Sino-US Competition: Is Liberal Democracy an Asset or Liability?

Abstract

This review essay covers five recent books on US-China relations, in particular addressing the rising challenge from China to the United States. These books examine US-China rivalry and advocate for changes, more or less, in US foreign policy. The essay offers a new synthesis by referring to lessons in US history and theoretical inspirations on flexible network. It evaluates the importance of liberal democracy for the United States to formulate its strategy and policy in response to China’s rising authoritarianism.

Heated Debate on US-China Rivalry

For the past three years, the American debate on China has become heated. For an updated understanding of this ongoing debate, this review essay selects the following five books: The Longer Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi (2021); Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence by Ryan Haas (2021); The World According to China by Elizabeth C. Economy (2022); An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First Century Order by Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper (2020); and The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy Versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the US and China by Matthew Kroenig (2020). Although the selected titles do not all focus on the same research question with equal emphasis, this essay will examine the authors’ arguments about the value of liberal democracy in the current US-China rivalry. To summarize succinctly, these authors differ in how they view the “authoritarian advantage” or the “democratic advantage” in the Sino-American rivalry, and to what degree they are willing to compromise democratic values in the face of China’s threat.

These books were selected because these authors represent a convergence toward China policy among Democrats and moderate Republicans and many consult with the President. For example, Doshi is the Director for China on the National Security Council (NSC); Lissner is the Director for Strategic Planning at the NSC; Rapp-Hooper is a senior advisor on China at the State Department; and Economy is the advisor in the Commerce department under the current Biden administration. Additionally, Haas held the position of the Director for China under the Obama administration, and in slight contrast, Kroenig is associated with Republican presidential candidates and the Scowcroft Center. By examining these five books, we may assess the shared understanding of US China strategy as one of the few policy areas with bipartisan consensus in Washington. This review essay will use the theme of the “value of democracy” to critically cross-examine the authors’ central arguments, hidden assumptions, and possible inferences in order to identify potential misdiagnosis in American strategic thinking. Although these problems might be minute at the first glance, the devil is in the details. They warrant our careful and critical reflection in order to detect misunderstandings before they are encapsulated in policy and lead to misguided decision.

China as a Challenger to the American Democracy Model

In 1991, at a low point for China’s political development after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, my former student at Fudan University presented me a book written by Wang Huning, entitled America against America (1991). Since my former student was working in the propaganda department under the university Party committee, obviously the free promotional copy was part of the ongoing ideological campaign against the “Bourgeois Liberalization.” Wang then served three Chinese top leaders for three decades so his ideas are popular with Chinese leadership. Inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster movie, Empire of the Sun (1987), Wang predicted China’s ultimate showdown with the US and its outcome: with its collectivism, authoritarianism and self-sacrifice (or altruism), China would ultimately win over the US founded on individualism, democracy and hedonism [26:389–390]. Wang could be credited as the earliest messenger for the couplet of “China is rising and US is declining,” which evolved into Xi Jinping’s mantra of today: “the rise of the East and the decline of the West.” Since taking power in 2012-13, Xi, the most powerful and self-assured leader since Mao Zedong under the PRC rule, has thrown down the gauntlet in front of the US and its democratic allies. Betting on the largest population, the second largest economy (China’s economy is already 25% larger than the US economy based upon the relative price of goods, according to Doshi [2:6]), and the third (or fourth, depending upon which method you choose, Chinese or American, inclusion or exclusion of Taiwan) largest territory, Xi has created a clear and present challenge to the US. This aggression was unequivocally epitomized in his de facto alliance with Putin through a joint declaration of the two Eurasian autocracies at the Beijing winter Olympics in February 2022 [14].

Since 2016 in the US, we have observed a similar paradigm shift from engagement to decoupling/deterrence/containment. Out of the five books analyzed, Economy offers the most comprehensive assessment about China’s ambition and challenge to the US. Economy’s book title, The World according to China, is dubious, if we consider that Xi Jinping is not equivalent to China. From the Chinese perspective, this is not a negligible difference and neither is the separation of the CCP from the Chinese. In fact, Haas disagreed with this approach to “clumsily attempting to drive a wedge between the Communist Party leadership and the Chinese people” [9:95]).

