Is World War Three between China and the West inevitable?

It should be a strategic priority to nurture and strengthen the group of regional powers directly affected by Chinese behaviour

Chinese military might

By Shashank Joshi

27 Oct 2015

On one of Margaret Thatcher’s trips to Beijing in the 1980s, Charles Moore tells us in his recent biography, the Chinese leadership hoped to pressure Britain over Hong Kong. They resorted to a most diabolical scheme: withholding gin and tonic from Dennis Thatcher. Though they later relented on such cruelty, the anecdote tells us that China is willing to turn the screws when it deems necessary.

David Cameron knows this well. It has taken him years of fawning to win back Chinese favour, after he committed the sin of meeting China’s bête noire, the Dalai Lama, in 2012. But while it’s easy for us to apply an economic salve to human rights wounds, China’s meteoric rise presents more fundamental problems for others.

David Cameron is still trying to recover from the diplomatic error of meeting the Dalai Lama in 2012 

The United States’ large military presence in Asia has underpinned seventy years of prosperity and stability – with China one of the beneficiaries. Today that presence is threatened by the increasing reach and sophistication of Chinese military forces, such as new missiles that can strike American aircraft carriers in the Pacific.

Over the past several years, China has staked a claim to large swathes of the South China Sea, built huge man-man islands and put military facilities on them, and demanded that other militaries keep out of a 12-nautical mile exclusion zone around these. This threatens the fundamental principle of freedom of navigation, through an area that conveys 30 per cent of the world’s shipping. While other Asian countries have their own dubious claims, few have alienated so many others in so little time.

Construction at Calderon (Cuarteron) Reef in the disputed Spratley Islands in the South China Sea

China’s power is growing at a rate that is difficult for us to comprehend. In the decade before the First World War, Germany’s economy grew by 13 per cent and spending on arms by 64 per cent. But in the past 10 years, China’s economy has grown a staggering four times larger while its military spending has tripled. “Never before in history,” writes Harvard scholar Graham Allison, “has a nation risen so far, so fast, on so many dimensions of power”. Allison argues that such rapid and massive changes in the balance of power have been associated with war in 12 out of 16 cases over the past 500 years. How do we avoid this fate?

"Even as we welcome Chinese goods and capital into the West and work with Beijing on global issues like non-proliferation and climate change, it should be a strategic priority to nurture and strengthen this group of regional powers concerned and directly affected by Chinese behaviour."

Remember, first, that China is no diplomatic leper. It boasts a seat on the UN Security Council, while its two most powerful regional rivals – Japan and India – do not. True, China is under-represented in some key global institutions that were created after the Second World War. It ranks sixth in IMF voting shares despite being the world’s second-largest economy. But countries – including Britain – (AIIB). The New Development Bank created by the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) will also be headquartered in China. And Beijing’s own China Development Bank now hands out more loans than the World Bank.

Nor is China shut out of traditional diplomacy. For instance, Washington welcomed Chinese efforts to broker talks between Afghanistan and the Taliban this year. China deserves a place in the sun commensurate with its size, but it is hardly a pariah.

What about the security order? Pessimists argue that China’s trajectory leaves us with no option but to appease its sweeping claims in the Pacific, perhaps by granting Beijing some version of its own Monroe Doctrine. This would be unwise. China may be eclipsing every one of its rivals individually, but its adversaries are building new and stronger ties with one another, despite disagreements of their own. Last week, for instance, India practiced submarine hunting with the United States and Japan. In September, Tokyo passed a law allowing its military to fight overseas.

When the United States promulgated the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, it didn’t have rivals the size of India and Japan sitting on its doorstep. Beijing, meanwhile, has few friends except basket cases like North Korea. China and Russia are drifting closer, true, but an isolated and declining petro-state bogged down in Ukraine and Syria is hardly a major asset to the Chinese. The twenty-first century is not Chinese, but Asian.

Chinese honour guards marching in China  Even as we welcome Chinese goods and capital into the West and work with Beijing on global issues like non-proliferation and climate change, it should be a strategic priority to nurture and strengthen this group of regional powers concerned and directly affected by Chinese behaviour. The United States, quite apart from its so-called pivot to Asia (a modest eastward shift of military forces) realises this. It is why Washington has been willing to transfer extraordinarily sensitive technology, such as aircraft carrier designs, to non-allies like India. It’s also why our own Royal Marines have trained their Japanese counterparts to fend off assaults on disputed islands.

"There are 209 land features still unoccupied in the South China Sea,” noted one senior Chinese military official to an American magazine last week, “and we could seize them all”. Disabusing Chinese leaders of such ideas can only be done through the construction of a broad, robust security architecture in Asia.