The Weird Threat Inflation of ‘Peak China’ Warnings

Most hawkish warnings about China emphasize both Beijing’s ambitions and its growing power, but some analysts have come up with a different interpretation and concluded that China is on the verge of decline and that this is what will cause the Chinese government to behave more aggressively in the near future. The two key assumptions behind this argument are that China has vast ambitions and that their leadership will therefore take huge gambles to achieve their goals before their window of opportunity runs out. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley’s new book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, lays out the argument for this view (an excerpt can be read here), and they presented an earlier version of their argument over a year ago. Others have made similar claims that time isn’t on China’s side and that the Chinese government knows this and will therefore act more rashly as a result. As Andrew Erickson and Gabriel Collins put it, this means that there is “a decade of danger from a system that increasingly realizes it only has a short time to fulfill some of its most critical, long-held goals.”

As exercises in threat inflation go, these arguments are unusual, because they take for granted that Chinese power will wane over the longer term but exaggerate the danger in the near term even more to compensate. Unlike many hawkish warnings about foreign threats, these have a definite expiration date, and if they are wrong we will know it in just a few years.

The reviews of Brands and Beckley’s argument have been mixed. Denny Roy identified a major problem with it earlier this year:

The closing window argument is only persuasive if we postulate that the Xi regime concludes it could win a war of expansion today but could not win the same war 10 years from now. The argument doesn’t work if the Chinese think they would lose the war today but would lose even worse in a decade.

I would add that if the Chinese government genuinely feared that it was facing decline it would likely be more interested in trying to consolidate its position and husband its resources instead of taking the risk of hastening that decline by gambling on major military adventures. Chinese governments have not embarked on wars of expansion for a long time, and the current government has not fought any kind of war in more than forty years, so it would be strange for them to strike out with desperate attacks in the next decade. That is no guarantee that this can’t happen, but it seems awfully unlikely.

In his review of the book, Andrew Latham found that the authors relied too much on the most convenient interpretations of the historical cases that they used to bolster their argument:

In this case, the authors appear to have fallen prey to the latter type of logical fallacy, very selectively drawing on one theory out of many that purport to explain the outbreak of war in 1914 and 1941 in order to make an argument about the dangers associated with China’s coming decline. Having for many years taught a college course on the politics of the world wars, I can point to any number of theoretical explanations for the causes of those wars that have little or nothing to do with German or Japanese fears of relative decline.

That the authors treat the most convenient accounts of these wars as simply the way things happened, and then conclude that we are now entering a similar period of heightened risk, may be suggestive but it is far from dispositive.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.