Economy details some significant achievements China has made both at home and abroad. According to her, “China’s economy will soon surpass that of the United States” [6:5]. China has capabilities and developed strategies to use its hard, soft, and sharp powers against the US in an existential competition. She describes how China has tried to export its authoritarian model, if not communism, to the world, to rewrite the rules of the game, and to “reorder the world order” for gaining the global centrality for itself on the world stage. Xi has clearly identified the US as the “biggest threat” to China’s development and security [6:27–28]. However, after carefully assessing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), technology (e.g., “Made in China 2025”), diplomacy, alliance, and the domestic strains at home, Economy concludes that “China does not appear prepared to supplant the United States as the world’s sole superpower” [6:27].

Economy intends to warn the complacent American public in a similar way to Thomas Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum and Peter Navarro [7; 21]. However, an alarmist style could easily fall into the trap of sensationalism in Chinese popular writings, which, besides commercial interest in an overcharged nationalistic environment, could be viewed as an often-used stratagem in Chinese statecraft: the empty fortress [19, 20]. Between Scylla and Charybdis, she has to phrase a strong message without being misperceived as defeatist and formulate a confident policy without inflating American-centric arrogance.

In her evaluation of BRI policy, Economy focuses on the “shelling out RMB” diplomacy (in Chinese it has a vulgar and unfortunate inference) encapsulated by the BRI, covering more than 140 countries in four continents and expanding to Digital Silk Road, Polar Silk Road and space roads [2:242]. If we apply cost-effective calculus, we see a “vanity project” [2:242] or a reckless money-losing political project as Kroenig also finds [14:190]). This egregious mismatch between China’s strategic goals and resources is especially risky for a country to indulge in an imperial overstretch before becoming a global empire [13]. Furthermore, Economy identifies China’s weaknesses from production chains, in which the Chinese companies, such as Huawei, are forced to pay a dear price or risk being shut out of the global market due to US prioritizing geostrategic interests over commercial ones. Although she does not encourage a complete decoupling between the US and China, Economy anticipates some amount of political, ideological, economic and technological decoupling. For others, like Haas, decoupling is unthinkable.

China as a Frenemy

Haas criticizes Trump administration’s “omnidirectional confrontation” posture as a losing strategy and proposes a “more constructive approach,” not a “binary ‘good vs. evil’ approach” [9:9]. He advises the US not “to stand in China’s way” [9:6] or defensively “blunt China’s progress” [9:7], but “both sides need to maintain an ability to co-exist within a heightened state of competition” [9:7]. Differing from the Trump administration, Haas does not think of Xi’s China as an existential threat to US but rather, as a potential partner [9:16]. He wants to convince us that the US has enough enduring strengths to be confident (a “confident strategy”), but should concede to China’s primacy in East Asia, abide by non-intervention to China’s domestic political system, and finally give up Pax Americana. He proposes “competitive interdependence” for the US-China relationship and advises US to look inward “to concentrate more on nurturing its own progress”: “America cannot choose China’s path; America can only control its own.” [9:7] Haas warns against the “ten-foot-tall syndrome” that exaggerates China’s strength; however, he is ready to concede “China’s rise as a peer competitor poses the most direct test of American policy in decades” [9:3–5]: “The United States needs to learn to coexist with a powerful China. At the same time, the United States needs to help China realize the boundaries of where it can pursue a greater role for itself without coming into conflict with vital American interests and values, and where it cannot.” [9:65] This advice to not challenge China’s domestic political system [9:86] is to some extent ignoring the heterogenous and incompatible governance and values between the two countries as well as the militaristic nature of the totalitarian system. Politically, it also provides ample ground for the Trump supporters to critique the “engagement policy,” “responsible stake holder” and G2 Condominium, important ideas under various administrations before Trump. There is perhaps wishful thinking in the book as seen with these phrases: “symbiotic relationship”, “virtuous cycle”, “new equilibrium for the relationship” and “affirmative agenda with Beijing”, etc. Understandably, for some critics, this is simply the continuation of an appeasement policy.

