3

Politics

itself and with a defined sense of historical mission. As we know from the American experience, this is crucial for establishing the foundations of domestic consensus vital to sustaining hegemonic enterprises — but it is also a challenge that is especially difficult to meet in the chinese case, given the country’s fraught politics between 1949 and 1989, the rapid socioeconomic changes that have taken place since the 1990s, and regional distrust.

If china truly becomes East Asia’s leading great power, all of East Asia’s flashpoints — taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and the East and south china seas — immediately become Beijing’s primary responsibility to manage and resolve. to gain legitimate control over these hotspots, china will face a wide range of complex challenges.

Without the same level of us involvement and projection into the “Western Pacific,” the boundaries of the East Asian sphere will become more fluid and contested. In addition to Japan at the heart of East Asia, china will face great power challengers India to the southwest and Russia to the north. Beijing would first have to police its own boundaries with these great powers — especially the one with India — and find means of stabilizing or settling disputes. china may contemplate making some concessions in territorial disputes with these neighboring states to try to prevent these powers from forging a balancing coalition against it. take the “Quad,” for example, consisting of Japan, Aus

Taking the US out of the East Asian security complex will certainly not solve problems for China ... It will create a host of urgent, serious and complex responsibilities for Beijing.

2) Establish its regional authority:

tralia and India along with the us. Without the us, the other countries — and possibly others like Russia — might be more likely to form a balancing coalition against china. china could either try to deter this possibility by building up us-style military preponderance, or try to gain their complicity by sharing power.

Moreover, china would have to try to ensure that rival Asian powers do not find support from third party states in the region, especially in southeast and south Asia. In the post-cold War period, Beijing’s approach toward countering this tendency vis-à-vis the us has been to “reshape the incentive structure and perceptions of its neighbors so that they would not agree to become complicit in a putative overt attempt by the us to constrain china.” this indirect method emphasizing

5 economic inducement and ideational persuasion dovetails neatly with the final challenge.

3) Exercise restraint and responsibility:

under Xi, Beijing has pushed for others to see that “china’s rise is beneficial for you,” stressing its ability to provide economic-development public goods via mutual gains. this is most marked in the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative that has mobilized large investments to open new markets, build infrastructure for joint economic development and give neighbors a stake in maintaining regional peace and stability. But this “community of common destiny” is geared almost exclusively to the less developed and smaller countries of Asia. In courting peripheral states that have tended to be neglected, taken for granted or treated as mere arenas by other major powers, Beijing may build a broad base of supporters for its hegemony, or at least do enough to prevent many from seriously contemplating backing a challenger.6 However, this developmental agenda is at best a “club” good, not a public good, if it excludes developed states like Japan and south Korea, and neighboring great powers like India and Russia. to become the leading regional great power (and a global leader), china will have to pay equal attention to a wide range of stakeholder states.

Challenges: from rising Power to leader

Identities are relational, and if china takes on great power leadership in East Asia, it will entail other regional states by definition becoming subordinate in the hierarchy. china’s core challenge will be to create sustainable underpinnings for this range of asymmetrical and unequal relations. the general point is that to construct viable and sustainable regional leadership, china will need to find new ways — both material and ideational — to gain support and acquiescence from the other states in East Asia, primarily Japan, the Koreas, and southeast Asia, but also Australia and New Zealand.

In doing so, china will have to pay sustained attention to demonstrating restraint and responsibility vis-à-vis those regional powers that would otherwise be its challengers. If Beijing persists in its “grow with us” geo-economic strategy, it will have to make clearer what benefits it can offer to developed regional economies and to competing regional powers. for instance, how would china act as the modern “lead goose” to facilitate and multiply development and prosperity for them? Would these benefits be sufficient to ensure their accommodation to Beijing’s core interests? could regional states be assured that china would not exploit their growing economic dependence, such as by applying trade sanctions in retaliation for political disagreements? In terms of broader financial and economic stability, to what extent would Beijing be able to avoid the “Kindleberger trap” — the danger of the rising hegemon not acting

quickly or substantively enough to provide the global financial public goods that the declining hegemon is unable to shoulder any longer? this

7 question is of key importance especially to the most developed and globalized regional economies like Japan and south Korea.

On “hard” security issues, how would china negotiate mutual nuclear restraint with India, for instance, not to mention Russia and possibly Japan? Equally important are so-called non-traditional security threats, especially “shared fate” issues, including climate change and pandemics.8 As the global crises caused by covid-19 vividly demonstrate, china plays a vital role — negative and positive — in addressing the greatest global challenges of the Anthropocene. How and with what success East Asia battles and emerges from this pandemic will depend significantly on how effectively china’s government, businesses and populace learn, adapt, help and co-operate with the region and the world in the coming months and years.

In short, if we buy the idea that the international order is crumbling and that china is one of the key global powers that needs to pick up the pieces, Beijing must start by consolidating its leadership within its own region. this task may be facilitated by the increasingly alarming uncertainties in the us. Yet taking the us out of the East Asian security complex will certainly not solve problems for china. Instead and immediately, it will create a host of urgent, serious and complex responsibilities for Beijing. to step into the shoes of the us, it would have to pick up the management of trade and finance; juggle a complex set of relations among regional powers; deal with crises that come within its sphere; and cultivate legal and institutional measures to support and sustain the regional order. Beijing would have to try to achieve all of this while reckoning with its fragmented and nationalistic domestic politics.

to date, china has, justifiably, used the claim to being both a developing country and a great power to be quite selective about its obligations. As a rising power, Beijing had the luxury of aiming to “reshape its periphery” (塑造周边, suzao zhoubian) using instruments of its choice. But to pick up the pieces of the changing world order, Beijing would have no choice but to tackle headon the challenges of leadership. In East Asia, china will have to shift to “constructing a Kingly Way” (塑造王道, suzao wangdao) — creating a consensual hegemony in the classical sense, akin to how chinese dynasties claiming a mandate from Heaven legitimized their rule vis-à-vis diverse vassal states. As East Asia’s leading great power, china will have to craft multiple assurances toward the diverse modern states in the region in order to pre-empt their potential opposition and to exercise authority over regional conflicts. this contrasts with the hybrid strategic approaches china adopted as a rising power, selectively extending assurances to weaker peripheral countries while also selectively resisting certain aspects of us hegemony and challenges from other regional powers. In facing this challenge, china’s long historical experience will provide little direct guidance, because of the current era of unprecedented globalization and the crowding of Asian great power spheres.

Evelyn goh is the shedden Professor of strategic Policy studies at the australian National university. her latest book, co-authored with barry buzan, is Rethinking Sino-japanese alienation: History Problems and Historical opportunities

university Press, 2020). (oxford