US, China playing dangerous game as battle of wills risks boiling over

The US and China appear to be playing different games even as they try to navigate the increasingly complex great power contest
The real test of national and global leadership in the years ahead will not be how they manage the international order but how they avoid further disorder

Andrew Sheng

Published: 10:00pm, 3 Dec 2021

Why you can trust SCMP

Coming back from a trip to Europe suggested to me that the US-China rivalry was not headline news within Europe. Europe appeared more concerned with the urgent job of economic recovery amid the emergence of the Omicron variant that is leading to more lockdowns. Protests in Rotterdam and elsewhere showed that some are rebelling against further restrictions to their ability to socialise.

Back in Asia, the news is focused on the US-China rivalry, including possible boycotts of next year’s Winter Olympics or the Women’s Tennis Association’s suspension of international tennis events in China. What happens to individuals such as tennis star Peng Shuai, therefore, has an impact on international relations.

How much of the tension is media-generated rather than hard-nosed competition across all fronts between the two largest powers on the planet? The latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine headlines the US-China rivalry aptly: “The Divided World: America’s Cold Wars”.

By implication, despite US President Joe Biden’s pledge in his recent UN address that the United States was “not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs”, the question remains whether China is willing to accede to America’s demands on issues such as Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan.

What game is being played by the protagonists? A Dutch friend observed that China was playing weiqi while Europe – including Russia – was playing grandmaster chess and the US was playing poker.

Weiqi, also known by its Japanese name go, is a board game with a 19-by-19 grid between two players. The idea is that whoever encircles the opponent’s pieces captures those pieces and wins by finally surrounding the opponent.

In contrast, chess has an 8-by-8 board with each side having 16 pieces. The aim is capturing the king, who is defended by one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops and eight pawns with defined rules of movement.

The game of poker is different from the other two because it involves multiple players using a standard deck of cards. There are elements of chance and escalated bets that evolve around strategies of bluffing as opponents assess the others’ card in determining whether to stay in the game.

All three are games of strategy in which psychology plays as much a role as hard assets. Even these complicated games have been reduced by superfast computers to predictable outcomes; in 2016, Google’s DeepMind programme AlphaGo beat two of the world’s top go players.

Google is using football to train its next wave of AI technology

The great power game is infinitely more complicated, with nearly 200 nations in play, plus non-state actors which can influence how each player moves and positions itself.

The US, China and European Union combined account for about half of world GDP in purchasing power parity terms, with that figure rising to nearly three-quarters of global GDP if one adds the other leading countries – including India, Japan, Russia, Britain, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico.

Add in the fact that the top six plus Pakistan, North Korea and Israel are in the nuclear weapons club and the great power game becomes a lethal one.

Henry Kissinger, the architect of the US-China detente in the 1970s, posed important questions for the unfolding US-China rivalry as one in which “both were too large to be dominated, too special to be transformed and too necessary to each other to afford isolation”.

He said the “appropriate label for the Sino-American relationship is less partnership than ‘co-evolution’”, because “neither is capable of defining terms for victory in a war or in a Cold War type of conflict”.

The conventional wisdom is that China is close to parity with the US in economic power, is not quite there in financial power and is distinctly behind in military and soft power. This is a psychological test of wills in which the rest of the world is unwilling as yet to choose sides.

Kissinger said that “the United States is more focused on overwhelming military power, China on decisive psychological impact. Sooner or later, one side or the other would miscalculate”.

Kissinger is also spot on in that in any rational competition, only the US is responsible for restoring its infrastructure, manufacturing and domestic social capital to bolster its economic and technological competitiveness.

Taiwan role expected for China’s second Type 075 landing helicopter dock

But the danger is that emotional factors, particularly on questions of values, provoke what each player sees as a decisive test of wills that could escalate into hot conflict.

Thus, it will take statesmanlike leadership by US and Chinese leaders to ensure such miscalculations do not occur. The best the US-China relationship could hope for is detente.

As we peer into 2022, it is safe to say that there will be no big policy breakthroughs from any of the big players, only more “steady as she goes” muddling through.

The real test of national and global leadership in the years ahead will not be how they manage the international order but how they avoid further disorder.

Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective