The Big Rivalry

Recent news indicates that in the next few years relations between Beijing and Washington will be defined by strategic rivalry.

On Monday, Tokyo published its economic growth numbers of the second quarter. They suggest that by the end of the current year, the Chinese economy will be the second largest in the world, after the U.S. If we take into account where China was in 1978 and everything that has happened in the international economy in the last three years, Beijing’s growth has been notable. In 32 years the Chinese economy has grown by 90 times. The second piece of news from a month ago comes from the International Energy Agency, which announced that China has surpassed the U.S. in energy consumption.

Economic growth and energy consumption always have strategic consequences, and in this case, they cannot but be linked to the history, geography and evolution of the Chinese economy and society.

The first thing we must take into account when discussing Beijing’s economy is the per capita income of the Chinese people (which is still very low at around $3,600), which is close to the Algerian, El Salvadoran or Albanian figures. And if we take into account where the wealth is situated in China, we see that the disparities between the provinces in the maritime areas of the Pacific and the ones in the interior of the country are huge. Besides, it has been quite difficult to develop a mass consumption culture in Chinese society. This difficulty makes the economy totally dependent on its exports to international markets. The Chinese decision-makers know better than anyone else that the next decade will be extremely demanding when it comes to domestic policies.

So why am I writing about the Beijing-Washington relations as being marked by regional rivalry? It’s because of the rhetoric and actions of the Chinese and American decision-makers in the past few months. We’ll start with the Chinese: Economic growth has allowed Beijing to be a kind of regional economic driver for the most developed economies in Asia.

As history shows, economic drivers always have strategic ambitions on the regional level. And China is no exception.

The best example of its ambition has been Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea and the construction of naval bases with real military capacities in the Western Pacific. The growing dependency of the Chinese economy on imported oil from the Middle East has also forced Beijing to develop the infrastructure and the necessary means to protect its marine communication lines in the Indian Ocean.

The political geography of the regional straits — Malacca, Funda and Lombok — does not favor China, but its leaders are determined to gain access to at least one of them.

China’s regional ambitions have been causing anxiety in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia and India. This anxiety has been brought to light and taken advantage of by the Obama administration. What is at stake here is very important for Washington. From a political point of view, the U.S. has been the most influential player in the Asia-Pacific region since 1945, and it wants things to stay that way.

Obama wasn’t elected to give up his country’s primacy. Hillary Clinton’s words in Hanoi last month about the South China Sea show that Washington and its regional allies are very interested in managing and containing Beijing’s growth.

So what about the Chinese and American decision-makers and the whole area of the Indian Ocean and the Asia-Pacific region? The management of this rivalry will need competent leaders and some common sense in China as well as in the U.S.