Peel the Onion | Book Review: Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy by Kishore Mahbubani

By J.B.Browne

The ink has barely dried on signing the world's biggest trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), on November 15. A miraculous accomplishment after eight long years of grueling talks, the new free trade zone will include close to a third of the world's population and economic output, outsizing both the European Union and US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. According to the BBC, RCEP will include ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.

Predictably, an aviary of seasoned China watchers are gorging themselves on the shifting tides narrative of Sino-American power relations and geopolitics. But rather than bemoaning a China-led trade deal of this magnitude, the giant baby elephant in the room is that the Asia-Pacific region has spoken without US leadership, interference, or involvement. RCEP then marks the beginning of China's and the end of America's centrality in Asia-Pacific trade, a ripple of indication that China has won or is winning the trade war over the US.

As the US wildly thrashes about in election afterbirth, flirting with more self-isolationism, RCEP is yet more evidence of a Sinocentric region, and possibly *hushed tones* a new world order. All of which makes veteran Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishor Mahbubani's latest book Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy as relevant as ever. Published in April 2020, it seems the book went to press pre-COVID-19, so we are missing some vital neo-global context for further analysis. However, nothing will likely change the essence of the geopolitical contest already underway. As China's more competent response to COVID-19, broader economic recovery, and now RCEP would suggest, if China isn't at least winning, has it already won? What exactly? How? Why?

"It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." 

- Thucydides    

The book's overarching question, now on everyone's lips, "Are the United States and China headed for war?" Mahbubani's framework of analysis, though not mentioned by name explicitly, seeks to define and, more importantly, understand the reasons behind and likely outcomes of the defining geopolitical contest of our times, this century's Thucydides Trap. When one great power threatens to displace another, Mahbubani argues, war is almost always the result, but it doesn't have to be.

Geopolitics Summarized: The Thucydides Trap! By Ozmandunn

Given the increasing "poisonous atmosphere toward China" in the West, a significant tussle between two world superpowers without serious rivals has been ongoing for years already, both economically and culturally. Seemingly, America has no strategy for China, acting impulsively and heavy-handedly, accentuated hallmarks of the Trump-era. America's latest and greatest best-loved boogeyman, the "China Threat," has emerged as a projected obstacle to a declining empire hellbent on maintaining its post-cold war geopolitical imperial dominance. With calls to make America great again (again), the Trump administration has attempted to vilify, isolate, and sanction China, almost consistently, demanding its allies spurn Chinese tech and investment. But will "America first" policy change under the Biden-led US? Likely not, Mahbubani argues.

The American mindset is far too entrenched in its "white man's burden" of exporting and weaponizing "superior values" (selectively) as the only genuine civilized system of governance on the planet. We will see how this selective posturing will continue under a Biden administration. His recent pick for Secretary of State, Anthony Bilken—an American exceptionalist par excellence; at best, a more palatable version of Mike Pompeo—believes the world has little chance of survival if the United States doesn't dictate its future. Regardless of ethnic diversity, other cabinet picks only further cement this hawkish stance and are not in the slightest bit antidotal to Trumpist foreign policy.

"Like the old Soviet Union, America has become rigid, inflexible, and doctrinaire." 

- Kishore Mahbubani

The bipartisan thirst for the new Cold War, chaos, and regime change, Mahbubani argues, are all symptoms of systemic "democratic" structures that have moved away from public interest. Instead, they have been hijacked by a ruling class elite who, through corrupt business lobbying ethics, push anti-China narratives on who can be "toughest" on China with very little difference in between. At the same time, Congress continues to shove more money into the Pentagon's ravenous war belly—Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria: "we spend more on defense than the planet's remaining countries put together."

This unhinged over-expenditure—$686 billion 2020 defense budget during a mismanaged pandemic—is a "massive geopolitical gift to China." The real competition, he says, will be less in the military but more in the diplomatic sphere, most likely because neither side can win a nuclear war. But the US Department of Defense, which practically never operates "defensively," will continue to outspend because it is structurally impossible for America to make the necessary U-turns in areas "where deep structures support vested interests."

Has China Won? A Conversation with Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani

Elsewhere Mahbubnai ruminates on the prevailing trend of groupthink anti-intellectualism within US political frameworks, which has led to a shrinking of foreign policy agencies and skilled agents. Western media bias is also complicit in manufacturing untruths, inducing "yellow peril" panic, which becomes accepted as fact. One example is that China seeks to be aggressively "expansionist," which Mahbubani refutes. Another is that it is "an aggressive and belligerent military power," despite China having not fired a single shot into a neighboring country in the 40 years. He says that the truth is often American self-projection harnessed and purported by intelligence services like the Anglo-Saxon Five Eyes network—America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. 

"For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet." 

- John F. Kennedy

The free-fall nature of both superpowers' deteriorating relationship only highlights their grating eccentricities. America values freedom and democracy; China, after its Century of Humiliation of interference and war, prefers freedom from turmoil and social stability. America is impatient, eager, and action-driven; Chinese civilization has outlived most others for over 4,000 years and knows patience. Capitalism American-style has ended up as an aristocratic plutocracy; China practices state capitalism, resulting in a scientific meritocracy. America now scoffs at the multilateralism it helped create after the war, acting in its own immediate interests; China encourages multilateralism. 

US-China relationship complexities make sabotaging your codependent rival that much harder. In a myriad of ways, China has already won with population size, economy, market size, manufacturing, exports, poverty elimination, cutting-edge inventions, and a leading role in 5G. It's not the humbled "factory of the world" it once was when joining the WTO in 2001. Perhaps China will never outshine the United States for arable land, military might, soft power and strategic narratives, global alliances, oil-rich resources, and geographical advantages. But the more China is "contained," the more it will affect the American people. For example, if forced to accelerate its move toward self-reliance and independence in, say, the manufacturing of semiconductors, the American semiconductor industry will be significantly dented, not now, but in a decade or so. China can plan and wait, but can America?

"Although China is still a somewhat politically closed society, it is a closed society with an open mind. America may be an open society, but it is an open society with a closed mind."

- Kishore Mahbubani

Besides the slightly provocative and marketable book title, Mahbubani uses a highly readable diplomatic language that one would expect from a distinguished fellow of his caliber. But in powerfully subtle ways, he alludes to potential scenarios of American aggression begetting Chinese defensiveness. By creating global conflict with an interest in dominating realms of space and geopolitical spheres thousands of miles away, the US's signature and hostile campaigns' net effect is far more damaging to human rights and life than whatever the day's allegation is relating to China.

Suppose the next possible type of war is a regional proxy war in the Asia-Pacific. China will have every right to defend its sovereignty against US-backed or direct aggression. Both have enough nuclear power to blow the world up several times over. Mahbubani's book is a warning—a plea to Western elites and their populaces to reject this New Cold War mentality and instead advocate for peace and cooperation in a multipolar world.

As he would refer himself, J.B. Browne is a half "foreign devil" living with anxiety relieved by purchase. HK-born Writer/Musician/Tinkerer.