The deep contradiction of Haas’ proposal lies in that on the one hand, he intends to defend American credibility abroad and build an American “united front” to resist China’s aggressive demands; on the other hand, his proposed “balance of power” policy would make some countries a pawn on the American strategic chessboard and sow doubts in the mind of foreign leaders, especially those from small Asian countries, about US reliability when discussing giving up its military primacy in East Asia. Haas tries to be balanced by walking the middle road; however, his spatial distance from his perceived two ends does not guarantee his arrival at a better perspective, because a new synthesis often draws positive ingredients from the opposing sides and transcends and reconciles both the original thesis and its anti-thesis (See, for example, Doshi’s discussing “oppositional” and “dialectical” unity [9:177]). Instead, his superficially balanced neutrality leads to a moral equivalence: He suggests that the US and China need to understand each other’s ambition, be ready to accept each other’s “progress,” and the US has to see its own faults even as it has the urge to criticize China’s failings. Haas treats the US and China as in the exclusive G2 Club (although he denies the G2 concept) above other middle great powers (including American democratic allies such as U.K., Germany, France and Japan), which gives China a false sense of parity with the US that Xi has been calling for a “new type relationship of great powers.” The following argument from Haas certainly would not be easily accepted by many people: “They both likely will rise or fall in tandem” [9:41]. Nevertheless, the engagement policy has a strong lingering pull. [19, 20]

China’s Grand Strategy

Haas acknowledges China’s strategic ambitions, but limits them to three “core interests”: sovereignty, security, and development [9:54], downplaying its ideological nature [9:51–52]. He wants to “keep China inside the tent” [9:88], not making an enemy out of a competitor [9:63]. In contrast, Economy’s “bigger tent” [6:219], which is bigger than American traditional allies, has expanded to include “a broader range of partners and potential allies”, looking for support and allies in the developing countries. Obviously, this bigger tent does not include China, who is its target. Rush Doshi goes one step further by arguing that China has viewed the US as “the greatest threat” and “main adversary” and formulated a “grand strategy to displace American order.” In his book entitled The Long Game, he sees China following a “template” or a “coherent scheme” to execute strategies of displacement in three steps: the first one (1989–2008) was “to quietly blunt American power over China,” the second (2008–2016) “sought to build the foundation for regional hegemony in Asia,” and the third (2016 to present) “expands its blunting and building efforts worldwide to displace the United States as the global leader” [2:4, italic original]. While Doshi’s highlighting of heightened antagonism from China toward the United States is more sober than Haas’s assessment, it is still plagued by a common misperception seen in Economy and Haas, namely taking Chinese commentators’ sensationalism (often verging on yellow journalism such as in The Global Times) at its face value. The perceived long game of China could ultimately be a cognitive blind spot.

Doshi defines “grand strategy as a state theory of how it can achieve its strategic objectives that is intentional, coordinated, and implemented across multiple means of statecraft—military, economic, and political.” As a believer of China’s grand strategy, Doshi tries to convince the skeptics by “applying a unique social-scientific approach” and relying on “a large trove of rarely cited or previously inaccessible Chinese texts” [2:8]. While not denying the value of official documents and speeches from Chinese leaders, as a scholar who spent his first half of life in China, I cannot easily ignore the persistent gap between promise and performance in Communist official ideological propaganda. If fact, Chinese-style Gargantuan-mania (being crazy for big) is deeply rooted in Marxist ideology of historical and dialectical materialism. Doshi is aware of the ideological origin of China’s strategic thinking from Leninism [2:26–27]. However, under Chap. 2, “The Party Leads Everything,” he has argued: “Together, with leadership at the top and institutional penetration virtually all the way through to the bottom, the Party has the ability not only to coordinate and direct state behavior but, in many cases, to monitor it. This is by design” (p. 36). Tragically, the CCP’s confidence in grasping the “red lining” of historical law, teleology, determinism, and historicism often ends up with Quixotism, utopianism and fanaticism in the Communist grand social engineering (the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, the Family Planning, and Xi’s abrupt reversal of Reform and Opening are examples). Doshi compares today’s debate on China’s grand strategy to Crowe’s discussion on the German strategy a century ago [2:16], of which Haas is well aware [9:126–127]. Both Doshi and Haas do have a point to warn the world about the imminent danger from China, but I must point out that, as in the German case, “the politics of cultural despair” (the namesake for Fritz Stern’s book on “a study in the rise of the Germanic ideology” [24]) has also played an important role in China’s restless and unsuccessful search for identity. To be fair, Economy, Haas and Doshi have seen China’s perennial internal crises and recent setbacks on the world stage; but it is problematic for Doshi to credit some of China’s obvious failures as rationality and strategic planning. For example, Doshi believes that the “traumatic trifecta of Tiananmen Square, the Gulf War, and the Soviet collapse gave rise to China’s first displacement strategy” [2:44]; he also believes that the new traumatic trifecta of the 2008 financial crisis, Trump’s trade war and COVID-19 pandemic has worked to China’s favor. We can argue that all these six events shocked the regime to its core and caused everlasting legitimacy crisis (the ghosts of Tiananmen massacre have been haunted the regime for more than three decades). As a matter of fact, the 2008 financial crisis caused the Chinese government to pump trillions of yuan into the economy and had created bubbles in the stock market and real estate [1]. While the West has acquired more instruments to cope with the pandemic, China has been struggling with vaccinations and its ongoing lockdowns have been unscientific, chaotic, brutal and unsustainable. Thus, the argument that China has a coherent grand strategy does not have much evidence to support it.

