China fastest growing global superpower

In The Long Game, Rush Doshi, advisor on China in the Biden White House, draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, and memoirs by party leaders, to demonstrate that China is in fact playing a long, methodical game to replace America as a regional and global hegemon. As the US and China gets embedded into a deep and new cold war, Doshi examines  the basic evolution of Chinese strategy, showing how it evolved in response to changes in US policy and its position in the world order. After charting these shifts over time, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet “asymmetric” plan for an effective US response to this challenge: one that undermines China’s ambitions without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan, Ironically, the approach mirrors China’s own current strategy of subtly weakening Chinese leverage in the region and elsewhere while expanding US leverage over China.

China, an adversary of United States, have reached sixty per cent of US GDP, is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States.

In 1872, LI Hongzhang, a Qing Dynasty general, (who is often compared to his contemporary Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification), and official who dedicated much of his life to reforming the dying empire, was writing a time of historic upheaval.

In a memorandum advocating for more investment in Chinese shipbuilding. Li Hongzhang penned a line space  repeated for generations: China was experiencing  “great changes not seen in three thousand years.”

As we enter this new chapter of acute competition, we lack answers to critical foundational questions, What are China’s ambitions, and does it have a grand strategy to achieve them?

To achieve coercive capability ( to force compliance), consensual inducements ( to incentivise it) and legitimacy ( to rightfully command it) the rising states, the act of peacefully displacing the hegemon consists of two broad strategies, including  to blunt the hegemon’s exercise of those form of control, particularly those extended over the rising state; after all, no rising state can displace the hegemon if it remains at the hegemon’s mercy and to build forms of control over others, as no rising state can become a hegemon if it cannot secure the deference of other states through coercive threats, consensual inducements or rightful legitimacy.

The Long Game offers valuable insight to the most important rivalry in world of politics, with a bold assessment of  what the Chinese government’s true foreign policy objectives are.

The Long Game China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi, OUP £21.99