US-China Rivalry and Power Transition

LESSON METADATA

SECTION 0 — Why This Lesson Exists

The central puzzle of contemporary international order is whether the relative decline of the United States and the rise of China must culminate in great-power war, or whether the transition can be managed without catastrophic violence. This is not merely an empirical question about two states; it is a theoretical question about the relationship between material power shifts and systemic stability. The lesson takes as its object the US-China rivalry as the paradigmatic case of power transition in the twenty-first century, and asks students to evaluate competing theoretical accounts—power transition theory, offensive realism, Chinese relational and moral realism, interdependence theory, and the engagement-containment debate—against evidence from trade, technology, military spending, and the Taiwan flashpoint. The puzzle is deliberately framed from an African vantage point: African states are not bystanders to this rivalry but are increasingly the terrain on which it is contested, through debt, infrastructure, digital networks, and security partnerships. What the African perspective reveals that the others miss is that bipolar competition is experienced not as an abstract systemic shift but as a set of concrete constraints and opportunities that reshape domestic politics, fiscal space, and strategic autonomy across the continent.

The theoretical stakes are high because each framework carries different implications for policy and for the probability of war. Organski’s power transition theory (1958) posits that the international system is hierarchical and that war becomes likely when a challenger approaches the dominant power’s capabilities and is dissatisfied with the status quo distribution of benefits. Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” (2017) popularized this logic, cataloguing sixteen cases of rising-power challenge and finding war in twelve. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism (2001, 2014) goes further: great powers are structurally compelled to maximize relative power, and a rising China will inevitably seek regional hegemony, provoking US resistance. Both frameworks treat conflict as structurally overdetermined. Against them, Chinese scholars offer alternative ontologies. Qin Yaqing’s relational theory (2018) locates order in relationships rather than in material power; Yan Xuetong’s moral realism (2011) argues that legitimacy and moral leadership, not merely capability, determine which state leads; Zhao Tingyang’s Tianxia (2021) proposes a world order built on inclusive relationality rather than zero-sum competition. These are not mere propaganda; they are serious theoretical traditions with distinct scope conditions and empirical referents.

The economic dimension complicates every theoretical prediction. L18 established that interdependence creates both vulnerability and restraint. The US-China economic relationship—deeply integrated supply chains, mutual investment, and dollar-denominated trade—has been described as too big to fail, yet also as a source of strategic risk. Friedberg (2018) argues that engagement failed to liberalize China and that the United States must now adopt a strategy of competitive containment, including decoupling in sensitive sectors. The “new cold war” framing implies a bipolar division of the global economy into competing blocs. But the evidence is mixed: trade volumes remained high even during tariff escalation, and third countries—especially in Africa and Southeast Asia—have become critical nodes in rerouted supply chains. The question is whether interdependence stabilizes or destabilizes, and under what conditions.

Taiwan is the most concrete and dangerous flashpoint. The island sits at the intersection of power transition, security dilemma, and domestic politics in both Beijing and Washington. A power-transition reading sees Taiwan as the test of whether the challenger can revise the status quo; an offensive-realist reading sees it as the geographic anchor of US containment; a relational reading sees it as a relationship that must be managed through mutual recognition rather than coercion. The risk of war is not abstract: military exercises, gray-zone coercion, and alliance commitments (AUKUS, Quad) have raised the temperature. The lesson’s problem pair asks students to apply both power transition and security dilemma frameworks to the Taiwan Strait.

The African perspective is primary because it reveals what the other four occlude. African states experience the rivalry as a set of structural pressures: debt distress linked to Chinese lending and Western conditionality; competition for critical minerals; digital infrastructure choices between Huawei and Western vendors; and security partnerships that import great-power competition into fragile states. Yet African agency is real: multi-alignment, the African Continental Free Trade Area, and collective bargaining through the African Union offer strategies for preserving autonomy. Grovogui, Mbembe, Bayart, Mamdani, and others have theorized this condition as extraversion, rhizomatic power, and the politics of the belly—frameworks that do not reduce African states to pawns. The African vantage point shows that the “US-China rivalry” is not only a bilateral or systemic phenomenon but a transnational one that reconfigures sovereignty, development, and security across the Global South.

By the end of this lesson, the student will be able to: (1) state and compare the causal mechanisms of power transition theory, offensive realism, and Chinese relational and moral realism; (2) specify the scope conditions under which each predicts war or peace; (3) reconstruct how each of the five perspectives frames the rivalry; (4) apply these frameworks to the 2018-2024 trade and technology war and to the Taiwan flashpoint; and (5) identify falsifiers that would discriminate among the theories. The lesson is designed for graduate-level evaluation, not mere description: every claim must be tied to a mechanism, and every theory must be presented with its strongest counterargument.

SECTION 1 — Pre-Class Priming

1.1 Retrieval warm-up

1. According to structural realism (L5), what is the primary determinant of state behavior, and how does this differ from classical realism’s emphasis on human nature?
2. What are the three pillars of the post-1945 liberal international order (L13), and what does the “contemporary transition” (L14) suggest about their durability?
3. How does the “contemporary transition” framework (L14) distinguish between a change in the distribution of power and a change in the rules of the international order?
4. Under what conditions does economic interdependence reduce the probability of war, and under what conditions does it increase it (L18)?
5. What is the security dilemma, and why does it make cooperation difficult even between states with no aggressive intentions (L5)?
6. What is hegemonic stability theory, and what does its decline imply for global governance (L13, L14)?

1.2 Orientation questions

1. Does China’s rise necessarily produce war with the United States, or can the transition be managed?
2. How do Chinese theoretical traditions challenge the Western assumption that power transitions are zero-sum?
3. Is economic interdependence between the US and China a stabilizer or a source of vulnerability?
4. What would have to be true for the “engagement” strategy to be judged a success or a failure?

1.3 Vocabulary pre-teach

• Power transition theory: A theory (Organski 1958) holding that the international system is hierarchical and that war becomes most likely when a rising challenger approaches parity with the dominant power and is dissatisfied with the status quo distribution of benefits.
• Thucydides Trap: Allison’s (2017) term for the structural tendency toward war when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power; derived from Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War.
• Offensive realism: Mearsheimer’s (2001) theory that great powers are structurally compelled to maximize relative power and seek regional hegemony, making intense security competition inevitable.
• Relational theory (guanxi): Qin Yaqing’s (2018) framework locating international order in social relationships and processes rather than in material power distributions.
• Moral realism: Yan Xuetong’s (2011) argument that legitimacy, moral leadership, and political authority—not merely capability—determine which state can lead the international order.
• Tianxia: Zhao Tingyang’s (2021) concept of a world order built on inclusive relationality and universal benefit rather than zero-sum competition among sovereign states.
• Security dilemma: The condition in which one state’s efforts to increase its security decrease the security of others, potentially producing arms races and conflict even without aggressive intent.
• Engagement vs. containment: The debate over whether to integrate China into the liberal order (engagement) or to limit its power (containment); Friedberg (2018) argues engagement failed.
• Decoupling: The partial or full separation of US and Chinese economies in sensitive sectors such as semiconductors, telecommunications, and critical minerals.
• Gray-zone coercion: Actions below the threshold of armed conflict—cyber operations, economic pressure, maritime militia—that advance strategic objectives without triggering war.
• Multi-alignment: The strategy of maintaining productive relationships with multiple great powers simultaneously rather than choosing a single patron.
• Extraversion: Bayart’s concept describing how African states have historically engaged external powers to secure resources and legitimacy, a framework that illuminates contemporary multi-alignment.

SECTION 2 — LESSON CORE

2.1 Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, the student will be able to:

1. Explain the causal mechanism of power transition theory as formulated by A.F.K. Organski and refined by Jacek Kugler, including the role of differential growth rates, the “danger zone” of approaching parity, and the critical distinction between power transition and power dissatisfaction, and identify the scope conditions under which the theory predicts major war rather than peaceful adjustment. (Bloom: comprehension/analysis)

2. Analyze how Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” framing has shaped policy discourse in both Washington and Beijing, distinguishing Allison’s stronger, more deterministic claim from Organski’s original conditional argument, and evaluating whether the framing functions as an analytical tool or as a self-fulfilling prophecy that narrows the space for diplomatic creativity. (Bloom: analysis/evaluation)

3. Evaluate the empirical foundations of the power-transition research program against the principal critiques—Jack Levy’s finding that hegemonic wars are historically rare, Steve Chan’s challenge to the theory’s case selection and its application to China, and the security-dilemma literature’s argument that structural pressures do not mechanically produce war—rendering a reasoned judgment about the theory’s predictive validity. (Bloom: evaluation)

4. Apply power transition theory and the security dilemma to the Taiwan flashpoint, distinguishing the structural pressures generated by a narrowing power gap from the agency exercised by leaders, domestic coalitions, and third-party actors, and specifying what evidence would confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis that Taiwan is the likely trigger of a US-China war. (Bloom: application)

5. Synthesize the African, Chinese, Russian, Western, and UN perspectives on US-China rivalry into a comparative analytical judgment, identifying what each perspective reveals about the distribution of costs and benefits of great-power competition and what each occludes, with particular attention to the African vantage point on bipolar competition as a structural condition shaping the continent’s development trajectory. (Bloom: synthesis)

2.2 KEY IDEA 1 — Power transition theory (Organski, Kugler) and the Thucydides Trap (Allison)

Bolded Causal Claim: Major war becomes most probable when a dissatisfied rising power approaches parity with the dominant power in the international system, because the narrowing power gap simultaneously tempts the challenger to demand revision of the order and tempts the hegemon to strike preventively while it still holds a margin of superiority, and because neither side can credibly commit to restraint once the balance shifts.

Mechanism: The mechanism operates through four linked stages. First, differential growth rates: in Organski’s original formulation in World Politics (1958), the international system is hierarchical, with a dominant power at the apex, great powers below, and small powers at the base. Growth is not uniform; a challenger state may grow faster than the hegemon because it is modernizing from a lower base, because it has not yet assumed the burdens of global order maintenance, or because its political system permits more concentrated resource mobilization. Second, the “danger zone”: Organski and Kugler, in The War Ledger (1980), specified that the risk of war peaks when the challenger reaches roughly 80 percent of the dominant power’s capabilities—not at full parity, and not when the challenger is still weak. The logic is that at 80 percent the challenger is strong enough to fight and to win a revisionist war, yet not so strong that the hegemon has already accommodated; the hegemon, meanwhile, still has a margin of superiority that makes preventive war thinkable. Third, dissatisfaction as the activating variable: power transition alone does not cause war. Organski was explicit that a satisfied rising power—one that accepts the rules, norms, and distribution of benefits of the existing order—will be accommodated peacefully, as the United States was accommodated by Britain in the late nineteenth century. War requires that the challenger be dissatisfied with the status quo, whether because the order was built by and for the hegemon, because the challenger’s growing power is not matched by growing influence, or because the challenger holds a different vision of legitimate international order. Fourth, the trap dynamics that Allison emphasizes: even rational leaders who wish to avoid war may be unable to do so because of commitment problems (the rising power cannot credibly promise not to use its future power to extract concessions), preventive-war incentives (the declining power has reason to fight now rather than later), audience costs (leaders who appear weak face domestic punishment), and the catalytic role of third-party crises that force choices before the underlying power shift has been negotiated. Allison’s Destined for War (2017) draws on Thucydides’ observation that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable” to argue that structural forces can overwhelm individual agency. Allison studied sixteen cases of a rising power challenging a ruling power over five centuries and found that twelve ended in war—a 75 percent rate that he presents as a warning rather than a destiny. The mechanism, in Allison’s rendering, is not that leaders want war but that the structural position of the two powers generates incentives and fears that make war the default outcome unless both sides make “huge, painful, and reciprocal” adjustments to accommodate the shift.

