Tangled Titans — The United States and China
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Strategicpipa
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David Shambaugh knows China like the back of his hand. But this is China formed and made by the “epistemic communities”, a group of political scientists with the same causal beliefs.
One of his early books, “The Beautiful Imperialist”, written in the late 1980s, was an attempt to explain the role of think tanks, researchers and political analysts in China, especially the manner to which they tried to analyze and understand China.
It was also a book inspired by his former/late Ph.D. supervisor Professor Allen Whitting, one of the first few American political scientists, to write exclusively on Sino-US relations only, the other scholar was the late Michel Oksenberg. But David Shambaugh has an edge.
As the editor of China Quarterly, a role which he took over from Roderick Macfarquhar, at Harvard University, there was a ceaseless number of papers on China, to which he was constantly exposed to.
What is most amazing about David Shambaugh’s analysis, despite constant exposure on China matters, is his conclusion that there is no apparent “independent variable” that can explain or capture China in one breadth. For example, no scholars can yet agree that the Chinese Communist Party is the one entity that makes things happen. Nor can anyone in China or the US affirm that China’s behavior is driven by international dynamics. Put bluntly, no one knows what makes China ticks. In the current day and age, some might even argue that it is the fear of the power of social media, which is inspiring Chinese president Xi Jinğing to crackdown on corruption, in order to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from becoming totally irrelevant if not rejected altogether.
“Tangled Times: The United States and China” tried to make sense of the complex web of the bilateral relationship based on old school international theories i.e. liberalism, realism, constructivism and institutionalism. Given the precise and prudent nature of these theories, it was of course not impossible to derive a neat picture of China and the US. Naturally, neat but complicated. The strength of the book, therefore, lies in the nifty use of various conventional theories. But if Marxist and Critical theories were deployed, the picture that formed Sino US relations would change too.
The US and China cannot get along completely due to the different manner by which they adopt capitalism. The US is using it to get rich, and richer. China has emulated the example too. But China is using its wealth to prevent any further oppression and exploitation, not necessarily due to its “century of humiliation”, but the structural instinct to be on top, rather than below, in any capitalist system.
Come what may, it was also odd to hear David Shambaugh argue that there has been no systematic study of the “epistemic communities”. As noted earlier, he was the first to have done so. Perhaps what he meant was the absence of a twin study of the epistemic communities of both countries. Come what may, David Shambaugh is a serious and exceptionally talented scholar. Over the last thirty years, he has caught the dynamics of China well, to the degree of referring to China as a “partial power”. This is true. China cannot exert its weight fully on the world yet. To do so would have required another round of checkbook diplomacy beyond what One Maritime Belt, and One Silk Road, proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013. China may be rich, but every dollar it spends abroad, will court the wrath of its own population. And, the restless population, may yet be the independent variable that everyone has not given enough attention to.
