What the ‘powershift’ narrative overlooks on US-China relations

by | Jul 2, 2011


These days, it’s become almost universally accepted that the key dynamic in early 21st century international relations is the ‘powershift’ underway between the US and emerging economies – or more specifically, in most people’s minds, between the US and China.

But reading Jamil Anderlini’s excellent FT comment piece today on the state of the Chinese Communist Party at its 90th birthday, I was struck that the ubiquity of the powershift narrative obscures a more interesting story: that of how the two countries’ situations are remarkably similar – and stand right in the way of making progress on the most important global issues. Consider:

Economically, both countries are caught between a rock and a hard place. Each is pursuing a growth strategy that is essentially unsustainable: China remains reliant on its export sector, while America’s [anaemic] growth is built on public and private debt. As they pursue these growth strategies, the two countries continue to create vast global economic imbalances that create enormous risk for everyone else. Both also have screwed financial sectors with massive bad debts, which their policymakers are studiously ignoring.

This economic mess in turn results in part from each country’s political sclerosis. Both countries have relied on the aforementioned unsustainable growth strategies to secure political support and legitimacy. But both countries now face truly breathtaking gulfs between their haves and have-nots that risk undermining their social contracts – a challenge amplified by weak social protection provision in both cases. And both have institutional and political systems that look increasingly moribund and unable to cope with the complexity and intensity of the challenges confronting them.

In the foreign policy context, both countries’ international postures are shaped by their reliance on imported oil – reliance that is likely to generate increasing friction between them in the future, as global demand for oil increasingly outstrips supply. At the same time, both countries’ political cultures have nationalist streaks to them that may lead to foreign policy adventurism – particularly when the economic and political chips are down (see above).

Most fundamentally, as each of the two countries grapples with its similar set of problems, neither finds itself able to muster the political will to  act decisively with other states on shared global risks like climate change, financial risk, resource scarcity or state fragility. If the world as a whole is to move towards positive sum cooperation on global risks, rather than a slide towards zero sum fragmentation, competition, protectionism, and resource nationalism, then it’s in these two countries that most has to change: while the ‘G-Zero’ world described by Ian Bremmer and David Gordon is about a larger group of countries than just the US and China, it’s these two that are its principal exponents.

It may be that both countries are now approaching some sort of (perhaps shared) moment of political economic denouement. If so, it’s likely to have vast – and potentially extremely hazardous – consequences for the rest of us. But it’s hard to see how the current stalemate will be unlocked without some sort of moment of catharsis for China and the US.

Author

  • Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.


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