Scope Conditions: Power transition theory applies only under a specific set of conditions, and recognizing these conditions is essential to avoiding the theory’s overextension. First, the theory assumes a hierarchical system with a single dominant power and a single challenger; it does not travel well to multipolar systems or to systems with multiple rising powers. Second, it requires that power be measurable and that the challenger’s growth trajectory be sustained and visible; if growth stalls or if power is diffuse across military, economic, and technological dimensions that do not move in tandem, the “danger zone” becomes difficult to locate. Third, the theory’s predictive power depends on the challenger’s dissatisfaction, which is a subjective and politically constructed variable; a challenger that is integrated into the order through institutions, trade, and elite socialization may remain satisfied even as its power grows. Fourth, the theory was developed to explain hegemonic war—war between great powers for control of the international system—and does not necessarily explain regional conflicts, civil wars, or wars of intervention. Fifth, and critically, Organski’s original theory was conditional and probabilistic; Allison’s “trap” framing is stronger and more deterministic. Conflating the two produces the error of treating a structural tendency as an iron law. The theory also struggles to account for nuclear deterrence, which may suppress the preventive-war mechanism that drives the model, and for the role of domestic politics, which can either accelerate or retard the transition. Finally, the theory assumes that states are unitary actors with coherent preferences; it has difficulty incorporating the role of transnational actors, multinational corporations, and global supply chains that may create cross-cutting interests between the hegemon and the challenger.

Observable Implications: If power transition theory is operating in the US-China case, several observable implications should follow. Militarily, one would expect a sustained increase in Chinese defense spending as a share of GDP, the expansion of the People’s Liberation Army’s power-projection capabilities, and the development of anti-access/area-denial systems designed to raise the cost of US intervention in the Western Pacific. One would expect the United States to respond with forward deployment, alliance reinforcement, and investments in technologies designed to offset Chinese advantages. Economically, one would expect a gradual decoupling of supply chains, the weaponization of trade and technology, and the formation of competing economic blocs. Diplomatically, one would expect the challenger to demand greater voice in international institutions, the creation of parallel institutions, and the contestation of norms. In the Taiwan case specifically, one would expect the issue to become more salient as the power gap narrows, with both sides hardening their positions and reducing the space for ambiguity. The theory also implies that crises over peripheral territories—Taiwan, the South China Sea, the East China Sea—will become more frequent and more dangerous as the transition proceeds, because these crises serve as tests of resolve and as opportunities to establish new facts on the ground. Conversely, if the theory is wrong or inapplicable, one would expect to see continued deep economic interdependence, institutional cooperation on shared challenges such as climate change and pandemic response, and the absence of a clear “danger zone” moment because power is multidimensional and does not converge on a single metric.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):

African (primary): The African perspective on power transition theory begins from a position that the theory itself does not occupy: the view from the periphery of a system whose center is defined by great-power competition. African scholarship—drawing on Nkrumah’s analysis of neo-colonialism, Rodney’s account of how Europe underdeveloped Africa, and Mamdani’s work on the bifurcated colonial state—treats the international system not as an anarchic arena of sovereign equals but as a structured hierarchy in which the rules of the game were written by and for the dominant powers. From this vantage point, the US-China power transition is not an abstract structural process but a concrete reconfiguration of the conditions under which African states must pursue development. The theory’s focus on the hegemon-challenger dyad occludes the fact that the “transition” is experienced in Africa as a new scramble: competition for minerals critical to the green transition and digital economy, competition for port access and military basing rights, and competition for diplomatic alignment in multilateral forums. African scholars such as Grovogui have argued that the language of “power transition” itself reproduces a Eurocentric ontology in which Africa appears only as a terrain of competition rather than as a site of agency. Yet the African perspective also identifies opportunities: the rivalry creates bargaining leverage for African states that can play the two powers against each other, diversify their partnerships, and extract better terms for infrastructure and technology transfer. The African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area represent attempts to aggregate African bargaining power and reduce the continent’s vulnerability to external shocks. The African vantage point thus reveals what the theory’s systemic framing misses: that power transitions are not just about who rules the system but about how the transition reshapes the life chances of those who did not design it. It also raises the question—rarely asked in Western or Chinese discourse—of whether the “trap” is not just a risk of war between two great powers but a trap of perpetual subordination for the rest of the world, in which the costs of great-power competition are externalized onto the Global South.

Chinese: The Chinese perspective on power transition theory is shaped by a dual movement: the embrace of the theory’s descriptive insight that China is rising, combined with a sharp rejection of its prescriptive implication that war is likely or inevitable. Chinese scholars and officials have argued that the “Thucydides Trap” is a Western construct that misreads Chinese intentions and that China’s rise is peaceful, defensive, and oriented toward the restoration of a rightful position rather than the overthrow of the existing order. The official Chinese position, articulated in Xi Jinping’s 2015 statement that “there is no such thing as the Thucydides Trap,” holds that the theory reflects a Western zero-sum mentality that China does not share. Chinese international-relations scholars such as Qin Yaqing have argued that the theory’s state-centric, materialist framework misses the relational and normative dimensions of Chinese foreign policy. At the same time, Chinese strategic discourse has internalized the theory’s warning: the recognition that the United States may act preventively has informed Chinese investments in military modernization, economic resilience, and technological self-sufficiency. The Chinese perspective thus both rejects and instrumentalizes the theory—rejecting its determinism while using its structural logic to justify defensive preparations.

Russian: The Russian perspective treats power transition theory as a partial description of a broader process: the decline of unipolarity and the emergence of a multipolar world order. Russian scholars and officials have argued that the theory’s focus on a single hegemon-challenger dyad is too narrow and that the relevant transition is not from US to Chinese hegemony but from unipolarity to multipolarity, in which Russia, China, and other powers collectively constrain American dominance. The Russian framing emphasizes the anti-hegemonic dimension: the problem is not China’s rise per se but the United States’ refusal to accept the loss of its unipolar moment. From this vantage point, the “Thucydides Trap” is a Western anxiety that reflects the hegemon’s fear of losing control, and the appropriate response is not to manage a bilateral transition but to accelerate the construction of a multipolar order in which no single power can dominate. Russian discourse has also stressed the role of the United States in provoking the rivalry through NATO expansion, color revolutions, and the weaponization of the dollar, suggesting that the “trap” is not structural but manufactured by hegemonic overreach.

Western: The Western perspective, particularly in the United States, has been deeply shaped by Allison’s framing, which has entered the policy mainstream as a warning that requires active management. The dominant Western view treats the US-China rivalry as a strategic competition in which China is a revisionist power seeking to displace the United States, and the policy debate centers on whether to engage, contain, or compete. Scholars such as Aaron Friedberg have argued that engagement has failed and that the United States must adopt a strategy of competitive containment. The Western perspective emphasizes the liberal international order as a public good that China threatens, and it frames the power transition as a test of whether the order can accommodate a rising authoritarian power. The perspective’s strength is its attention to the material and institutional dimensions of the rivalry; its weakness, acknowledged by critics within the Western tradition, is its tendency to mirror-image Chinese intentions and to treat the rivalry as a new Cold War, which may foreclose cooperative solutions to shared problems.

UN: The UN perspective approaches the power transition through the lens of Charter principles: sovereign equality, the prohibition on the use of force, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. The UN framework does not deny that power shifts occur, but it insists that they must be managed within the rules-based order rather than through unilateral action or preventive war. The UN perspective highlights the risk that great-power rivalry poses to the multilateral system, including the Security Council’s ability to function, the integrity of international law, and the protection of smaller states caught between competing powers. On Taiwan specifically, the UN perspective is constrained by the fact that the organization does not recognize Taiwan as a member state and that the issue is governed by the “One China” principle as understood by the majority of member states, yet the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force applies to all parties. The UN vantage point thus emphasizes de-escalation, crisis management, and the maintenance of channels of communication, while acknowledging that the organization’s effectiveness depends on the willingness of the great powers to subordinate their rivalry to collective security.

SECTION 2.3 KEY IDEA 2 — Offensive realism (Mearsheimer) and the tragedy of great-power politics applied to US-China

Bolded Causal Claim: Under offensive realism, the anarchic structure of international politics compels great powers to maximize relative power and seek regional hegemony, so the rise of China makes sustained US-China strategic competition and a high risk of conflict structurally likely even in the absence of hostile intentions.

Mechanism: Offensive realism, most systematically developed by John Mearsheimer in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) and applied to China in later work (2014), rests on five core assumptions: the international system is anarchic; no state can be certain of another state’s intentions; states prioritize survival; states can never be certain that other states will not use force; and power is the means by which states ensure survival. From these assumptions, Mearsheimer derives a demanding conclusion: great powers are not merely security-seekers but power-maximizers, and the ultimate aim of each is to become the hegemon in its own region while preventing any other state from achieving hegemony in another region. Global hegemony is treated as impossible because of the difficulty of projecting power across oceans, so the realistic ambition is regional hegemony. The “tragedy” is that even rational, defensive efforts to increase security are interpreted by others as threatening, producing a security dilemma in which all states end up less secure. Applied to US-China relations, the mechanism works as follows. The United States has been the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere and the dominant external power in East Asia since 1945; China’s rapid economic and military growth threatens that position. Because intentions cannot be verified, Washington must assume that a stronger China will eventually seek to dominate Asia and push the United States out. Beijing, conversely, must assume that Washington will try to contain it and preserve US primacy. Each side’s defensive measures—US alliances, forward bases, and freedom-of-navigation operations; Chinese anti-access/area-denial capabilities, naval expansion, and missile forces—are read by the other as preparations for coercion. Taiwan sits at the center of this mechanism because it is both a strategic and symbolic node in the first island chain; control of Taiwan would significantly expand China’s ability to project power into the western Pacific and complicate US defense of Japan and the Philippines. Mearsheimer’s 2014 argument that China cannot rise peacefully follows directly: the United States and China’s neighbors will balance against it, and China will respond by seeking greater military capability, making intense security competition likely. Nuclear weapons may reduce the probability of all-out war by making conquest prohibitively costly, but they do not eliminate conventional conflict, crises, or the possibility of escalation. The theory therefore predicts not an inevitable war but a structurally driven rivalry in which both sides have strong incentives to compete for relative power.

Scope Conditions: Offensive realism applies most strongly when five conditions hold: the system is anarchic and lacks a reliable enforcer; states are rational unitary actors focused on survival; power can be converted into security; geography permits regional hegemony; and intentions are opaque. It is less predictive when nuclear deterrence makes war unthinkable, when economic interdependence creates powerful domestic constituencies against conflict, when a state’s ambitions are genuinely limited, when regional states bandwagon rather than balance, or when domestic politics and ideology override structural incentives. It also assumes that power is measurable and that military capability is the decisive currency of international politics; it therefore struggles to account for forms of influence that are not easily militarized, such as institutional leadership, technological standards, or normative attraction. The theory is a theory of great powers, not of small states, and it says little about the agency of secondary actors except as balancers or bandwagoners. Finally, because it treats intentions as unknowable, it cannot distinguish between a genuinely revisionist China and a China seeking only security; this is both its analytical strength and its policy danger, since it can justify worst-case planning that becomes self-fulfilling.

