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We often use the lessons from European history to try to understand China, says David Kang, professor of international relations at USC. But we don't have to if we were to take Asia on its own terms instead of using Europe to explain it. If we look at the history of East Asia, we see that the United States and China can avoid conflict.

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DAVID KANG:

David C. Kang is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, with appointments in both the School of International Relations and the Marshall School of Business. At USC he is also director of the Korean Studies Institute. Kang’s latest book is "American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security in the 21st Century," (2017, Cambridge University Press). He is also author of "East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute"; "China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia"; "Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines"; and "Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies" (co-authored with Victor Cha). Kang has published numerous scholarly articles in journals such as International Organization and International Security, and his co-authored article “Testing Balance of Power Theory in World History” was awarded “Best article, 2007-2009,” by the European Journal of International Relations. Kang has also written opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as writing a monthly column for the Joongang Ilbo in

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TRANSCRIPT:

We instinctively use the lessons of European history to explain Asia’s future, and it is incredibly difficult to make the argument that we should look at Asia’s history if we want to understand where Asia is going to go in the future.

The most common way that we think about power transitions in international relations is to look at a war between Sparta and Athens from 2500 years ago—the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece. There, a rising power caused fear in a declining power and they ended up inevitably fighting.

Thucydides wrote about this in his famous History of the Peloponnesian War, and almost ever since then what IR scholars and international relation scholars and historians have done is used the example of the Peloponnesian War as the most foundational way in which we think about rising powers: “Rising powers are inevitably ambitious. Declining powers are inevitably fearful and they always clash at some point.”

Well, when we get to modern China today the example seems to fit perfectly, which is: China is a rising power, it’s very ambitious; America is a declining power, it’s very fearful; and so at some point there’s almost an inevitable chance that the two are going to come into conflict.

And in fact you hear this over and over again. And yet in a way—isn’t it weird to think about a primitive infantry battle between two Greek villages from 2500 years ago that would have any implications for what contemporary modern China, how they’re going to behave today? I mean in a way it seems like quite a stretch.

And in many cases I think that simply taking the lessons of history in this way biases us towards looking towards conflict in ways I don’t think actually are necessarily going to play out, particularly in contemporary East Asia.

That is, what we do, is we always take European history as the sum of all things, and somehow what happened—again, 2500 years ago in ancient Greece—is going to predict what’s going to happen in modern East Asia.

And I don’t think that’s the case at all, especially when we look at how East Asian history worked.

If we were to take East Asia on its own terms instead of using Europe to explain Asia—why don’t we look at East Asia?

And if we took it on its own terms one thing that we would find is that first of all China is not really rising; China has always been big!

Sometimes it goes into a period of decline and then it comes back, and this is more return than a rise, so it’s not anything new to the countries in the region.

In many ways what happens is: China’s dominance, China’s massive size has been a fact of life in East Asia for literally centuries, so this is nothing new.

So it’s not at all clear to me that we should view this as a “rising power” any more than we would view the United States as a “potentially rising power.”

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