks, capital markets, academic networks and defense-industrial base—and replicated a version of it with Chinese characteristics: centralized, agile, state-backed and global. This is no longer a contest of ideologies. It is a contest of capacities. For Malaysia and ASEAN, the time for strategic hedging has reached its limit. As Professor Lee Jones warns, 'Neutrality in a bifurcating world must be underwritten by genuine resilience—economic, technological and political.' China's dragon does not need to strangle the eagle. It merely needs to squeeze at the right moments. And in that tightening grip lies the uncomfortable truth of 21st-century power: it is no longer about who dominates, but who endures. Phar Kim Beng, PhD, is professor of ASEAN studies at the International Islamic University Malaysia. His analyses have been published across Asia and Europe, with a focus on strategic diplomacy, interdependence and power asymmetries.
Asia Times
16-04-2025
- Politics
- Asia Times
Are US and China really in a Thucydides Trap?
The so-called Thucydides Trap has become a staple of foreign policy commentary over the past decade or so, regularly invoked to frame the escalating rivalry between the United States and China. Coined by political scientist Graham Allison — first in a 2012 Financial Times article and later developed in his 2017 book 'Destined for War' — the phrase refers to a line from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote in his 'History of the Peloponnesian War,' 'It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.' At first glance, this provides a compelling and conveniently packaged analogy: Rising powers provoke anxiety in established ones, leading to conflict. In today's context, the implication seems clear – China's rise is bound to provoke a collision with the United States, just as Athens once did with Sparta. But this framing risks flattening the complexity of Thucydides' work and distorting its deeper philosophical message. Thucydides wasn't articulating a deterministic law of geopolitics. He was writing a tragedy. Thucydides fought in the Peloponnesian War on the Athenian side. His world was steeped in the sensibilities of Greek tragedy, and his historical narrative carries that imprint throughout. His work is not a treatise on structural inevitability but an exploration of how human frailty, political misjudgment and moral decay can combine to unleash catastrophe. That tragic sensibility matters. Where modern analysts often search for predictive patterns and system-level explanations, Thucydides drew attention to the role of choice, perception and emotion. His history is filled with the corrosive effects of fear, the seductions of ambition, the failures of leadership and the tragic unraveling of judgment. This is a study in hubris and nemesis, not structural determinism. Much of this is lost when the phrase 'Thucydides Trap' is elevated into a kind of quasi-law of international politics. It becomes shorthand for inevitability: power rises, fear responds, war follows. But Thucydides himself was more interested in why fear takes hold, how ambition twists judgment and how leaders — trapped in a narrowing corridor of bad options — convince themselves that war is the only viable path left. His narrative shows how conflict often arises not from necessity, but from misreading, miscalculation and passions unmoored from reason. Even Allison, to his credit, never claimed the 'trap' was inescapable. His core argument was that war is likely but not inevitable when a rising power challenges a dominant one. In fact, much of Allison's writing serves as a warning to break from the pattern, not to resign oneself to it. Traditional Russian wooden dolls depict China's President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. Photo: Dmitri Lovetsky / AP via The Conversation In that sense, the 'Thucydides Trap' has been misused by commentators and policymakers alike. Some treat it as confirmation that war is baked into the structure of power transitions — an excuse to raise defense budgets or to talk tough with Beijing — when in fact, it ought to provoke reflection and restraint. To read Thucydides carefully is to see that the Peloponnesian War was not solely about a shifting balance of power. It was also about pride, misjudgment and the failure to lead wisely. Consider his famous observation, 'Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.' This isn't a structural insight — it's a human one. It's aimed squarely at those who mistake impulse for strategy and swagger for strength. Or take his chilling formulation, 'The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.' That's not an endorsement of realpolitik. It's a tragic lament on what happens when power becomes unaccountable and justice is cast aside. Seen in this light, the real lesson of Thucydides is not that war is preordained, but that it becomes more likely when nations allow fear to cloud reason, when leaders mistake posturing for prudence and when strategic decisions are driven by insecurity rather than clarity. Thucydides reminds us how easily perception curdles into misperception — and how dangerous it is when leaders, convinced of their own virtue or necessity, stop listening to anyone who disagrees. It ain't necessarily so. Photo: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images via The Conversation In today's context, invoking the Thucydides Trap as a justification for confrontation with China may do more harm than good. It reinforces the notion that conflict is already on the rails and cannot be stopped. But if there is a lesson in 'The History of the Peloponnesian War,' it is not that war is inevitable but that it becomes likely when the space for prudence and reflection collapses under the weight of fear and pride. Thucydides offers not a theory of international politics but a warning — an admonition to leaders who, gripped by their own narratives, drive their nations over a cliff. Avoiding that fate requires better judgment. And above all, it demands the humility to recognize that the future is not determined by structural pressures alone but by the choices people make. Andrew Latham is professor of political science, Macalester College This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