Observable Implications: If offensive realism is a useful lens, one should observe sustained increases in military spending on both sides; the expansion of Chinese naval, missile, and space capabilities; the strengthening of US alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, including AUKUS and the Quad; more frequent US freedom-of-navigation operations; larger and more complex Taiwan arms packages; Japanese and Australian defense buildups; South China Sea militarization; and efforts by both powers to reduce dependence in security-sensitive technologies. One should also observe hedging by regional states that fear both Chinese dominance and US abandonment. The theory implies that economic cooperation will be subordinated to security competition in strategic sectors, even if broad trade continues. Falsifiers would include a durable peaceful power transition, Chinese acceptance of US regional primacy, US retrenchment without conflict, deep integration preventing war, China refraining from military dominance, or regional states refusing to balance. The theory is not falsified merely by the absence of war, because it predicts competition rather than conflict; but it is weakened if competition remains limited and institutionalized over long periods.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):
African (primary): Offensive realism’s structural determinism can be read from Africa as a theory that treats great-power competition as inevitable and thereby normalizes the subordination of smaller states to the security requirements of hegemons. African scholarship and diplomacy have long emphasized that bipolar and unipolar systems generate externalities—commodity price shocks, debt distress, militarized aid, and proxy conflicts—that are borne disproportionately by the global South. Yet the same structural rivalry also creates multi-alignment opportunities: African states can leverage competition among powers to diversify partnerships, negotiate better terms, and resist exclusive alignment. The African vantage point therefore does not deny the reality of power competition but insists that its costs and opportunities are unevenly distributed and that African agency lies in strategic autonomy, regional integration, and the refusal to be conscripted into a binary. Scholars such as Grovogui and Mbembe highlight how international orders are experienced as racialized and extractive; from this perspective, offensive realism explains the behavior of great powers but not the legitimacy of their claims. The theory’s occlusion is its tendency to treat African states as objects of balancing rather than as actors with their own security projects.
Chinese: Offensive realism is frequently rejected in Chinese discourse as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Chinese officials and scholars argue that the “Thucydides Trap” is not a law of history and that China’s rise can be peaceful if the United States abandons containment and zero-sum thinking. The theory is seen as rationalizing US military primacy and alliance expansion in the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, some Chinese realists accept structural competition and advocate military modernization; the debate is internal as well as external. The Chinese perspective emphasizes that intentions matter and can be shaped through dialogue, economic integration, and institutional cooperation.
Russian: Russian commentary generally treats offensive realism as a description of US behavior rather than a universal law. Moscow frames the United States as a declining hegemon resisting multipolarity, while China’s rise is interpreted as part of a broader correction of the post-Cold War order. Russia’s own strategic culture combines great-power realism with anti-hegemonic rhetoric, producing an alignment with China that is pragmatic rather than ideological. The risk, from a Russian vantage point, is that an unbalanced China could itself become a hegemon; hence Moscow values multipolarity and strategic autonomy even within the Sino-Russian partnership.
Western: In Western IR, offensive realism is one of the most influential and contested theories of great-power politics. Mearsheimer’s work shapes US strategic debates, especially arguments for offshore balancing and preventing Chinese regional hegemony. Critics from liberal institutionalism, constructivism, and economic interdependence theory argue that the theory overstates the inevitability of conflict, understates the constraining effects of institutions and commerce, and risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Western perspective is therefore internally divided between those who see structural competition as unavoidable and those who believe policy can shape outcomes.
UN: The UN perspective treats offensive realism as a warning about the dangers of unchecked great-power competition rather than as a policy guide. The Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and its emphasis on collective security stand in tension with a theory that normalizes power maximization. From the UN vantage point, the relevant question is whether crisis-management mechanisms, communication channels, and legal constraints can prevent structural pressures from producing war. Taiwan is a particular concern because any conflict would implicate the Charter’s core norms and the organization’s credibility.

SECTION 2.4 KEY IDEA 3 — Chinese relational and moral realist accounts (Qin Yaqing, Yan Xuetong, Zhao Tingyang)

Bolded Causal Claim: Chinese relational and moral-realist theories argue that international order is constituted by relationships, moral authority, and inclusive world-systems rather than by anarchic power competition; therefore US-China rivalry need not follow a Thucydides Trap if both sides cultivate relational harmony, moral leadership, and Tianxia-style inclusive governance.

Mechanism: The mechanism has three distinct but complementary strands. First, Qin Yaqing’s relational theory, developed in A Relational Theory of World Politics (2018), begins with an ontological claim: the world is composed of relations rather than substances. Actors are not pre-given, self-contained units that enter into relations; they are constituted by their relations. This challenges the substantialist ontology that underlies much Western IR theory, in which states are treated as billiard balls or unitary actors. Qin introduces “relational rationality,” in which actors pursue harmony, mutual constitution, and the maintenance of relationships rather than only utility maximization. Power is understood as relational capacity—the ability to shape and sustain networks of relations—rather than as a stock of material resources. “Harmony without uniformity” becomes a governing principle: order does not require sameness but the management of difference through relationship. In the US-China context, this implies that rivalry is not mechanically determined by material power shifts; it is shaped by the quality of diplomatic, economic, and social relations. If both sides invest in relational management—summits, institutional dialogue, people-to-people ties, and shared problem-solving—anarchy can be socially transformed into a more ordered relational community. Second, Yan Xuetong’s moral realism, articulated in Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (2011), argues that international leadership depends on moral standing as well as material power. Drawing on pre-Qin Chinese thought, Yan distinguishes “humane authority” (wangdao), which attracts voluntary followers through moral credibility and benevolent governance, from “hegemony” (badao), which relies on coercion and is less durable. Moral realism does not deny power politics; it insists that power must be accompanied by moral resources if it is to produce stable leadership. In a power transition, the rising power must cultivate strategic credibility and moral authority; the declining power’s resistance may be mitigated if the rising power is perceived as legitimate. This reframes the US-China rivalry not only as a contest over capabilities but as a competition over which state can offer a more credible and attractive model of order. Third, Zhao Tingyang’s Tianxia theory, developed in works such as All Under Heaven (2021), critiques the Westphalian system as exclusionary, anarchic, and incapable of producing genuine world order. Tianxia, or “all-under-heaven,” proposes an inclusive world system in which the world is treated as a single political community rather than a collection of sovereign states. “Coexistence” and “universal care” are central; the goal is not hegemony but the construction of a shared world. Zhao’s argument is philosophical and normative rather than a blueprint for policy, but it offers a powerful critique of both US liberal hegemony and crude realism. Together, these three strands shift the analytical focus from material structure to social and moral constitution, from zero-sum power to relational harmony, and from state-centric anarchy to world-system inclusiveness. They suggest that US-China rivalry can be moderated by relational management, moral legitimacy, and inclusive institutions, even though they do not deny the reality of power.

Scope Conditions: These theories are most plausible when several conditions hold: elites and publics are receptive to relational or moral frameworks; institutions can be reformed to reflect inclusiveness; power asymmetries are manageable; security dilemmas are not acute; and cultural resources are credible to both domestic and international audiences. They are less applicable when material threats dominate decision-making, when trust is absent, when core security issues such as Taiwan are at stake, when domestic politics reward hawkishness, or when the theories are deployed as normative cover for power projection. There is also an epistemological boundary: relational and moral theories are partly philosophical and normative, and their empirical validation is difficult. They may describe how order ought to be constituted more than how it is constituted. A further risk is conflation between scholarly theory and state discourse. Qin’s relational theory, Yan’s moral realism, and Zhao’s Tianxia are academic arguments; they are not identical to official Chinese policy, even though they resonate with concepts such as a “community of shared future for mankind.” Treating them as mere propaganda would be unfair, but treating them as settled descriptions of Chinese state behavior would be equally mistaken. Finally, these theories may understate the coercive dimensions of power: relational harmony can be imposed, and moral claims can be instrumentalized.

Observable Implications: If these theories influence Chinese diplomacy and international order-building, one should observe sustained emphasis on relational language—“community of shared future,” “win-win cooperation,” “mutual respect,” “harmony without uniformity”—in official discourse; the use of the Belt and Road Initiative as a relational network rather than a purely extractive project; investments in people-to-people ties, educational exchange, and cultural diplomacy; moral claims in global governance debates; and academic prominence for Tianxia and relational theory. One might also expect efforts to create or reform institutions that emphasize inclusiveness and consensus. However, observable implications also include continued military modernization, coercive diplomacy, and assertive behavior in the South China Sea and around Taiwan, which suggest that material competition persists alongside relational rhetoric. The theories are therefore not falsified by the existence of rivalry, but they are weakened if relational language is consistently contradicted by coercive practice. Conversely, they are strengthened if periods of tension are followed by renewed cooperation, institutional innovation, or durable crisis management. A key test is whether relational and moral frameworks can constrain behavior when core interests are at stake, or whether they function mainly as diplomatic vocabulary during periods of lower tension.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):
African (primary): Relational and moral-realist theories resonate with African intellectual traditions that emphasize communal ethics, Ubuntu, and the critique of atomistic individualism. African scholars have long argued that international order should be evaluated by its capacity to sustain human dignity and collective flourishing, not merely by power balances. From this vantage point, Qin’s relational ontology and Zhao’s inclusive world-system offer a vocabulary for multi-alignment and for resisting binary Cold War logics. Yet African critics, including Grovogui and Mbembe, caution that relational harmony can obscure structural asymmetry: a “community of shared future” may still be organized around the interests of the powerful. The African perspective therefore welcomes the decentering of Western individualism but insists that relational ethics must be coupled with material redistribution, debt justice, and genuine equality. Theories of moral leadership are attractive, but African history warns that moral claims by great powers can legitimate intervention and extraction. Thus the African contribution is to demand that relational and moral orders be measured by their effects on the most vulnerable, not by the rhetoric of the powerful.
Chinese: This is the indigenous theoretical core. Qin, Yan, and Zhao represent efforts to build Chinese IR theory from Chinese philosophical resources rather than importing Western frameworks. They are not identical to official policy: Qin’s relational theory is academic; Yan’s moral realism is prescriptive; Zhao’s Tianxia is philosophical. Yet they resonate with official discourse about a “community of shared future for mankind” and multipolarity. The Chinese perspective sees these theories as correcting Western biases—substantialism, individualism, and anarchy—and as offering a more humane and inclusive vision of order. Critics within China debate their empirical validity and political implications.
Russian: Russian IR and strategic culture are more statist and civilizational than relational in the Chinese sense, but Moscow finds Chinese moral/relational rhetoric useful as a counter to Western liberal universalism. The idea of multipolarity and civilizational pluralism aligns with Russian critiques of US hegemony. Russia’s own tradition emphasizes sovereignty, great-power status, and anti-hegemonism rather than relational harmony. Thus the Russian perspective treats Chinese theories as complementary to, but not substitutable for, a multipolar balance of power. There is also caution about Chinese moral claims becoming a new form of universalism.
Western: Western scholars are divided. Liberals and constructivists may find relational ethics and moral leadership promising, especially as correctives to crude realism. Realists tend to view these theories as normative narratives that do not alter material constraints; some see them as strategic discourse designed to legitimize China’s rise. The Western perspective also worries that Tianxia can be read as a hierarchical order centered on China. The debate is whether these theories are genuine alternatives to anarchy or sophisticated justifications for power.
UN: The UN Charter’s universalism, sovereign equality, and collective security resonate with the inclusive aspirations of Tianxia and relational ethics. However, the UN system is legal and institutional rather than moral-philosophical; it depends on state consent and great-power cooperation. From the UN vantage point, relational and moral theories can support diplomacy and confidence-building, but they cannot replace legal obligations or enforcement. The risk is that moral claims by powerful states override the rights of smaller states. The UN perspective therefore welcomes dialogue while insisting on Charter principles.

SECTION 2.5 — KEY IDEA 4: ECONOMIC INTERDEPENDENCE AND THE ‘NEW COLD WAR’ FRAMING

Bolded Causal Claim: Deep US–China economic interdependence does not reliably pacify rivalry once security externalities and asymmetric vulnerabilities are securitized; instead, interdependence becomes a domain of coercion, producing selective decoupling and a “new cold war” in strategic sectors without full economic separation.

Mechanism: The liberal interdependence tradition, most clearly associated with Keohane and Nye, predicts that dense trade, investment, and production networks raise the cost of conflict and create stakeholders for cooperation. That mechanism operates when economic exchange is politically insulated and when gains are broadly distributed. In the US–China case, however, the same networks created chokepoints: semiconductor equipment, advanced chips, critical minerals, cloud infrastructure, financial messaging, and data flows became instruments of leverage. The mechanism of escalation is not simply tariff retaliation but the conversion of commercial dependence into strategic vulnerability. When Washington perceives that Chinese firms can access dual-use technologies, it expands export controls, investment screening, and sanctions; when Beijing perceives that supply chains and capital markets can be weaponized, it accelerates self-reliance, stockpiling, and alternative payment systems. The “new cold war” framing, advanced by scholars such as Friedberg, captures a competition that is ideological and systemic rather than merely territorial, yet it differs from the US–Soviet case because the two economies remain deeply intertwined in consumer goods, agriculture, manufacturing, and services. The result is not autarky but bifurcation by sector: continued trade in low-politics goods alongside restriction in high-politics technologies. A second mechanism is domestic political securitization. Bipartisan consensus in Washington increasingly treats economic engagement with China as a source of national-security risk, while Beijing treats US restrictions as evidence of containment and technological suppression. Once economic policy is framed as security policy, the normal bargaining logic of trade—compromise, mutual gain, and institutional dispute settlement—gives way to zero-sum framing, industrial policy, and alliance-based supply-chain restructuring. The “new cold war” is therefore less a description of total separation than a strategic narrative that justifies selective decoupling, friend-shoring, and the politicization of markets.

