OPINION: Stop Underestimating China's Strengths
The currency of the People’s Republic of China is the renminbi (RMB), also known as the yuan. (PxHere)
Iris Peng (COL ‘24) is a journalist for Compass World and a guest writer for the Caravel's opinion section. The content and opinions of this piece are the writer’s and the writer’s alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the Caravel or its staff.
Before knowing Dr. Matthew Kroenig as a Georgetown professor in the Government Department and School of Foreign Service, I associated Kroenig with “Kroenig 15.”
“Kroenig 15” is the best piece of evidence on the consequences of nuclear proliferation, widely read in policy debate. In “The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have a Future?” Kroenig argues that a pair of emerging nuclear states risks nuclear war because one or both states have first strike incentives.
Though I understood little about security studies and deterrence theory as a high schooler, I found Kroenig’s essay convincing for my purposes. I gladly employed fearmongering to win high school debates: “If we do not stop arms sales to Taiwan, there will be worldwide proliferation. That causes extinction.”
Like many other high school debaters, I blindly worshipped popular debate authors like Kroenig. Upon discovering that Kroenig is a Georgetown professor, I declared in a group chat, “im gonna [sic] take a class from Kroenig.”
At that time, I did not realize I was limited to a small selection of intro courses. Nevertheless, my reverence for Kroenig persisted. When my Intro to International Relations class assigned his April 2020 opinion article from the Atlantic, I was thrilled. At last, something Kroenig-related! But after finishing the article, I was struck with a combination of disappointment and irritation. This article did not possess the same scholarly, logical quality as his nuclear proliferation essay. Perhaps partially owing to his overconfident tone, “Why the U.S. Will Outcompete China” lacks nuance and foresight.
Kroenig’s worship of the “democratic” United States political system in the article is significantly stronger than my previous admiration for him. For instance, he predicted that America’s “halting and patchwork measures” to deal with COVID-19 would yield better results than “autocratic China’s firm response.” He backed this prediction with China’s misrepresentations of infection and death numbers and faulty Chinese testing kits. While it is true that China has not been the most transparent about its COVID-19 statistics, he was egregiously wrong in placing his bets on the United States.
In Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, Kishore Mahbubani claims that many American foreign policy pundits, by being hyper-aware of China’s weaknesses but underestimating its strengths, are making a strategic error. Unfortunately, Kroenig’s opinion article also falls into this trap. He doubts predictions that China will be more economically successful than the United States because autocratic leaders, being unconstrained, can easily “[take] their countries in new and radically different directions” and because “autocratic regimes are notoriously brittle.”
To support these sweeping generalizations about the behavior of autocratic states, Kroenig cherrypicks examples from China’s history to fit the narrative that China is always on the brink of collapse. Frankly, some of his evidence is completely unconvincing. For example, he narrows China’s “5,000 years of history” to a period “pockmarked by rebellion, revolution, and new dynasties.” Never mind that the United States prides itself on being founded by a revolution grounded in freedom and liberty. Or that, in China, the domestic instability of the 19th and early 20th centuries was at least partially caused by foreign interference, particularly the socially devastating political and economic effects of the opium trade.
Kroenig also hypocritically evaluates China’s military spending. On one hand, he criticizes Xi for “baring China’s teeth militarily” and for advancing “confrontational” and “provoking” policies. But on the other, he claims that China’s national defense spending, which is lower than its domestic security spending, is a sign of fragility. These contradictory tropes—China as both a dangerous threat and a perpetually weak country—are Orientalist representations common in Western discourse on China. But Kroenig fails to consider that China’s focus on domestic security could indicate that its intentions in the international arena are less hostile than he makes them out to be.
Moreover, China’s economy has proven to be resilient in the face of several potential crises. In China: The Bubble That Never Pops, Bloomberg’s Chief Economist Thomas Orlik credits China’s economic success to the “advantage of backwardness,” which allows China to follow a path to growth already set by other countries. Additionally, China can draw lessons from the earlier economic crises of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to manage problems that developing countries face. China’s other economic strengths include a high domestic savings rate, which creates a stable funding source for its state-owned banking system, and its imaginative, flexible policymakers who can always take advantage of the “unusual resources of a Leninist party state.”
Finally, by concentrating only on political systems, Kroenig’s opinion article lacks foresight. Kai-Fu Lee, in AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, explains that artificial intelligence will play a decisive role in economic growth, as “digital goods and services will continue eating up larger shares of the consumer pie.” Certainly, a country’s political system will influence its efforts in AI development. But so do the availability of data, the tech culture, and the ability to recruit talent. Kroenig neglects one of the most important facets of U.S.-China competition, to his own detriment.
Though Kroenig has every right to praise democracy for spurring “power, wealth, and prestige,” his argument that the U.S. will outcompete China is too brazen. By not defining what “outcompeting” entails, he leaves room for anyone who heeds his advice to continuously shift the goalposts of this so-called “competition,” a mindset which would ironically lock the U.S. and China into perpetual, unproductive rivalry. If I have learned one lesson in policy debate, it is that bold statements like Kroenig’s must be substantiated with robust evidence. Sadly, his opinion article has not passed the test.
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