Doshi, Rush. The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order. Oxford University Press, 2021.
In light of China’s skyrocketing economic and military capabilities, nothing seems to be more urgent than a balanced strategy for China’s geopolitical influence. Chinese hegemony, in Asia at least, had been previously presumed to be slow in coming. This rapid growth has therefore raised tremendous concerns for the United States and its allies, triggering a perceived need to adjust principal priorities in preparation for long-term strategic competition of an American-centered coalition with this restless superpower-in-the-making. In sharp contrast with a key requirement for readiness, however, Washington is reluctant to dive into the logic behind Chinese realpolitik and, instead, takes its quest for global supremacy and leadership as fait accompli. What does Beijing aspire to be, and does it possess a grand strategy in the face of constraints? If so, through which methods would it obtain the goal? In The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Rush Doshi offers novel insights based on extensive Chinese primary sources over time, including official documents, speeches and memoirs of political elites, editorials of state-affiliated media, as well as scholarly research.
According to Doshi, these materials proactively convey a message about China’s firm commitment, both regionally and globally, to defend its interests at length to end the hegemony of the United States. Essentially, as elaborated in three parts comprising 13 chapters, this emerging colossus possesses three sequential strategies for a peaceful displacement: ‘hiding capacities and biding time (Tao Guang Yang Hui, 1989–2008),’ ‘actively accomplish something (Ji Ji You Suo Zuo Wei, 2009-2016),’ and ‘great changes unseen in a century (Bai Nian Wei You Zhi Da Bian Ju, 2017-)’ (pp11-13). In correspondence to them are three behavioral patterns coined by Doshi: blunting, building, and expansion. These patterns thwart the ruling state’s forms of control, ‘coercive capability (to force compliance), consensual inducements (to incentivize it), and legitimacy (to rightfully command it),’ (p3) while stretching its own scope of influence so as to smoothly take the throne.
In response, both the ‘counterproductive strategy of confrontation’ and ‘accommodationist one of grand bargains’ pursued by US administrations have failed on account of China’s significant aggregate volume, both sides’ capacities in resource mobilization, as well as other varied advantages. Despite the strengths of openness and rule of law in America’s possession, for instance, it suffers great institutional limits as well as fiscal burden, making any symmetric strategy for long-term competition less than sustainable. Rather, the country would be better off, as Doshi proposes in Chapter 13, in competing with Beijing asymmetrically rather than ‘dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan’ (p333). It then leads to the same two aforementioned approaches—blunting and building—for a long-term multi-domain rivalry. Washington, for one thing, should explore a cost-effective avenue to diminishing China’s order-building and, for another, consolidate the foundation of Pax Americana with more efforts.
Laudable though, Doshi’s conclusion is to some extent untenable in two respects. First, there exists a causal arrows backwards, symptomatic of a deeper attribution bias. The author attributes the phenomenon that China is surpassing and displacing the United States to its long possession of a displacing grand strategy. Indeed, China’s aspirations and progression for world number one in recent years coincide with the mantle of global leadership being passed from the United States. However, he hastily jumps to the conclusion that Beijing has drawn up a schedule to cause the decline of the former hegemon or to intentionally blunt the US-led order. A complex interplay of many different forces may have resulted in the current scenario, such as a structural factor that rising power will inevitably lead the international system to an unsteady parity, and a social factor that domestic ethnic conflicts have likely hampered American ability to mobilize its resources for effective global governance.
Furthermore, perhaps we assume Doshi was right about the presence of China’s strategies of displacement. In that case, the timeline of this roughly three-decade plan would need a careful re-assessment, as the evidence supplied fails to fully appreciate those firsthand sources. The recent adjustment towards assertiveness in foreign policy possibly signals Beijing’s determination to supplant America as a new hegemon. But has it really planned all of this since the 1990s?
Doshi, for example, pays heed to Deng Xiaoping’s guideline Tao Guang Yang Hui and interprets its connotation through the analogy ‘sleep on brushwood and taste gall (Wo Xin Chang Dan)’ (p58). Yet the two situations are too different to justify the analogical deduction. In fact, Deng’s ‘hide and bide’ low-key approach was more likely a non-military method to boost China’s economy accompanied by more moderate engagement in the world rather than the strategic deception as some presumed. In his meeting with Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the former United Nations Secretary-General, he clearly stated that China’s refusal to act as the leader for developing countries was a serious political consideration as national economic development was the top priority. Individuals in poverty took up nearly two-thirds of the population of the entire country while the annual GDP merely accounted for around 6% of that of America. Without a doubt, Deng endeavored to reorient the country’s focus on economic growth as well as on domestic stability and legitimacy, following the disastrous time of political turmoil during the traumatic Cultural Revolution.
China’s leaders could neither gain competitive advantage over the US by engaging in strategic deception—unlike the confrontational mode between the two ancient Chinese countries in the story of Wo Xin Chang Dan—nor did they have such motivation, given an initial flourishing baseline set by the two sides while earlier countering the Soviet Union. Despite a brief dip in the bilateral interaction due to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Beijing and Washington managed to preserve the US-China relationship thanks to a vast array of mutual understandings and efforts at the top level, highlighted by the letter exchange between Deng and George H W Bush, and sequential visits to China by Brent Scowcroft, Alexander Haig, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger. With the policy of ‘comprehensive engagement’ being proposed in the early 1990s, the bilateral ties were deepened further, starting with trade. Instead of targeting the bilateral context with the United States, including its ‘perceived threats’ or the ‘power gap’ with China, Deng’s vision was more about China’s position in the multilateral world and establishing good relations with all, as elaborated in his Selected Works. Regrettably, the special moment of the guiding proposal, insufficient understanding of Chinese high-context culture and history, as well as controversial debates over the term Tao Guang Yang Hui that lacks an official explanation, jointly results in this misapprehension.
No doubt Doshi remains sober-minded overall and probes relatively deeper than many others in his generation into China’s strategic culture. However, there are indeed certainly more theoretically and substantively important questions which are proffered and can be identified once readers get past the quagmire of assertions in the text. With regards to the policy implications of the book, it is symptomatic of an extended departure of American strategic orientation from engagement to competition. Given the author’s dual figure as both a rising scholar in China studies and an incumbent senior official in foreign affairs, the idea may serve as a linchpin, which has already been in practice through multiple of Biden’s moves, and may certainly construct long-lasting conceptual guidance for Washington’s China policies hereafter.
The bilateral relation is leaning towards issue-linkage complex, retaining and evolving more facets over a straightforward contest for hegemony or a traditional balance-of-power situation. The outcome therefore requires less reliance on the pressures of the international system than on how well leaders from the two sides will manage the situation. It can be easier for both to take ample steps to manage the relationship if certain about each other’s actual intentions, and a vital US-China clash might well be avoided.
Junyang Hu is a MA candidate at the Committee of International Relations, The University of Chicago. He was formerly a research fellow at Intellisia Institute, where he assesses the broad challenges that have arisen across the Asia-Pacific since China’s rise, alongside US strategy and its presence in the area and US-China relations. His works have been featured or will be forthcoming in International Affairs, The Diplomat and CHINA-US Focus, among other publications. Junyang holds MSc in Security Studies from University College London (UCL).