Scope Conditions: The pacifying version of interdependence is most plausible when exchange is concentrated in non-strategic sectors, when no single node creates asymmetric vulnerability, and when domestic coalitions benefit from continued access. The weaponized version becomes more likely when trade involves dual-use technologies, when one side controls a chokepoint, when security communities dominate economic policymaking, and when both states possess the administrative capacity to enforce controls. The “new cold war” framing is most accurate where competition spans ideology, institutions, and technology; it is less accurate where third countries refuse bloc alignment, where firms reroute trade through intermediaries, or where consumer and producer interests sustain integration despite political tension. It also overstates separation if bilateral trade volumes remain high even as their composition shifts. The framing is weakest as a predictive claim if it assumes inevitable global bifurcation; it is strongest as an analytical claim about the securitization of economic policy.

Observable Implications: The 2018 tariff rounds and the Phase One agreement showed that trade conflict could escalate without ending interdependence. Subsequent US export controls on advanced semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, the expansion of the Entity List, investment-screening reforms, and allied coordination on technology controls illustrate the shift from market access to technology denial. China’s responses include industrial-policy campaigns, efforts to reduce dependence on foreign chokepoints, and diversification of trade and financial partnerships. Observable indicators include changes in the sectoral composition of US–China trade, relocation of assembly to Vietnam, Mexico, and other intermediaries, increased screening of inbound and outbound investment, and the growth of “friend-shoring” rhetoric in G7 and allied policy. A further implication is that third countries become arenas of competition: they may gain manufacturing investment while facing pressure to align on export controls, data governance, and critical-minerals supply. If the “new cold war” framing is accurate, one should observe persistent restrictions in strategic sectors alongside continued integration in agriculture, energy, and consumer goods; if it is overstated, one should observe rapid corporate adaptation that restores trade through alternative routes without durable political blocs.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):

African (primary): From an African vantage point, the “new cold war” framing is not an abstract superpower metaphor but a material risk to development. African economies are exposed to commodity-price volatility, debt distress, inflation, and supply-chain disruption when US–China competition intensifies, yet they also gain leverage from critical minerals, demographic growth, and the African Continental Free Trade Area. The African perspective, informed by long traditions of analyzing unequal exchange and external dependence, treats bipolar competition as both a danger and an opportunity for multi-alignment: African states can bargain for infrastructure, technology transfer, and market access while resisting pressure to choose a single patron. The occlusion in superpower discourse is that African agency is often reduced to a prize in a contest rather than a set of independent development projects. The strongest African objection to the “new cold war” framing is that it can normalize the subordination of African priorities to great-power rivalry; the strongest contribution is that it highlights how global economic fragmentation raises costs for import-dependent and debt-burdened states.

Chinese: The Chinese perspective generally rejects the “new cold war” framing as a US attempt to contain China’s development and to deny the legitimacy of its rise. It emphasizes mutual benefit, development rights, and a “community of shared future,” arguing that interdependence should be managed through cooperation rather than securitized decoupling. From this vantage point, US export controls are not neutral security measures but hegemonic efforts to preserve technological dominance. The perspective contributes a critique of Western double standards and a defense of state-led development; it occludes the security concerns of other states about coercion, opacity, and asymmetric dependence.

Russian: The Russian perspective frames US–China economic rivalry as part of a broader transition away from unipolarity and welcomes the erosion of US economic hegemony. It emphasizes multipolarity, anti-hegemonism, and the legitimacy of states resisting Western sanctions and financial dominance. Moscow tends to interpret US technology controls as instruments of imperial power and supports de-dollarization, BRICS expansion, and alternative trade routes. This perspective contributes a systemic critique of Western economic governance; it occludes Russia’s own use of economic coercion and the dependence of many states on stable, rules-based trade.

Western: The Western perspective treats economic interdependence with China as a strategic vulnerability requiring “de-risking,” not necessarily full decoupling. It emphasizes economic security, resilience, alliance coordination, and the protection of critical technologies. The engagement-to-containment shift reflects a judgment that economic integration did not produce political liberalization and that China’s state-capitalist model exploits openness. This perspective contributes serious attention to coercion, intellectual-property theft, and supply-chain risk; it occludes the costs of fragmentation for consumers, firms, and the Global South, and it sometimes conflates commercial competition with existential threat.

UN: The UN perspective approaches economic interdependence through Charter principles, sovereign equality, development rights, and the need for a rules-based multilateral trading system. It warns that weaponized trade, sanctions, and fragmented supply chains disproportionately harm developing countries and undermine the Sustainable Development Goals. From this vantage point, the “new cold war” framing risks legitimizing economic coercion and eroding non-discrimination. The UN contribution is to insist that economic security must be reconciled with global development and legal equality; its occlusion is that it lacks enforcement power when great powers treat trade as security policy.

SECTION 2.6 — KEY IDEA 5: THE DEBATE OVER ENGAGEMENT VERSUS CONTAINMENT, AND THE RISK OF WAR OVER TAIWAN

Bolded Causal Claim: The Taiwan Strait is the most dangerous escalation pathway in US–China rivalry because unresolved sovereignty, military modernization, and alliance commitments convert a political dispute into a deterrence problem; whether Washington’s strategy is engagement or containment shapes whether Beijing perceives restraint or encirclement, but neither strategy eliminates the risk of inadvertent war.

Mechanism: Engagement and containment are not merely policy labels; they imply different causal theories about how rising powers behave. Engagement assumes that economic integration, institutional inclusion, and diplomatic normalization socialize a rising state into the existing order, reducing incentives for revisionism. In the US–China case, this logic underpinned post-Cold War trade expansion, WTO accession, and the expectation that prosperity would produce political liberalization. Containment assumes that power must be balanced, that revisionist states exploit openness, and that deterrence requires alliances, military superiority, and denial of strategic technologies. The mechanism of rivalry is that each strategy can become self-fulfilling: engagement can be read as appeasement if the rising power uses openness to build power; containment can be read as encirclement if the rising power interprets balancing as an attempt to block legitimate development. Taiwan concentrates this dilemma because it sits at the intersection of sovereignty, nationalism, alliance credibility, and military geography. The PRC’s anti-secession framework treats Taiwan as an internal matter and warns against formal independence; the United States maintains a “one China” policy, the Taiwan Relations Act, arms sales, and strategic ambiguity about whether it would defend Taiwan. The mechanism of war risk is not simply a decision for invasion but a chain of misperception: gray-zone coercion, military exercises, domestic political signaling, alliance commitments, and the possibility that either side believes it can achieve objectives at acceptable cost. Deterrence by denial requires the defender to convince the attacker that success is impossible; deterrence by punishment requires credible threats of escalation. Both are undermined by uncertainty about US willingness to fight, PLA confidence in rapid fait accompli, and domestic pressures in Taipei, Washington, and Beijing. Escalation can also occur through accidents, cyber operations, space assets, or maritime incidents that outpace crisis management.

Scope Conditions: Engagement is most plausible when the rising power accepts the status quo, when domestic politics permit compromise, and when economic ties create constituencies for restraint. It is least plausible when the rising power seeks to revise territorial or institutional arrangements and when domestic nationalism rewards assertiveness. Containment is most effective when alliances are credible, military balances are favorable, and economic denial is enforceable; it is least effective when it provokes accelerated military buildup, drives the target toward self-reliance, or lacks allied consensus. The risk of war over Taiwan is highest when three conditions coincide: the PLA believes it can achieve a quick fait accompli before US intervention; US domestic politics make ambiguity less credible; and Taiwanese politics move in ways that Beijing interprets as crossing a red line. The risk is lower when crisis-management channels function, when economic interdependence raises the cost of conflict, and when all sides believe that time favors their position without requiring immediate action. Neither engagement nor containment eliminates these conditions; each changes the incentives and perceptions that shape them.

Observable Implications: Indicators of the engagement-versus-containment debate include shifts in US strategy documents, export-control intensity, alliance expansion, and diplomatic language about China as competitor, rival, or threat. Indicators of Taiwan risk include PLA exercises around the island, blockade or quarantine simulations, arms packages, diplomatic visits, cross-strait economic coercion, and changes in Taiwanese defense spending and conscription. Alliance developments such as AUKUS, the Quad, and Japan’s defense buildup signal containment; continued trade, climate cooperation, and crisis hotlines signal residual engagement. A useful test is whether military signaling remains bounded and reversible or whether it becomes normalized as a new status quo. If engagement logic dominates, one expects sustained dialogue and managed competition; if containment logic dominates, one expects harder decoupling, expanded deterrence, and more explicit security commitments. The most dangerous observable pattern is not a single crisis but the normalization of high-intensity military activity combined with eroding crisis-management trust.

Perspective Note (five traditions in brief):

African (primary): The African perspective on Taiwan and great-power war begins with the cost of escalation: a conflict in the Taiwan Strait would disrupt global shipping, energy markets, food prices, finance, and development finance, with disproportionate effects on import-dependent and debt-burdened African states. African diplomacy therefore emphasizes non-alignment, peaceful settlement, and the protection of development gains, while also navigating the tension between territorial integrity and self-determination that resonates with African experiences of colonial borders and secessionist conflicts. Multi-alignment allows African states to maintain relations with Beijing, Washington, and Taipei-linked economic networks without endorsing either side’s maximal claims. The African contribution is to insist that great-power rivalry must be evaluated by its human and developmental consequences; its occlusion in superpower debate is that African states are treated as peripheral to a crisis that would reshape their economies. The strongest African objection to containment logic is that it can militarize global politics; the strongest objection to engagement logic is that it can excuse coercion against smaller actors.

Chinese: The Chinese perspective treats Taiwan as an internal affair and reunification as a core national interest. It opposes foreign interference, supports the one-China principle, and frames US arms sales and high-level visits as violations of sovereignty and provocations. From this vantage point, deterrence is legitimate defense of territorial integrity, while US strategic ambiguity is destabilizing. The perspective contributes a strong claim about sovereignty and historical grievance; it occludes the preferences of Taiwan’s population and the risks that coercion poses to regional stability.

Russian: The Russian perspective generally aligns with China’s anti-hegemonic framing and treats US involvement in Taiwan as part of a broader strategy to contain rising powers. It emphasizes multipolarity, sovereignty, and opposition to Western military alliances. Moscow’s contribution is to highlight how US alliance expansion can be perceived as encirclement; its occlusion is that it applies sovereignty selectively and underestimates the dangers of normalizing force as a tool of territorial revision.

Western: The Western perspective centers on deterrence, strategic ambiguity, and the defense of a rules-based order. It treats Taiwan as a critical node in semiconductor supply chains and democratic resilience, and it debates whether engagement failed or was never fully tried. Containment advocates emphasize alliances, military readiness, and technology denial; engagement advocates emphasize crisis management, economic costs, and avoiding self-fulfilling prophecy. The perspective contributes serious analysis of credibility and escalation; it occludes the extent to which US policy itself shapes Chinese threat perception and the domestic costs of sustained rivalry.

UN: The UN perspective approaches Taiwan through Charter principles: sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-use of force, and peaceful settlement of disputes. General Assembly Resolution 2758 recognized the People’s Republic of China as the sole legitimate representative of China, and the UN system does not treat Taiwan as a member state. At the same time, the UN emphasizes that disputes must be resolved peacefully and that great-power conflict would violate the Charter’s collective-security aspirations. The UN contribution is to elevate legal process and human protection over unilateral force; its occlusion is that it cannot enforce restraint when permanent members are directly involved.

