A Contest for Supremacy.

• Author: Coffey, John
• Position: Book review

Text:

A Contest for Supremacy

Reviewed by John Coffey

A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia by Aaron L. Friedberg, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011, ISBN13-978-0393068283, 384 pp., $27.95

"However absorbed a commander may be in the elaboration of his own thoughts," Winston Churchill counseled, "it is necessary sometimes to take the enemy into consideration." In this book, Aaron Friedberg of Princeton University serves a bracing tonic of realism, devoid of diplomatic "happy talk," about the Sino-American contest for mastery in Asia. Having served from 2003-2005 as Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning in the Office of the Vice President, Friedberg disclaims membership in the Sinologist "fraternity" and sets out to speak candidly about the central struggle of our time. Acknowledging the tentativeness of his argument, he nonetheless believes this subject is too important to be left to the "China hands."

America and China, Friedberg maintains, are engaged in a global struggle for power, rooted in geopolitical and ideological causes. No economic determinist, he argues the decisive factor is political, a clash between America's liberal-democratic goal of regime change in China versus the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) determination to maintain its authoritarian rule. China's political liberalization offers the best hope for a stable entente; continued growth of Chinese power under its authoritarian regime will embolden more aggressive Chinese behavior abroad. China is reaching economic parity with the U.S., and current trends favor Chinese regional supremacy.

Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms propelled China's international ascent, unleashing three decades of phenomenal economic growth, averaging 9 percent annually, until by 2008 it had become the world's second largest economy. Friedberg recognizes that formidable obstacles - overinvestment creating excess capacity, an aging population, environmental degradation, deteriorating public health, bad bank loans, unproductive state enterprises, a yawning wealth gap, official corruption - make China's continued rise problematic. Since sustained, high economic growth underlies Friedberg's case about China, we shall return to some of these factors. He predicts, nevertheless, that China's continued, albeit slower, growth will make it the world's leading economy by midcentury.

Friedberg labels the bipartisan U.S. strategy for China under four administrations "congagement," that is, a blend...