China is not Imperial Germany of the 21st century
Robert Dujarric says those who draw parallels between East Asia today and Europe in 1914 before the first world war often miss the critical differences. China is not Imperial Germany
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," wrote Leo Tolstoy. The same might be said of peace and war (to invert the order of the author's most famous novel). Though there are multiple reasons for peace, to some extent all peaceful international environments are similar.
Every war, however, has unique characteristics, despite efforts to categorise them based on various parameters (causes, duration, geographic scope, endings and so on). Therefore, if a violent struggle erupts in Asia, it will not be a carbon copy of the first world war. Moreover, as Carl von Clausewitz wrote, war is highly unpredictable. Foreseeing how a major war in East Asia would be conducted and how it would end is more an exercise in astrology than in science.
But when observers draw parallels between East Asia today and Europe a century ago, they focus on how the first world war started rather than on how it ended. Sarajevo, not Versailles, is what attracts the attention.
Broadly speaking, these comparisons fall into two camps.
One is driven by what we could call the Sarajevo Axiom. It posits that the governments of all the great and smaller powers, countless disputes involving the Balkans and colonial claims, the alliance systems and a lack of understanding of how destructive war had become allowed the assassination of the heir to the crowns of the dual monarchy to escalate into the first world war.
Using this lens, many analysts look at East Asia and see disputes over the Senkaku islands - known in China as the Diaoyu Islands and in Taiwan as the Diaoyutai - the conflicting claims of China, Taiwan, and several Southeast Asian states in the South China Sea, Beijing's contention that it should control Taiwan, tensions between Beijing and Washington over incompatible interpretations of the law of the sea, disturbances in Xinjiang and Tibet and the continuing quasi-permanent crises involving North Korea.
When the alliances between the United States and its Northeast Asian partners (Japan, South Korea; and Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act) and Southeast Asian allies are added to the equation, these analysts see a great resemblance with Europe 100 years after the archduke's killing in Bosnia.