SECTION 2.7 — FIVE PERSPECTIVES IN DEPTH

2.7.1 African Perspective (PRIMARY)

The African vantage point on US-China rivalry begins from a position that the other four perspectives systematically under-theorize: the experience of being the terrain on which great-power competition is fought, extracted, and narrated, rather than a party to it. This is not merely an empirical observation about African states’ marginalization in great-power diplomacy; it is a theoretical claim about the structure of international order. From the vantage of African political thought, the US-China rivalry is not a dyadic transition between two hegemons but a reconfiguration of a global system whose rules were written during colonialism and whose material flows still run through African bodies, minerals, and debt. The African perspective therefore asks a different question than the other four: not “who will win the transition?” but “what does the transition cost those who did not choose it, and what leverage do they retain?”

The theoretical lineage runs through several distinct traditions. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa established the foundational claim that African underdevelopment is not a natural condition but a product of structured extraction by external powers; applied to the present, this means that both US and Chinese engagement with Africa must be read against a history in which external powers have consistently converted African resources into their own industrial and military capacity. Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism warned that formal independence would be hollowed out by economic control; the contemporary debate about Chinese debt and US conditionality replays this argument with new actors. Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa and his insistence on non-alignment provided a practical doctrine: African states should refuse to be conscripted into blocs whose conflicts are not theirs. Amílcar Cabral’s emphasis on “return to the source” and on the material basis of culture grounds a skepticism toward both Western liberal universalism and Chinese “community of shared future” rhetoric when either is offered as a substitute for African self-determination. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth supplies the psychological and political grammar: the colonized are not merely victims but agents whose negotiation reshapes the metropole; applied to US-China rivalry, this suggests African states are not passive arenas but actors whose choices alter the costs of great-power competition.

Contemporary African scholarship sharpens these classical positions. Siba Grovogui’s work on international law and sovereignty argues that the international legal order was constructed to manage European empire and that African states encounter it as a structure of subordination; from this angle, both US and Chinese invocations of “rules-based order” or “sovereignty” are strategic vocabularies whose application to Africa is selective. Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the postcolony suggests that African populations live under regimes of extraction that precede and exceed any particular great-power rivalry; the US-China competition is thus layered onto existing structures of violence rather than creating them. Jean-François Bayart’s “politics of the belly” and his analysis of extraversion describe how African elites have historically profited from mediating external power; this implies that the costs and benefits of US-China rivalry are distributed unevenly within African societies, not borne uniformly by “Africa.” Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject and his later work on colonialism highlight how the colonial state’s bifurcated structure persists, shaping which African actors can engage great powers and on what terms. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s decolonial feminism challenges the universalization of Western categories such as “state,” “power,” and “security,” and asks whose knowledge counts in defining the rivalry; Sylvia Tamale’s work on African feminism and decoloniality extends this to questions of gendered extraction in mining and infrastructure. In security studies, Kwesi Aning and Kwaku Danso have analyzed how African security architectures navigate great-power competition, emphasizing institutional agency and the limits of external security assistance.

The mechanism through which US-China rivalry affects Africa operates on several channels. First, the economic channel: both powers compete for access to critical minerals—cobalt, lithium, coltan, rare earths—essential to the energy transition and defense industries; this reproduces a classic extractive dynamic in which African states export raw materials and import finished goods, with value addition occurring elsewhere. Second, the debt and finance channel: Chinese lending through the Belt and Road Initiative and Western-led IMF and World Bank conditionality create competing creditor structures; African states navigate between them, sometimes gaining bargaining space, sometimes facing debt distress and austerity. Third, the security channel: US Africa Command and Chinese security engagement introduce great-power military presence into African conflicts, potentially internationalizing local disputes and constraining African security autonomy. Fourth, the diplomatic channel: competition for votes in the UN General Assembly, recognition of Taiwan, and alignment on human-rights resolutions forces African states into choices that may not serve their interests. Fifth, the narrative channel: both powers frame their engagement in developmental and civilizational terms, which can crowd out African-defined priorities.

The African perspective’s distinctive contribution is to reframe the rivalry’s stakes. Where Western analysis asks whether China is a revisionist power, African analysis asks how the binary itself—revisionist versus status quo—presupposes a legitimacy for the existing order that African states never consented to. The “rules-based international order” that the US defends was, from this vantage, built on colonial extraction and racial hierarchy; Chinese challenges to it are not automatically liberatory, but the defense of it is not automatically just. This produces a position of “active non-alignment” or “multi-alignment”: African states seek to maximize agency by engaging both powers without subordination to either, using the rivalry as leverage for better terms. The African Union’s Agenda 2063, the African Continental Free Trade Area, and the push for permanent African seats on the UN Security Council are institutional expressions of this strategy. The perspective also highlights the costs of bipolarity: the Cold War’s proxy wars in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa devastated the continent; a “new cold war” risks repeating this pattern, with African states again serving as battlegrounds for others’ conflicts.

The African perspective’s occlusions are equally important. It can romanticize non-alignment, understating the asymmetry of power that makes genuine equidistance difficult: African states need markets, finance, and security assistance that neither power provides unconditionally. It can treat “Africa” as a unitary actor, obscuring the heterogeneity of fifty-four states with divergent interests, regime types, and relationships to both powers. It can understate African elite agency in choosing alignment for domestic political gain, as Bayart’s extraversion suggests. It can also overstate the novelty of great-power competition, since European powers have competed for African resources since the scramble; the US-China rivalry is a new configuration of an old structure. Finally, the perspective risks being so focused on external power that it under-theorizes internal governance failures and the ways African states themselves produce insecurity and extraction. Scope conditions: the African perspective is most illuminating when analyzing resource and debt politics, diplomatic leverage, and the distributional consequences of great-power competition; it is less directly applicable to the military balance in the Taiwan Strait or to nuclear deterrence dynamics, where African states have limited direct stakes. Its strongest counterargument comes from within: Nyerere’s non-alignment worked partly because the Cold War’s ideological stakes were clearer; today’s rivalry is more economic and technological, and African states’ dependence on both US and Chinese markets makes pure non-alignment harder to sustain.

2.7.2 Chinese Perspective

The Chinese perspective on US-China rivalry is structured by a rejection of the premise that the rivalry is a power transition in the Western sense. Chinese official discourse and much Chinese IR scholarship insist that China’s rise is peaceful, that the “Thucydides Trap” is not inevitable, and that the proper frame is not competition between two hegemons but the emergence of a multipolar “community of shared future for mankind.” This is not merely propaganda; it reflects distinct theoretical traditions in Chinese IR that challenge Western realism’s assumptions.

Qin Yaqing’s relational theory of world politics argues that the Western IR canon is built on an ontology of atomistic, self-interested actors, whereas Chinese thought emphasizes relationality: actors are constituted by their relationships, and order emerges from the cultivation of harmonious relations rather than from the balance of power. Applied to US-China rivalry, this means the relationship is not a zero-sum transition but a dynamic that can be managed through mutual accommodation and relational governance. Yan Xuetong’s “moral realism” offers a different Chinese account: international order is shaped by the moral quality of leadership, and China’s rise can be stabilizing if it provides moral leadership rather than pursuing hegemony. Yan is more realist than Qin—he accepts that power transitions occur and that states pursue interests—but he argues that the moral basis of leadership determines whether transitions are peaceful or violent. Zhao Tingyang’s “tianxia” (all-under-heaven) system proposes a cosmopolitan world order in which no single state is hegemon and all are included in a shared political community; this is explicitly offered as an alternative to the Westphalian state system and to US unipolarity.

The mechanism of Chinese engagement is framed as “win-win cooperation”: infrastructure investment, trade integration, and diplomatic multilateralism through BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank create mutual benefit rather than zero-sum extraction. The Chinese perspective emphasizes that China does not seek to replace the US as global hegemon but to democratize international governance, giving developing countries greater voice. The “no Thucydides Trap” argument, articulated by Xi Jinping and echoed in Chinese scholarship, holds that the trap is a Western projection: conflict is not structurally determined by power shifts but results from misperception and hostile policy, particularly US containment.

The Chinese perspective’s contribution is to challenge the inevitability thesis and to offer alternative vocabularies for order. Its occlusions are significant. It tends to understate the coercive dimensions of Chinese power: the militarization of the South China Sea, economic coercion against Australia and Lithuania, and the opacity of Belt and Road debt. It treats “win-win” as descriptive rather than aspirational. It underplays the security dilemma that Chinese military modernization creates for neighbors, including those who do not seek US alignment. And it can conflate the Chinese state’s interests with those of “the Chinese people” or “the developing world,” obscuring internal diversity and dissent. The perspective also struggles to account for why so many states, including in Africa and Southeast Asia, seek US security guarantees despite Chinese economic engagement: if the relationship were truly win-win, balancing would be unnecessary.

2.7.3 Russian Perspective

The Russian perspective on US-China rivalry is shaped by Russia’s own confrontation with the West and its strategic partnership with China. Russian IR and official discourse frame the rivalry as the terminal crisis of US unipolarity and the emergence of a multipolar order in which Russia and China are co-architects. The core claim is anti-hegemonic: the US-led order is illegitimate not because of its values but because of its unilateralism, and its decline creates space for sovereign equality and civilizational diversity.

The theoretical lineage includes Russian Eurasianism, which posits Russia as a distinct civilization bridging Europe and Asia, and the realist tradition of Primakov’s “multipolar world” concept from the 1990s, which argued that Russia should pursue strategic partnerships with China and India to counterbalance US dominance. Contemporary Russian scholarship frames the US-China rivalry as evidence of the “end of the American century” and the rise of a “post-Western” world. The Russian perspective shares with the Chinese a rejection of the Thucydides Trap framing as Western-centric, but adds a distinctive emphasis on NATO expansion and US military interventionism as the primary sources of global instability.

The mechanism of Russian strategy is “strategic partnership without alliance”: deepening economic, military, and diplomatic coordination with China while preserving formal autonomy. This includes energy deals, joint military exercises, coordination in the UN Security Council, and shared opposition to US sanctions. Russia’s own confrontation with the West over Ukraine has accelerated this alignment, making Russia increasingly dependent on China economically and diplomatically.

The Russian perspective’s contribution is to highlight the role of US policy in generating rivalry: NATO expansion, regime change operations, and the weaponization of the dollar and financial system are presented as provocations that made US-China confrontation inevitable. It also draws attention to the hypocrisy of Western “rules-based order” rhetoric given US violations of sovereignty in Iraq and Libya. Its occlusions are severe. It systematically understates Russian agency in generating insecurity, including the invasion of Ukraine and interference in neighboring states. It overstates the coherence and durability of the China-Russia partnership, which is asymmetric—China is the senior partner economically—and rests on convergent opposition to the US rather than a shared positive vision. It ignores the agency of smaller states, including in Central Asia and the Caucasus, who may not welcome a Sino-Russian condominium. And it treats multipolarity as inherently desirable without examining whether a multipolar world with weak institutions might be more conflict-prone than the unipolar moment it replaces. The perspective also cannot easily explain why states that share Russia’s anti-hegemonic rhetoric nonetheless seek Western security guarantees and investment.

2.7.4 Western Perspective

The Western perspective on US-China rivalry is the most institutionally powerful and the most theoretically diverse. It spans a spectrum from engagement to containment, but converges on several premises: that the post-1945 liberal order is worth defending, that China’s rise poses a systemic challenge to that order, and that US leadership remains indispensable to managing the transition. The perspective is not monolithic; it contains internal debates that are themselves part of the policy landscape.

The theoretical lineage includes offensive realism (Mearsheimer 2001, 2014), which predicts that China’s growth will produce hegemonic ambition in Asia and inevitable conflict with the US; liberal internationalism, which emphasizes institutions, interdependence, and democratic peace; and constructivism, which examines how identities and norms shape the rivalry. Power transition theory (Organski 1958) provides the structural frame: a rising power approaches parity with the dominant power, and war becomes likely if the rising power is dissatisfied with the status quo. Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” (2017) popularized this for policy audiences. Friedberg (2018) argued that the US must prepare for long-term competition and that engagement had failed to produce a liberal China.