The Power of Liberal Democracies and Open Order

Doshi [2:332–333] does have made effort to balance his alarmist argument by concluding his book with a discussion on the rise and fall of five rounds of American “declinism”. He (2:334) wrote: “[P]olicymakers must resist the common declinist tendency to see US competitors as ten feet tall and instead calibrate a response that spurs innovation without stoking fear and prejudice.” At this point, we will bring three generalists, Kronenig, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper into my discussion of if we can still find confidence in the American system and its ability to defend liberal democracy, both at home and on the world stage, against the techno-authoritarian challenge of China.

Lissner and Rapp-Hooper in their book An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for the Twenty-First-Century Order argue that: “The liberal international order will not survive the tectonic movements under way” [18:61]. They claim: “The drawbacks of a persistently liberal-universalist strategy would likely come in the form of overreach, as policymakers devote resources to reshaping states whose characters cannot be transformed in Washington” [18:118]. They continue, “In all, the United States and its allies can secure a favorable and accessible future order, despite the dusk of the liberal international order. Guaranteeing an open order despite opposing forces of closure, however, will require a lucid American vision alongside shrewd statecraft” [18:63]. They prescribe “the possibility for an American strategy that promotes openness—free access to the global commons, economic exchange, information flow, and security cooperation—without insisting upon the spread of liberal democratic governance as a prerequisite” [18:28]. Sadly, with a belief that “China is a power in unequivocal ascendance” [18:58] and the US acknowledges “sundown on the unipolar era” [18:119], their retreat from a liberal global order to an open system is an unnecessary concession to China by renouncing regime type as a requirement for open governance and policy of regime change [18:101]. In fact, the authors point out with an error that: “Advanced economies with significant technological market share, the United States and its allies possess more than 28 times (sic!) China’s overall GDP and exceeds its per capita wealth by a multiple of 4.5” [18:136].

The fundamental flaw in Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s book lies in the artificial separation of openness from liberalism, openness as “a model for international, not domestic governance” [18:98]. As argued by Karl Popper, at the regime level or global governance, openness or “open society” is an essential part and parcel of liberalism [23]. If one tries to downplay liberalism and emphasize openness as a “shrewd statecraft,” it has overshadowed the holistic vision of liberalism. To phrase US-China competition/confrontation as openness vs. closure, we can easily lose sight of the expansive and dynamic nature of China’s global reach, for example, the BRI. To advocate global openness with “exceptions” (e.g., migration in Lissner and Rapp-Hooper [18:116]) and not to support domestic liberal regimes in the world can be a contradiction at best and a hypocrisy at worst. Lissner and Rapp-Hooper [18:117] explain that: “The magnitude of American power affords some space for hypocrisy”. Contrary to their realist assessment, at this historical juncture, we may actually have been witnessing the ongoing transition from a “liberal international order” to a “liberal global order”: the former applies to the US-led “free world”/ “democratic alliance,” the latter will be the lingua franca for an emerging new world.

At the dawn of post-WWII liberal international order, as described by the historian Tuchman [25], China under Chiang Kai-shek failed to live up to FDR’s expectation to become a key contributor in the new world order as one of the “Four Policemen.” Now at the twilight (not “dusk” used by Lissner and Rapp-Hooper, but the moment before sunrise) of a liberal global order, China’s oligarchic leadership ignored the second invitation from four American administrations to work with the US (such as G2) on liberalization and democratization. Although China has been challenging the American-led liberal order, but it will not displace the liberal international order. In fact, my research has convinced me that Xi’s power has already started to diminish after the crash of the stock market in the summer of 2015.

