Agreeing to agree (and disagree).

• Author: Art, Robert J.
• Position: Viewpoint essay

HISTORICALLY, THE rise of one great power at the expense of the dominant one has nearly always led to conflict between the two and, more often than not, eventually to a war between them that drags in other great powers. Is this violent history of rising and dominant great powers the future for U.S.-China relations?

Clearly, there will be political and economic conflicts and friction between the United States and People's Republic of China as the PRC's economic and military power in east Asia and its global economic and political reach continue to expand. There will also be some arms racing between China and the United States as each jockeys for an advantage over the other and as each is driven by its military necessities of intimidating and defending Taiwan, respectively. Historically, dominant powers have not readily given up their top position to rising challengers, and rising challengers have always demanded the fruits that they believe their growing power entitles them to. There is no reason to expect that things will be different in this regard with China and the United States; consequently, they will not be able to avoid a certain level of tension over the next several decades as China's influence continues to grow and as the United States seeks to deal with it. So, even if China's rise remains peaceful, Sino-American relations will not be harmonious.

Nonetheless, there are some significant shared interests between the United States and China (noted below), and hence some bases for cooperation in both the medium and longer term. Will the peace-inducing aspects of the U.S.-China relationship overshadow the conflict-producing ones? No one can say for certain. However, if we believe that there are distinct elements in the Sino-American relationship that differ from past rising-versus-dominant-power competitions, then the dismal history of these past competitions need not be the future for this one.

Stopping China's Rise?

WE CANNOT predict the exact nature of China's intentions and goals a few decades from now (nor can the Chinese), but we can, with high confidence, predict that China will want its "place in the sun", just as every other rising great power has. This does not mean that China will be an aggressive, warlike nation or, to the contrary, a strictly peaceful one. It means only that China will do what all great powers do--not simply react to its international environment, but instead act to shape that environment in ways that are conducive to its national interests.

Greater Chinese influence over east Asia and over the international system more generally, however, will not always coincide with America's national interests. If that is the case, is it within America's power to stop the rise of China?

Stopping China's rise means containing and constricting Chinese power. That, in turn, requires halting or drastically curtailing China's economic growth, upon which all else depends, and thwarting its rising influence regionally and globally. Stopping China's rise would be equivalent to what I have called "compound containment", which was applied against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Compound containment involves two central ingredients: stalemating a power militarily and waging economic "denial" against it. The former is designed to prevent the state from gaining any political leverage from its military power; the latter, to weaken a state economically, either by actually reducing its gross domestic product (GDP) or by severely constricting its technological improvement and economic growth rate.

The most direct way for the United States to hurt China economically would be to block all of China's exports to the United States. In 2005 (the latest year for which figures are available), China--which includes mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau--exported $270 billion to the United States, or 26 percent of its total exports for that year. In 2005 China's GDP (in current prices) was $2.2 trillion. This means that in 2005, 12 percent of China's GDP was exported to the United States, an astoundingly high figure that appears to demonstrate a huge Chinese dependency on access to the U.S. market. (The actual dependency is somewhat lower because China's exports are measured in terms of gross value, not value added in China, and because much of China's exports involve the processing of imports.)

The problem is that such a policy of economic warfare would be highly disruptive to the United States as well because China holds a powerful financial lever over Washington and could retaliate. As of December 2006, China possessed $350 billion (7 percent) of the approximately $5 trillion of the total outstanding U.S. Treasury securities that are privately held. (Japan is the biggest holder at $644 billion, or 13 percent.) China could retaliate against an American embargo on China's exports by dumping its holdings of Treasury securities or by refusing to buy any more. This would hurt China by...