The mechanism of Western strategy has shifted over time. The engagement era assumed that economic integration would liberalize China; the post-2017 consensus treats China as a “strategic competitor” requiring “managed competition.” Instruments include tariffs and export controls on semiconductors and AI chips, alliance reinforcement through AUKUS and the Quad, and technology decoupling. The Western perspective’s contribution is to identify the specific mechanisms of Chinese revisionism—military modernization, economic coercion, technology theft, human-rights abuses—and to mobilize collective action through alliances.

The Western perspective’s occlusions mirror those of its rivals. It can overstate Chinese revisionism, treating defensive Chinese behavior as inherently aggressive. It can understate US agency in generating the security dilemma: US forward deployment, Taiwan arms sales, and technology controls are themselves perceived as threats in Beijing. It universalizes Western interests as “international” interests, conflating the defense of US primacy with the defense of global order. It can treat the liberal order as more consensual and beneficial than many Global South states experience it. And the engagement-versus-containment debate reveals an internal tension: if engagement failed, was the failure inherent to the strategy or to its implementation? Mearsheimer would say engagement was always naive; liberals argue it was undermined by Chinese political closure and US inattention. The perspective also struggles with the Taiwan question: deterrence requires ambiguity, but ambiguity increases risk of miscalculation.

2.7.5 UN Perspective

The UN perspective approaches US-China rivalry through the lens of Charter principles: sovereign equality, non-use of force, peaceful settlement of disputes, and collective security. The UN system does not recognize Taiwan as a member state (General Assembly Resolution 2758, 1971), and the PRC holds the China seat on the Security Council. The UN’s contribution is to elevate legal process and human protection above unilateral force, and to provide forums—General Assembly, Security Council, specialized agencies—where rivalry can be managed multilaterally.

The mechanism of UN engagement is institutional: the Security Council can authorize collective action, though P5 veto power limits this when permanent members are involved; the General Assembly provides a platform for norm-setting and coalition-building; and specialized agencies manage functional cooperation that can survive political rivalry. The UN also provides humanitarian and development frameworks that address the consequences of great-power competition for vulnerable populations.

The UN perspective’s contribution is to insist that US-China rivalry is not merely a bilateral or systemic issue but a threat to the collective security architecture established in 1945. It highlights the risk that great-power conflict would violate the Charter’s core purposes and cause catastrophic harm, particularly to non-combatant populations. It also provides a legal framework for Taiwan: the UN position is that Taiwan is not a sovereign state and that any change in status must be peaceful and consensual, not imposed by force.

The UN perspective’s occlusions are structural. The organization cannot enforce restraint when permanent members are directly involved; the veto ensures that the Security Council is paralyzed on issues touching US or Chinese core interests. The UN’s legal formalism can obscure power asymmetries: General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and the “international community” often means Western-led coalitions. The UN also struggles to adapt to a world where two permanent members are strategic rivals; the Charter assumed great-power concert, not sustained rivalry. Finally, the UN perspective can be overly state-centric, underweighting non-state actors, civil society, and the transnational dimensions of the rivalry—technology, climate, pandemics—that fall outside traditional security frameworks. The UN’s strength, its universal membership and legal authority, is also its weakness: it can articulate norms but cannot compel compliance from the powerful.

SECTION 2.7.6 Comparison Matrix

SECTION 2.8 WORKED EXAMPLE (I do)

Case: The 2018–2024 US–China Trade and Technology War — From Tariffs to Export Controls

Levels of analysis

Individual. The trade and technology war cannot be reduced to structural forces alone; individual leaders and their cognitive frames mattered. Donald Trump’s mercantilist worldview and his conviction that trade deficits signal national weakness reframed China from a partner to be engaged into a competitor to be confronted. Joe Biden retained and deepened the confrontation, suggesting the shift was not merely personal but had acquired bureaucratic and political momentum. On the Chinese side, Xi Jinping’s consolidation of authority and his “Made in China 2025” industrial policy signaled an ambition to climb the value chain that US policymakers read as a direct challenge to American technological primacy. Individual agency here operated within structural constraints: neither leader invented the rivalry, but each accelerated it through specific decisions—tariff schedules, entity-list designations, executive orders on investment screening.

State. At the state level, the conflict is a contest between two political economies with incompatible development models. The United States, responding to domestic deindustrialization and the political backlash against globalization, deployed Section 301 tariffs, export controls, and industrial policy (the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022) to rebuild domestic capacity and deny China access to advanced semiconductors. China responded with retaliatory tariffs, rare-earth export restrictions, and accelerated indigenous innovation programs. Each state’s policy was shaped by its internal coalition politics: US measures drew support from both labor and national-security constituencies, while Chinese measures were framed as defending sovereignty and development rights. The state level reveals that the “war” was not a single event but a sequence of policy instruments—tariffs, then entity lists, then comprehensive export controls, then outbound investment screening—each expanding the scope of decoupling.

Systemic. Systemically, the trade and technology war is an instance of power-transition dynamics: a rising power (China) approaching parity with a hegemon (the United States) in economic and technological capacity, triggering defensive measures by the incumbent. Offensive realism predicts that the hegemon will seek to prevent the challenger from translating economic power into military capability, which is precisely what the October 2022 semiconductor export controls attempted—denying China the advanced chips needed for artificial intelligence and military modernization. Power transition theory (Organski, Kugler) adds that the danger is greatest when the challenger is dissatisfied with the existing order; here, US policymakers increasingly read China’s industrial policy as evidence of such dissatisfaction. The systemic frame also captures the alliance dimension: the United States sought to multilateralize controls through the Wassenaar Arrangement and coordination with Japan and the Netherlands, while China deepened ties with Russia and the Global South.

Transnational. The transnational level is where the war’s most consequential effects appear. Global supply chains—Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), ASML in the Netherlands, Samsung in South Korea—meant that US export controls rippled through third countries, forcing firms and governments to choose between US market access and Chinese market access. Technology standards (5G, AI governance, quantum encryption) became arenas of competition with global spillovers. Diaspora scientists, academic collaborations, and cross-border investment flows were disrupted. The transnational level also includes the ideological and narrative competition: the “new cold war” framing itself became a transnational discourse shaping how states, firms, and publics understood the rivalry, with consequences for investment, migration, and scientific cooperation.

Mechanism

The core mechanism is a security dilemma operating through economic interdependence. Under conditions of deep integration, measures taken by one state to reduce vulnerability (export controls, reshoring, friend-shoring) are read by the other as hostile intent, triggering countermeasures that deepen the spiral. The mechanism has three stages. First, threat perception: US policymakers came to view Chinese technological advancement not as benign development but as a security threat, especially after the Made in China 2025 plan and the fusion of military and civilian technology under Xi. Second, instrumental escalation: the United States moved from tariffs (2018) to targeted technology denial (2019–2020) to comprehensive semiconductor controls (2022) to outbound investment screening (2023), each step expanding the domain of confrontation. Third, structural decoupling: even where full decoupling did not occur, the expectation of future restrictions drove firms to diversify supply chains, creating a self-fulfilling fragmentation of the global economy. The mechanism is reinforced by domestic politics: in both countries, hawkish constituencies gained influence, making de-escalation politically costly. The result is not a clean break but a “small yard, high fence” regime—targeted denial in critical technologies alongside continued trade in non-strategic goods.

Perspective reconstruction

African (primary). From an African vantage point, the trade and technology war is not primarily a US–China story; it is a shock to the global trading system on which African development depends. The African perspective, drawing on Rodney’s analysis of how external powers structure peripheral economies, sees the rivalry as accelerating the fragmentation of global value chains in ways that can either harm or benefit African industrialization. On one hand, decoupling raises costs for African importers of technology and reduces demand for African commodities tied to Chinese manufacturing. On the other hand, “China Plus One” strategies and the search for alternative supply-chain nodes create openings for African economies—Morocco’s automotive sector, Ethiopia’s industrial parks, South Africa’s mineral processing—to capture relocated investment. African states have responded with multi-alignment: maintaining ties with both Washington and Beijing while asserting sovereignty over critical minerals (cobalt, lithium, rare earths) through resource nationalism. The African perspective also highlights what Western and Chinese accounts occlude: the war’s costs are borne disproportionately by the Global South, which has no voice in setting the rules of decoupling. Bayart’s “politics of the belly” reminds us that African elites may extract rents from the rivalry, but the structural position of African economies remains subordinate. The African contribution is to reframe the war not as a bilateral power transition but as a reordering of global capitalism whose distributional consequences fall hardest on those least responsible for it.

Chinese. The Chinese perspective frames the trade and technology war as a US attempt to contain China’s legitimate development, violating the principles of free trade and technological openness that the United States itself championed. From this view, tariffs and export controls are not defensive measures but offensive acts of hegemonic preservation, driven by anxiety about China’s rise rather than by genuine security threats. Qin Yaqing’s relational theory suggests that the US approach—atomistic, zero-sum, treating China as an adversary to be contained—reflects a Western ontology ill-suited to an interdependent world. Yan Xuetong’s moral realism would judge US policy as lacking the moral authority of a legitimate hegemon, since it prioritizes narrow self-interest over the common good. Zhao Tingyang’s “community of shared future” offers the normative alternative: a world order in which technological development is shared rather than weaponized. The Chinese perspective emphasizes that the war has accelerated indigenous innovation—Huawei’s 7nm chip, the push for semiconductor self-sufficiency—and has strengthened China’s resolve to reduce dependence on US technology.

Russian. The Russian perspective reads the trade and technology war as confirmation that unipolarity is over and that the United States is lashing out to preserve a fading hegemony. From Moscow’s vantage point, US sanctions and export controls against China mirror those applied to Russia, revealing a pattern of economic coercion against any state that challenges Western dominance. The war is evidence that multipolarity is not a choice but a fact, and that the US-led order is fragmenting under the weight of its own contradictions. Russia’s interest lies in deepening its partnership with China—energy, technology, military—while positioning itself as a pole in an emerging multipolar order. The Russian perspective underweights the costs of this alignment for China and overstates the coherence of an anti-Western bloc.

Western. The Western perspective, drawing on Friedberg and Mearsheimer, treats the trade and technology war as a necessary and overdue correction to a failed engagement strategy. From this view, decades of economic integration did not liberalize China; instead, they funded its military modernization and technological catch-up. The war is thus a defensive adjustment: tariffs address unfair trade practices, and export controls prevent the transfer of militarily relevant technology to a strategic competitor. The Western perspective emphasizes that the measures are targeted (“small yard, high fence”) rather than blanket decoupling, and that they are coordinated with allies to preserve the liberal order’s technological edge. It occludes the extent to which US policy is driven by domestic political economy—protectionist constituencies, techno-nationalism—and the possibility that containment may accelerate the very Chinese self-sufficiency it seeks to prevent.

UN. The UN perspective frames the trade and technology war as a challenge to the multilateral trading system and to the principles of non-discrimination and peaceful economic cooperation enshrined in the Charter and the WTO. From this view, unilateral tariffs and export controls undermine the rules-based order and risk fragmenting the global economy into competing blocs. The UN emphasizes the need for dialogue, dispute settlement through the WTO, and the avoidance of measures that could escalate into broader conflict. The UN perspective occludes the power asymmetries that make multilateral rules ineffective when great powers choose to bypass them, and it struggles to address the security dimensions of technology competition that fall outside traditional trade frameworks.

