Will a Desperate China Take Desperate Measures?
REVIEW: ‘Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China’ by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley
Mike Watson • October 16, 2022 4:59 am
When it comes to the China problem, most Americans have viewed the challenge as holding off 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 falling power far sooner than most people think,” they write. And that spells trouble.
Their book challenges an important piece of conventional wisdom, that rising powers like China are more likely to fight established powers like the United States when they are on the ascent but tend to back off when they pass their peak. Brands and Beckley show this is not necessarily the case. Once they realize that time is no longer on their side, some countries make bigger and bigger gambles to try to stave off stagnation. Germany before World War I and Japan in the leadup to Pearl Harbor are only the two most dramatic of the examples they list.
China’s rise has been remarkable since Mao Zedong’s death, but Beckley and Brands note that China enjoyed many advantages in that period that have eroded away. 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 provoking the strategic encirclement Beijing has long feared. Mao’s successors, particularly Deng Xiaoping, promoted economic reforms and ruled through interparty 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 struggles for power when the strongman dies.
What the Marxists in Beijing may appreciate most clearly is the change in material factors. China’s enormous demographic dividend has now expired: In the early 2000s, there were 10 workers for every retiree, but by 2050 there will only be 2. “To prevent senior citizens from dying in the streets,” China will have to devote 30 percent of its GDP to elderly care, as much as it spends on its entire…