For example, as Doshi has described, China under Jiang Zemin started “blue sea navy” and “sea control” strategy but later followed “sea denial” strategy [2:11; also see: 6:51]. By contrast, Xi’s continental, inward-looking BRI has been a proactive strategy in response to the containment of maritime countries [Haas 9:32–33], especially the reaction and consolidation of the first island chain (in particular Japan and Taiwan with American intensifying support), rather than a trump card against the US. On this point, I agree with Kroenig [14:190], who said: “BRI is in part a sign of Chinese weakness, not strength. Boxed in from expanding in the East by America and its allies, the expansionist CCP had no choice but to look west to Central Asia.” The American global geostrategic realignment completed with the Indo-Pacific strategy has created a donut-structure in which the maritime ring of democratic countries and their allies has successfully surrounded the Eurasian authoritarian core based upon the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This new realignment and the formulation of an antagonistic rivalry has become the important foundation for our understanding of US-China interactions.

The Democratic Advantage and Democracy’s Neglected Vulnerability

Kroenig shows us the evolution from “China as a global superpower,” a power transition from US to China, and a “post-American world” and debunks the authoritarian advantage in foreign policy arguing: “[D]emocracies enjoyed a built-in advantage in long-run geopolitical competitions.” [14:3] He continues to argue that: “[D]emocratic countries are better able to amass power, wealth, and influence on the world stage than their autocratic competitors. Democracy is a force multiplier that helps states punch above their weight in international geopolitics” [14:4]. In his conclusion, he [14:215] states: “Democracy is the best machine ever invented for generating enormous state wealth, influence, power, and prestige on the international stage. Indeed, it is difficult if not impossible to achieve lasting global mastery without it.” In addition to its instrumental values and premium values (for example, brain gain for America from other countries’ brain drain, and capital gain out of capital flight from autocratic states), a liberal democratic republic has the most important intrinsic value as an effective organizational mechanism for political governance: to overcome both the prisoners’ dilemma (to end anarchy) and the dictators’ dilemma (to end autocracy and keep power under check) [15, 16]. He rejects the “long game” argument by explaining: “[P]roponents of autocratic advantage theory state that autocracies can make long-term plans and stick to them. But theory and history suggest that autocracies are erratic strategic decision-makers” [14:193]. Kroenig offer us an even longer perspective from the vantagepoint of democratic development: “[T]he history of Western civilization can be thought of as the passing of the torch of liberal hegemony from Athens to Rome, to Venice, Amsterdam, and London, and on to its current resting place in Washington, DC” [14:4]. The US victories in the World War II and the Cold War, the ensuing American “unipolar moment” and the Third Wave of Democracy must have astounded China, one of the five surviving communist countries, with a strong message: “the end of history” [also see: 11; 8; 19]. Stepping into the shoes of Chinese leaders with heightening anxiety in the era of democratization and globalization, we can easily understand that they believe a long, longer game had been concocted by the US to subjugate China.

To build his theory of democratic advantage, Kroenig [14:8] reviews seven cases of democracy vs. autocracy in the history of more than two thousand years (his democracy is more an open system which covers both democracy and republic in content) [14:18]. If we can distinguish these two forms of system under the terminology of Aristotle, after the creation of the representative democracy in the American revolution, the rise of market economy, and the expansion of enfranchisement, a liberal democracy has become a new synthesis. Like Doshi, Kroenig follows the social scientific research design and builds a falsifiable theory by betting on the highly likely collapse of Chinese communist regime [14:194] to be the next validating case.