Explicit adjudication

The Western perspective best explains the initiation of the trade and technology war: the shift from engagement to containment was driven by a reassessment of China’s trajectory, grounded in power-transition logic and the recognition that economic interdependence had not produced political convergence. The mechanism of instrumental escalation—tariffs to entity lists to comprehensive controls—fits the Western narrative of a defensive adjustment to a rising challenger. However, the Western perspective misses the transnational and distributional dimensions that the African perspective captures: the war’s costs fall on third parties, and the “small yard, high fence” framing understates the breadth of decoupling’s spillovers. The Chinese perspective correctly identifies the coercive character of US measures but underweights the security concerns that motivated them and the degree to which Chinese industrial policy was itself a driver of US threat perception. The systemic frame (power transition) explains why the rivalry intensified when it did, but it cannot explain the specific instrument choices—why semiconductors rather than, say, pharmaceuticals—without reference to the transnational supply-chain structure and domestic political coalitions. The most complete explanation combines the systemic (power transition creating the conditions), the state (policy instruments shaped by domestic politics), and the transnational (supply-chain interdependence determining which technologies became flashpoints). The African perspective does not explain the war’s origins but provides the essential corrective: any account that treats the US–China dyad as the whole story misses the global distributional consequences and the agency of states caught between the two powers. No single perspective is sufficient; the Western frame explains the trigger, the systemic frame explains the timing, and the transnational frame explains the mechanism’s reach.

SECTION 2.9 PROBLEM PAIR (We do)

Task 1 — Level of analysis. At which level or levels (individual, state, systemic, transnational) does the Taiwan flashpoint most plausibly operate, and why does the dominant level change depending on whether one is explaining the 1995–96 crisis, the 2022 Pelosi visit, or a hypothetical 2027 blockade?

Task 2 — Power-transition reading. Using Organski and Kugler’s power-transition logic and Allison’s Thucydides Trap, reconstruct the argument that Taiwan is the most likely trigger for a US–China war. What exactly is the “trap” mechanism, and where does credibility enter?

Task 3 — Security-dilemma reading. Using Mearsheimer’s offensive realism, explain how Taiwan functions as the intervening variable that converts abstract systemic rivalry into concrete military planning, and how US commitments and Chinese countermeasures feed each other.

Task 4 — Chinese relational and moral-realist reading. How would Yan Xuetong’s moral realism, Qin Yaqing’s relational theory, and Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia frame Taiwan differently from the Western power-transition account? What do they assume about anarchy, intentions, and recognition?

Task 5 — Occlusion and adjudication. What does each of the three readings occlude? On the available evidence (military exercises, diplomatic statements, economic integration, Taiwan’s own agency), which reading has the strongest support and which the weakest?

Task 6 — Falsifiers. Specify two pieces of evidence that, if observed by 2030, would weaken the power-transition reading and two that would weaken the security-dilemma reading.

MODEL ANSWER (continuous prose). The Taiwan flashpoint is best analyzed as a multi-level phenomenon whose dominant causal register shifts with the time horizon. At the systemic level, the flashpoint is a power-transition problem: Taiwan sits at the intersection of a rising China’s claim to territorial integrity and a declining hegemon’s commitment to a status-quo order. Organski’s original formulation held that war is most likely when a challenger approaches parity with the dominant power and is dissatisfied with the existing order; Allison’s popularization of the “Thucydides Trap” adds the psychological mechanism that the established power’s fear of decline and the rising power’s demand for recognition compress decision time and magnify misperception. On this reading, Taiwan is dangerous not because of its intrinsic value but because it is the one issue on which both sides have staked credibility: Beijing’s “core interest” framing and Washington’s strategic ambiguity each make retreat domestically costly, so the bargaining space narrows as the power gap narrows.

At the state level, Mearsheimer’s offensive realism supplies a different mechanism: the security dilemma. Because states cannot know others’ intentions and must maximize relative power to survive, China’s military modernization — including anti-access and area-denial capabilities around Taiwan — is read in Washington as preparation for coercion, while US arms sales, freedom-of-navigation operations, and alliance tightening are read in Beijing as containment. The result is a self-fulfilling spiral in which defensive measures are indistinguishable from offensive ones. Taiwan functions here as the intervening variable that converts abstract systemic rivalry into concrete military planning: exercises, blockades, and gray-zone pressure become the currency of competition.

The Chinese relational and moral-realist accounts reframe the same facts. Yan Xuetong argues that moral leadership, not material power alone, determines whether a rising state can replace the hegemon; on this view, China’s Taiwan policy is judged by whether it demonstrates humane authority rather than mere dominance. Qin Yaqing’s relational theory treats the Taiwan issue as embedded in a web of relationships — cross-strait, Sino-US, and regional — whose stability depends on mutual recognition and face-saving rather than on balance-of-power calculations. Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia reframes the entire problem: the goal is not victory in a bilateral rivalry but the construction of an all-under-heaven order in which Taiwan’s status is resolved within a shared civilizational framework rather than through zero-sum competition. These accounts occlude the security-dilemma logic by assuming that intentions can be signaled and read, and they occlude power-transition logic by denying that the system is necessarily anarchic.

Each reading occludes something. The power-transition reading occludes the degree of economic integration that raises the cost of war for both sides and the agency of Taiwan itself, which is not a passive object of great-power bargaining. The security-dilemma reading occludes the possibility that at least some Chinese behavior is driven by status and identity rather than by security maximization, and it risks treating all US policy as reactive. The Chinese readings occlude the coercive dimension of Beijing’s military signaling and the genuine security fears of smaller states. Adjudicating on the evidence: the 2022 Pelosi visit and subsequent PLA exercises showed that signaling and misperception operate powerfully, supporting the security-dilemma reading; the long-term growth of China’s naval and missile capabilities supports the power-transition reading’s material premise; but the absence of a war despite repeated crises supports the relational reading’s claim that dense interaction and mutual interest in stability can manage, if not resolve, the rivalry. The weakest reading on current evidence is strong Thucydides-Trap determinism, which treats war as structurally likely; the historical base rate of power transitions ending in war is lower than Allison’s framing suggests, and both sides have strong incentives to avoid direct conflict.

Falsifiers: the power-transition reading would be weakened by a sustained Chinese economic slowdown that removes parity pressure, or by a durable US–China agreement on Taiwan’s status. The security-dilemma reading would be weakened by transparent, verifiable military confidence-building measures that both sides implement and sustain, or by a Chinese decision to unilaterally reduce military exercises without reciprocal US concessions. Conversely, a Chinese blockade rehearsal combined with US non-response would strengthen the power-transition reading, while a spiral of reciprocal sanctions and military deployments would strengthen the security-dilemma reading.

SECTION 2.10 INDEPENDENT MEMO (You do)

(a) Case description. In May 2024, the United States raised tariffs to 100 percent on Chinese electric vehicles, 25 percent on lithium-ion EV batteries, and 50 percent on solar cells, while extending export controls on advanced semiconductors and AI model weights. China responded with anti-dumping investigations into European pork and brandy, tightened export licensing for gallium, germanium, and graphite, and accelerated subsidies for domestic chip fabrication. Several African and Southeast Asian governments announced they would not enforce either bloc’s trade measures, positioning themselves as transshipment and assembly hubs; the African Continental Free Trade Area secretariat warned that “bipolar trade fragmentation” threatened industrialization plans. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s TSMC continued to dominate leading-edge foundry capacity, and both Washington and Beijing intensified diplomatic competition over Pacific Island states’ recognition of Taiwan versus the PRC. The episode raised the question of whether economic interdependence is still a brake on conflict or has become a weapon.

(b) Required memo headings (respond to each as a prompt).

• Mechanism: Identify the causal mechanism linking the 2024 tariff and export-control escalation to (i) the power-transition dynamic, (ii) the security dilemma, and (iii) the interdependence-as-weapon thesis. Specify which level of analysis each mechanism operates at and what would have to be true for the mechanism to fail.
• Perspective reconstruction: Reconstruct how an African, Chinese, Russian, Western, and UN analyst would each explain the same 2024 episode, steel-manning each from within. Identify the one thing each perspective sees that the others miss and the one thing each occludes.
• Historical analogue: Select one historical case (e.g., Anglo-German trade rivalry pre-1914, US-Japan semiconductor friction 1980s, or Cold War COCOM controls) and specify the respects in which it is and is not analogous. State the limits of the analogy explicitly.
• Falsifiers: List three observable developments by 2027 that would falsify your central claim, and state which of your mechanisms each would most directly test.

(c) Self-check. Before submitting, verify that you have distinguished description (what happened), explanation (why it happened), prediction (what will happen next), and prescription (what should be done), and that no single sentence conflates two of these.

SECTION 2.11 HINGE QUESTION

Question. In the US–China case, which statement best distinguishes the causal mechanism of Organski’s power-transition theory from that of Mearsheimer’s offensive realism?

A. Power-transition theory locates the danger in the challenger’s dissatisfaction with the existing order as it approaches parity; offensive realism locates it in the structural impossibility of knowing intentions, which drives all great powers to seek hegemony.

B. Power-transition theory predicts war only when the challenger is weaker than the dominant power; offensive realism predicts war only when the two powers are roughly equal.

C. Power-transition theory is a liberal theory of interdependence; offensive realism is a constructivist theory of identity.

D. Both theories predict that economic interdependence prevents war, but they disagree on whether international institutions matter.

Correct answer: A.

Distractor diagnosis.

• B misstates both theories’ scope conditions. Organski’s danger zone is the approach to parity, not weakness; Mearsheimer’s security dilemma operates across power distributions, not only at equality. A student choosing B has confused “parity” with “equality of outcome” and treated offensive realism as a balance-of-power threshold theory.
• C misclassifies both traditions. Power-transition theory is a realist theory of hierarchy and dissatisfaction, not liberal interdependence; offensive realism is structural realism, not constructivism. A student choosing C is importing paradigm labels without matching them to the theories’ actual premises.
• D attributes to both theories a liberal claim neither makes. Neither Organski nor Mearsheimer treats interdependence as a reliable brake on war; both are skeptical of institutional and economic pacification. A student choosing D has projected liberal institutionalism onto realist frameworks.

SECTION 2A — DATA LAB

Data sources and caveats. The tables below assemble publicly available indicators from the World Bank (GDP), SIPRI (military expenditure), the US Census Bureau and UN Comtrade (bilateral trade), and the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) entity-list and export-control actions. All figures are approximate and rounded; Chinese military spending is reported at official budget levels, while independent estimates (SIPRI) run higher and are used here. GDP in purchasing-power-parity (PPP) terms and in nominal (market-exchange-rate) terms measure different things: PPP captures domestic productive capacity and living standards, while nominal GDP captures international purchasing power, debt-servicing capacity, and the scale of cross-border transactions. Both matter for power-transition analysis, and they tell different stories about the US–China gap. Technology-control coverage is measured by cumulative entity-list designations and by the scope of controlled items, not by a single scalar; the table therefore reports directional thresholds rather than precise counts.

Table 1 — Aggregate power indicators, United States and China, 2000–2024 (approximate)

Sources: World Bank World Development Indicators (GDP); SIPRI Military Expenditure Database. Figures rounded to one decimal for GDP and nearest billion for military spending.

Table 2 — Bilateral economic interdependence and technology controls, 2017–2024 (approximate)

Sources: US Census Bureau, Foreign Trade Division; BIS Entity List and October 7, 2022 interim final rule; subsequent BIS updates through 2024.

Table 3 — Structural chokepoints in US–China technology interdependence (approximate shares)

Five numbered analysis questions

1. Trend. Describe the trajectory of the US–China power gap between 2000 and 2024 using both nominal and PPP GDP, and then compare it with the trajectory of military spending. Does the gap close faster in economic or in military terms, and what does that imply for Organski’s claim that power transitions occur when the challenger’s power approaches the dominant state’s? Note specifically the 2015–2022 period, when Chinese nominal growth slowed while PPP estimates continued to rise.

2. Level of analysis. The October 2022 semiconductor export controls and the cumulative entity-list designations are state actions, but they operate through firm-level supply chains, individual researchers, and transnational production networks. At which level of analysis — individual, state, systemic, or transnational — is the technology war best explained, and why does the choice of level change the predicted outcome? Consider whether a systemic-level reading (bipolar competition) predicts decoupling, while a transnational-level reading (interdependence) predicts managed friction.

3. Perspective reconstruction (all five). Reconstruct how each of the five perspectives reads Tables 1–3. The African perspective should foreground the costs of bipolar competition for development finance and the opportunities of multi-alignment; the Chinese perspective should read the data as evidence of legitimate catch-up and of US containment; the Russian perspective should read it as confirmation of multipolarity and of anti-hegemonic opportunity; the Western perspective should read it as evidence of strategic rivalry requiring managed competition; the UN perspective should read it as a test of Charter principles and of the risk of great-power conflict. Which perspective best explains the 2022–2024 decline in bilateral trade alongside rising entity-list designations?

4. Interpretation. Does the data support the “new cold war” framing, or does it support the “deep interdependence” framing? Use the trade totals, the deficit trajectory, and the chokepoint table to adjudicate. Specify what evidence would falsify each framing: for example, a sustained fall in bilateral trade below USD 300 bn with no substitution would support decoupling, while stable or rising trade alongside expanding controls would support managed interdependence.

5. Limitation. Identify three data limitations that could reverse or qualify your conclusions. At minimum, address (a) the gap between official and estimated Chinese military spending, (b) the difference between nominal and PPP GDP for assessing international power, and (c) the absence of reliable data on technology-control evasion, smuggling, and third-country transshipment. Explain how each limitation biases the analysis toward either alarmism or complacency.

SECTION 3 — DUAL-CODED VISUAL ANCHOR

Visual 1 — The power-transition curve (Organski) with a Thucydides overlay.

What to draw. On a large sheet, draw two horizontal axes: the vertical axis labelled “Relative power (index, 1990 = 100)” and the horizontal axis labelled “Year, 1990–2040.” Plot two smooth curves: a solid line for the United States that rises gently to a plateau around 2010 and then flattens or slightly declines; a dashed line for China that starts far below in 1990, crosses the US line somewhere between 2025 and 2035 (draw the crossing as a shaded band, not a single point, to signal uncertainty), and continues rising. Shade the band where the two curves are within 10–15 percent of each other in dark grey and label it “Danger zone / power-transition band.” Add a vertical dashed line at the crossing labelled “Transition point (contested).”

Labels to place. Label the US curve “Dominant power (status quo),” the China curve “Challenger (rising power),” and annotate three historical markers along the x-axis: 2001 (WTO accession), 2018 (trade war begins), 2022 (semiconductor controls). Add a small box in the corner titled “Organski mechanism: challenger grows faster → power gap narrows → war risk peaks during transition, not after.”

Perspective overlay to annotate. In the upper-left margin, write “Western reading (Allison): Thucydides Trap — 12 of 16 historical cases ended in war.” In the lower-right margin, write “Chinese reading (Qin/Yan/Zhao): ‘no Thucydides Trap’ — relational order and moral legitimacy can manage transition.” Draw a double-headed arrow between the two margin notes labelled “Same data, divergent causal attribution.”

Visual 2 — The Taiwan security dilemma spiral.

What to draw. Draw two concentric circles. The inner circle is labelled “Taiwan Strait (contested space).” The outer circle is labelled “Regional security environment.” Place two nodes on opposite sides of the inner circle: “PRC” on the left and “US/ROC” on the right. Draw curved arrows between them in a spiral pattern: PRC arrow → “military exercises / ADIZ incursions” → US/ROC arrow → “arms sales / freedom-of-navigation” → PRC arrow → “grey-zone coercion” → US/ROC arrow → “deterrence posture” → back to PRC. Each arrow should be thicker than the last to show escalation. In the centre of the inner circle, draw a small Taiwan silhouette labelled “Status quo ambiguity.”

Labels to place. Along the spiral, label four rungs: (1) “Perception of threat,” (2) “Defensive response,” (3) “Counter-perception,” (4) “Escalation.” Add a box at the bottom: “Security dilemma (Herz/Jervis): defensive measures read as offensive → spiral.” Add a second box: “Power-transition overlay: Taiwan as the ‘most dangerous’ flashpoint because it combines status inconsistency with alliance commitments.”

Perspective overlay to annotate. Annotate the PRC-side arrows with “Chinese reading: anti-secession, sovereignty, US interference.” Annotate the US/ROC-side arrows with “Western reading: deterrence, Taiwan Relations Act, ‘strategic ambiguity.’” Annotate the spiral itself with “Russian reading: US hegemony provoking crisis; African reading: proxy cost of bipolar competition; UN reading: Charter Art. 2(4) and peaceful settlement.”

Visual 3 — The technology interdependence web and chokepoints.

What to draw. Draw a network diagram with five nodes arranged in a pentagon: “US design (EDA, IP),” “Taiwan fab (TSMC),” “China assembly/test,” “China rare-earth processing,” and “Global markets.” Connect them with thick lines labelled with flows: “design files,” “wafers,” “components,” “raw materials,” “finished goods.” Place a red “X” or scissors icon on three edges to mark chokepoints: US EDA → China, China rare earths → US/Japan, Taiwan fab → global. Shade the nodes by actor: US nodes in blue, China nodes in red, Taiwan node in yellow, global node in grey.

Labels to place. Title the diagram “Managed interdependence, 2022–2024.” Label each chokepoint with its control instrument: “BIS entity list / Oct. 2022 rules,” “Export licensing / quota,” “Strategic ambiguity + deterrence.” Add a legend: solid line = flow, dashed line = restricted flow, X = active control.

Perspective overlay to annotate. Around the diagram, place five short margin notes: “African: chokepoints raise input costs for African manufacturing and green-transition minerals.” “Chinese: US ‘small yard, high fence’ is containment in disguise.” “Russian: sanctions architecture is a tool of hegemony.” “Western: ‘de-risking’ not decoupling; controls are defensive.” “UN: export controls must comply with WTO and Charter obligations; technology access is a development right.” Draw a bracket grouping the last two notes labelled “Contested legal framing.”

SECTION 4 — CORNELL NOTES

Source log. Allison (2017); Mearsheimer (2001, 2014); Organski (1958); Kugler (power-transition extensions); Qin (2018); Yan (2011); Zhao (2021); Friedberg (2018); World Bank; SIPRI; US Census Bureau; BIS. Secondary: Herz (1950) and Jervis (1978) on the security dilemma; Keohane and Nye (1977, 2012) on interdependence; Grovogui (2006), Mbembe (2019), Aning (2020) on African vantage points.

Summary. US–China rivalry is best understood as a power transition in progress, but whether it produces war depends on mechanisms — security dilemma, alliance commitments, and technology chokepoints — that are not captured by aggregate power indices alone. The data show a narrowing but unclosed gap, persistent and managed interdependence, and an expanding but incomplete control regime. The five perspectives disagree on whether the transition is manageable: Chinese relational theory and African multi-alignment see opportunity in multipolarity, while Western offensive realism and the Thucydides framing see structural danger, and the UN stresses Charter-based restraint.

SECTION 5 — FEYNMAN COMPRESSION

Step 1 — Explain without jargon. Imagine two runners on a track. One has been ahead for decades and owns most of the equipment. The other is catching up fast, has more people, and is building its own equipment. The race is not just about speed; it is about who gets to set the rules of the track. The danger is highest not when the second runner is far behind, nor when it has clearly won, but in the middle, when the first runner fears losing and the second runner feels it deserves a say. That middle period is the power transition. Now add a narrow bridge on the track — Taiwan — that both runners claim. Even if neither wants to crash, the bridge makes a crash more likely because each runner’s defensive move looks like an attack to the other. That is the security dilemma. The data show the second runner is still behind in money that counts internationally, but ahead in money that buys things at home, and the two runners still trade heavily even as they restrict each other’s technology. So the race is real, the bridge is dangerous, but the runners are still tied together by the track itself.

Step 2 — Mark gaps. Three gaps remain in this explanation. First, it treats “power” as a single number, but military quality, alliance networks, and technological leadership are not captured by GDP. Second, it does not explain why the African perspective matters: the two runners’ race reshapes finance, debt, and mineral markets for everyone else, and those effects are not visible in bilateral US–China data. Third, it assumes the security dilemma is symmetric, but the two sides have different political systems and different time horizons, which may make one side more risk-acceptant than the other.

Step 3 — Reread verification. Re-reading Organski (1958) confirms that the transition period, not the endpoint, carries the highest war risk, and that the challenger’s satisfaction with the status quo matters as much as its power. Re-reading Allison (2017) confirms that the Thucydides Trap is a probability, not a destiny: four of sixteen cases avoided war, usually through accommodation or alliance restructuring. Re-reading Mearsheimer (2014) confirms that offensive realism predicts US resistance to Chinese regional hegemony but does not predict inevitable war; it predicts sustained competition. Re-reading Qin (2018) and Yan (2011) confirms that Chinese scholars argue relational legitimacy can lower transition risk, a claim that is theoretically coherent but empirically untested at this scale. Re-reading Friedberg (2018) confirms that the engagement-to-competition shift is dated to roughly 2017–2018 in US strategy documents. The Feynman analogy survives but must carry these qualifications.

Step 4 — Analogy with explicit limits. The runners-on-a-track analogy captures the transition dynamic and the bridge/flashpoint logic, but it fails in four ways. It implies two actors, whereas the system includes Taiwan, Japan, ASEAN, the EU, and African states as consequential agents. It implies a finish line, whereas power transitions are open-ended and reversible. It implies physical collision, whereas modern great-power conflict may be economic, cyber, or proxy rather than kinetic. And it cannot represent the interdependence that makes both runners’ shoes in the other’s factory. Use the analogy for the transition mechanism only; do not extend it to policy prescription.

Step 5 — Rewrite. US–China rivalry is a power transition in which a rising challenger approaches a dominant power’s capabilities, raising war risk during the transition window; the risk is amplified by a security dilemma over Taiwan and by technology chokepoints, but is moderated by deep economic interdependence and by competing visions of international order. Whether the transition ends in conflict or managed competition depends on mechanisms — alliance credibility, domestic politics, and relational legitimacy — that aggregate power data alone cannot settle, and on perspectives that the bilateral frame systematically underweights, especially those of African, UN, and smaller-state actors.

SECTION 6 — SPACED-REPETITION FLASHCARDS

SECTION 7 — METACOGNITIVE CALIBRATION

7.1 Confidence Audit

7.2 Three-Question Debrief

1. Which theory in this lesson did I initially treat as more deterministic than its author intended, and what textual or logical cue should have corrected that?
2. When I reconstructed the African perspective, did I explain it from within African scholarly and political traditions, or did I merely append African examples to a Western theory?
3. Which of my claims about US-China rivalry would change if I shifted from nominal GDP to PPP GDP, or from aggregate military spending to specific capability domains?

7.3 Error-Log

SECTION 8 — CHEATSHEET

SECTION 9 — REVIEW SCHEDULE

SECTION 10 — COMPLETION CHECKLIST

• I can state power transition theory and its scope conditions without calling it inevitable.
• I can distinguish Organski’s original claim from Allison’s Thucydides Trap framing.
• I can explain Mearsheimer’s offensive realism and its strongest counterargument.
• I can reconstruct Qin, Yan, and Zhao as distinct Chinese theoretical traditions.
• I can explain why interdependence can both deter and escalate conflict.
• I can present the engagement-versus-containment debate with evidence on both sides.
• I can analyze Taiwan through power transition and security-dilemma frameworks.
• I can reconstruct the African perspective as primary, not as an add-on.
• I can steel-man Chinese, Russian, Western, and UN perspectives.
• I can use individual, state, systemic, and transnational levels of analysis correctly.
• I can identify at least one falsifier for each major claim in the lesson.
• I can distinguish description, explanation, prediction, and prescription in a memo.
• I can interpret GDP, military spending, trade, and export-control data without overclaiming.
• I can explain what each of the five perspectives occludes.
• I can produce an adjudicated claim rather than a mere summary.
• I have logged at least two misconceptions in the error-log.
• I can connect this lesson to L48, L49, and L52-56.
• I can explain why “new cold war” is a contested analogy.

FURTHER READING (Optional)

Power transition and structural realism

• Organski (1958)
• Allison (2017)
• Mearsheimer (2001)
• Mearsheimer (2014)

Chinese international relations theory

• Qin (2018)
• Yan (2011)
• Zhao (2021)

Interdependence, authoritarian challenge, and engagement

• Friedberg (2018)

End of Lesson 47. Say Next when you are ready.