China-US relations: is Beijing working a ‘long game’ to replace America as dominant world power?

New book by Rush Doshi argues that, in the wake of Brexit, the election of Trump and the pandemic, China has been building foundations for its own world order

China does not want to fall into a spiral of conflict but at the same time does not fear confrontation on core issues, says Chinese analyst

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Published: 5:00am, 5 Aug 2021Updated: 9:15am, 5 Aug 2021

China and the US have been at loggerheads on almost all fronts, but with tensions continuing into the Joe Biden presidency, where is the relationship heading? After US deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman’s visit to Tianjin last week, and the Washington debut of China’s new envoy to the US Qin Gang, this series aims to check the temperature of bilateral relations. In this article, Sarah Zheng looks into how the US sees Beijing’s efforts to build up its own world order.

Democrats and Republicans may well agree on one thing – that China wants to displace the United States in the global order.

Or at least that is the view put forth by Rush Doshi in his new book, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, which argues that China has been explicitly undermining the US global position and building the foundations for its own world order in the aftermath of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump as president in the US and the Covid-19 pandemic.

“If there are two paths to hegemony – a regional one and a global one – China is now pursuing both,” writes Doshi, the China director for US President Joe Biden’s National Security Council.

“It is clear, then, that China is the most significant competitor that the United States has faced and that the way Washington handles its emergence to superpower status will shape the course of the next century.”

Doshi’s book, written before he joined the Biden administration and already well received by prominent China scholars in the US, is a window into how one of the White House’s most senior officials views Beijing’s long-term strategic intentions at a time of escalating tensions and Biden’s review of America’s China policy.

As one of the younger members of Biden’s team, Doshi is part of the slew of Asia experts and veteran advisers in the administration supportive of a more hardline policy to compete with an increasingly assertive China, a view also shared by officials such the National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell.

SCMP Series

China and the US: where is the relationship heading?

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