Even if history follows the course predicted by Kroenig, his proposition still needs to stand the test of falsification. Instead of waiting for the “black swan,” we can move one step closer to a scientific theory by examining a counter example that a democracy was defeated by an autocracy of comparable power, for example, France vs. Germany in 1940 during the World War Two. Due to space limitation, I can only point out that the immobilisme resulting from a parliamentary system plus multi-party system reminds us the vulnerability of democracy in maintaining the public good (such as national defense). Under American presidentialism, Le Mal Français is called deadlock, gridlock, institutional sclerosis [22] or democratic sclerosis [4]. In reflecting upon American domestic governance, Haas [11:39–40] does not realize this danger. His policy prescription needs to appreciate of the pluralistic and diverse American society with talented immigrants; and to invest in education, including international/area studies, for Americans’ better understanding of the world. Even though Lissner and Rapp-Hooper had a better understanding of human capital [18:122–123], as they were suggesting for “building strength at home” [18:5–6], they failed to ask how we can muster strength to build. For example, they did not quite reconcile the tensions between political independence of nations and global openness, such as the advocacy for openness/transparency and the insulation of US foreign policy, and the close techno-state partnership being a strength for China but a failure for the US. Kroenig makes a similar mistake focusing too much on the hardware, especially weapons [14:132–133]. As clearly detected by Haas [9:186–187], some American strategists might have already been entrapped by the Chinese deceptive stratagem of “empty fortress” (“rational irrationality” in Western parlance) to demand more guns at the cost of butter, namely infrastructure and human infrastructure (e.g., education and health) in the US.

Economy [6:28] rightly warns the United States not to fall into a dyadic zero-sum game with China that could isolate the US from its allies and partners. “Instead,” she argues, “the fundamental challenge presented by China is to the broader values, norms, and institutions that underpin the current rule-based order.” Unfortunately, Xi has been advocating for “a global community of shared future,” a “win-win cooperation”; and “as world powers with rich cultural and historical heritage” claiming “long-standing traditions of democracy” with Russia [11]. This advocacy for “democratizing international relations” allows Xi to occupy the moral high ground in the global discourse [6:8–9]. In contrast, many American leaders and thinkers are defending the status quo, being restricted by an American-centric straightjacket. For example, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper [18:11] believe that “The term ‘liberal international order’ has always served as a shorthand for a fairly benign form of US hegemony.” Such a historic myopia writes off Pax Britannica too easily. The same ignorance about the “Cold War consensus”, “particularly during the early decades of US-USSR rivalry” overemphasized the “unity” without adequate attention to McCarthyism that left deep wounds in American society. Similar to McCarthyism [3:22, 49, 66], under Trump, the debate on China risked going astray into paranoia. The veteran diplomat George Kennan [12:228] deplored that the witch hunt under McCarthyism caused the purge of a generation of “China Hands” and implanted “a lasting doubt” into his consciousness about “the adequacy of our political system”. Today we have similar weaknesses with both historical myopia and American-centric analysis. For example, when the US has failed to ratify UNCLOS for four decades, it is counterproductive to use it over South China Sea dispute [18:142–143]. Furthermore, Doshi’s terminology of “American liberal order,” “American order,” “US order,” and “US hegemony” loses the last thin internationalist veneer and refocuses the urgent issue of “China’s subverting the liberal order” as the “US order being displaced by the China order” [2:329]. Similarly, Kroenig uses the terms “American leadership”, American “benevolent hegemony,” ‘the global pecking order,” “global mastery,” “liberal leviathan,” and “American era”. This is not the best strategy to spread American soft power, and the Chinese propogandists love to exploit this for their “sharp power.”

Conclusion

Based upon the track record, while its democracy and strategic position has gone through numerous crises, the United States has emerged stronger and smarter. As Walter Lippmann [17] assured Americans, the good society is a free society which will not be vanquished by the “providential state” with a command economy and repressive politics. Given a reviving authoritarian/totalitarian political economy, many Americans seem inclined toward a direction of moral equivalence and self-doubt. Liberal democratic political economy is in danger or without strong advocates. Furthermore, a schizophrenia between self-aggrandizement and self-defeatism hampered many analysts from understanding the internal dynamics within China and the defensive/paranoid nature of China’s policy. Kroenig has correctly realized that autocracies’ “biggest security threat comes from their own people” [14:222], as evidenced by China’s bigger spending on internal security (“stability-maintenance”) than national defense. However, the profiled authors have given up on efforts to democratize China’s regime, which if we can draw a lesson from the US victory over USSR in the Cold War, such an abandonment may lose an effective strategy. At Biden’s Summit for Democracy (2021), no representative was invited from the Chinese overseas democracy movement. This lack of Chinese participation shows up again when Doshi made several Chinese transliteration errors and cited two wrong cases: the submarine incident on [2:83] was nothing more than a blunder due to lack of training; and Zheng Min and Zheng Ming are the same person [2:96–97].

The ultimate goal for the United States is a liberal, democratic, just, progressive and sustainable global order, which cannot easily be categorized as an American Order versus the China Order, the latter as a challenger and replacement. Almost all the profiled authors have emphasized that to achieve the public good of global governance and order, American allies are essential. However, it would be wrong-headed to pursue a “single organization” or “standing organization,” namely democratic allies and partners form ‘a new Alliance of Free Nations” [14:221]. To consolidate a democratic alliance against the autocracies in a trench war is not a way forward, either. To tear down the Bamboo Curtain and to penetrate the bamboo network [27], the starting point lies in the idea of “rhizome” and “rhizomatic network.” According to Deleuze and Guattari [5:21–22], a rhizome as subterranean stem is different from roots and radicles as in a tree (which is dominant and hierarchical, as advocated by American-centric strategists). Its principles of connection, heterogeneity, and multiplicity open up multiple entryways and constitute a contrast to unity and “either-or dichotomy.” Although Lissner and Rapp-Hooper [18:87] do not agree that “autocracies vs. democracies” is the leitmotif of global rivalry, and Haas does not see an ideological competition, President Biden’s characterization of “democracy versus autocracy’ as the major battle of the 21st century is more accurate. However, in this human progress, the US must uphold strong democratic ideals and use this strength to build a strong network of allies. As the whole world has been thrown into a once-a-century comprehensive crisis (a mixture of pandemic, recession and war), we will soon see which system, democracy or autocracy, will survive better in this humongous stress test.

Professor Ming Xia

Ming Xia is a Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and Global Affairs, the College of Staten Island, the City University of New York and a doctoral faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his degrees from Fudan University and Temple University. He once taught at Fudan University and served as a residential fellow at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the George Washington University(2003), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2004), the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore (2004 and 2011) and the Asian Research Institute at NUS (2012). He is the author of The Dual Developmental State (2000), The People’s Congresses and Governance in China (2008), Political Venus (2012, in Chinese) and Empire of the Red Sun (2015 in Chinese). He is a co-editor of The Crown of Thorn: Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Peace Prize (in Chinese 2010) and the editor of Chen Ping’s The Age of Plunder: The 2008 Economic Crisis as a Turning Point in Chinese History and World Civilization (2016). He is a co-producer of an HBO Oscar-nominated documentary movie, "China’s Unnatural Disaster" (2009) and the historical advisor/translator for the documentary movie Dream against the World: Mu Xin (2015). He was included consecutively to the "Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals” from 2009 to 2013, then in 2015 and 2017. Most Recent Publications: “Triangulating Human Political Conditions and Reorienting Political Development in China,” Journal of Chinese Governance, Vol. 1, Issue 3, 2016, pp. 405–426. “Movement and Migration” in Handbook on Human Rights in China, ed. by Sarah Biddulph and Joshua Rosenzweig, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019. “A China Scholar’s Rendezvous with Islam,” in Choosing Asian-America: A New York Reader, edited by Russell Leung, 2017 September CUNU Forum, Asian American and Asian Research Institute, the City University of New York. Book Editor for CHEN Ping, The Age of Plunder: The 2008 Economic Crisis as a Turning Point in Chinese History and World Civilization (Hong Kong: iSun Affairs Limited, 2016, pp. 287). “Media Control as Stability Maintenance: The Case of Sichuan Earthquake” in Media at Work in India and China: Discovering and Dissecting (edited by Robin Jeffrey and Ronojoy Sen), New Delhi, India: Sage, 2015, pp. 245–270. “Communist Oligarchy and Oligarchic Transition in China,” in Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne, ed., China’s Transition from Communism: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 34–55, 2015. Book review: The Politics of Controlling Organized Crime in Greater China by Sonny Shiu-hing Luo, The China Quarterly, Volume 226 / June 2016, pp 571–573. Review Essay:” See No Evil: A Tailored Reality?” A Review of Selling Sex Overseas by Ko-lin Chin and James Finchenauer, CUNY Forum: Asian American /Asian Studies, Vol. 1:3, Fall & Winter 2015–2016, August 2015, pp. 101–106. Book Review: Chinese Politics and Government: Power, ideology, and organization by Sujian Guo (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), Jan. 2016, Journal of Chinese Political Science. Personal Homepage: www.dr-ming-xia.org. Office Phone: 1-718-982-3197. Email: Ming.xia@csi.cuny.edu.

Disclaimer

I hereby disclose that there is no conflict of interest in writing this article.