Description
Sino-US relations are at the lowest point since the time of Chairman Mao and Richard Nixon. Whereas certainly there was never a shortage of contention before in this bilateral relationship, this level of vitriol and hostility is something more recent, and came on the heels of the Trump administration’s repudiation of the engagement paradigm that served as the underpinning of America’s China policy for decades. By all accounts, the Biden administration has doubled down on this “whole of state” approach to tackle the perceived China threat. China, in return, has been forced to modify its own objective and tactics.
How can we best characterize this “new normal” in US-China relations? To that end, I plan to take a two-pronged approach. First, I will stack a full roster of issues and disputes bedeviling the relationship against a list of areas where even half-hearted cooperation is possible. I will then juxtapose this broad scorecard against a series of popular terms and concepts being used in both policy and academic communities, among which the new cold war (Harris & Marinova 2022), a security dilemma, and the Thucydides Trap have gained a great deal of currency. The goal is to evaluate their conceptual consistency and fitness with the US-China scenario. Preliminary analyses suggest they are either too narrow in the depiction of inter-state tensions, or not coherent enough as a social science concept.
To make up for the lacunae, my second act is to introduce the concept of ontological security into the analysis. Critical questions that are worthy of careful investigations include: Have China and the US crossed the Rubicon and entered a chapter in history where they “prefer conflict to cooperation, because only through conflict do they know who they are” (Mitzen 2006)? What is their respective raison d'etre for pursuing a tit-for-tat mode of interaction? To what extent are they prone to seeing the other side as an existential threat? Does the divergence in political systems, which in turn engenders the difference between regime security and national security, matter in their construction of the other as a threat?
