{"id":12526,"date":"2014-02-28T06:00:56","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T19:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=12526"},"modified":"2014-03-06T10:26:37","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:26:37","slug":"power-sharing-and-risk-management-in-hugh-whites-china-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/power-sharing-and-risk-management-in-hugh-whites-china-choice\/","title":{"rendered":"Power sharing and risk management in Hugh White’s ‘China Choice’"},"content":{"rendered":"
Hugh White argues in his book China Choice<\/i><\/a> that the United States should share power with China. Perhaps the starkest aspect of his proposal is that it requires real and substantive concessions to be negotiated with the Middle Kingdom. There\u2019s no wishful thinking about China being happy as a \u2018responsible stakeholder\u2019 in Hugh\u2019s view, and there\u2019s no place at the table for middle powers such as Australia either. His is a security architecture built around olde worlde great power politics.<\/p>\n As an example of what that might look like, Hugh sketches out a \u2018concert of Asia\u2019 involving America, China, Japan, India and perhaps Indonesia. In doing so, he outlines seven \u2018understandings\u2019, with which the members of the concert would probably have to agree, including \u2018fully accept[ing] the legitimacy of the political systems of all the others\u2019. What\u2019s more, he identifies Japan\u2019s re-emergence as a great power in its own right (i.e. independent of the United States) as a likely precondition for a concert to be workable. None of this would be easy; in fact it might not even be possible.<\/p>\n If power sharing can be achieved, it certainly won’t be pretty. The fundamental basis of Hugh\u2019s scheme entails compromises in favour of Chinese interests. Indeed, the term \u2018power sharing\u2019 is at best incomplete and potentially misleading in this context. In a previous generation, prior to the taint of history, the word \u2018appeasement\u2019 would have arisen in the discussion.<\/p>\n What exactly China might demand is hard to anticipate, and Hugh is imprecise on the limits to be imposed on concessions. Although he mentions the UN Charter with its restraint on the use of force\u2014at least between those sharing power\u2014he also says that small and middle powers would be \u2018vulnerable to the predations of the great powers\u2019. In any case, it\u2019d be hard to be optimistic about continued Taiwanese independence under a power sharing arrangement with China.<\/p>\n So we have a proposal which would be both difficult to achieve and worrying in its consequences. To his credit, Hugh doesn’t pretend otherwise. Instead, he argues that we should work towards what he calls power sharing because it\u2019s vastly preferable to what he sees as the alternatives: US withdrawal from the region or escalating US-Sino rivalry with an attendant risk of catastrophic war.<\/p>\n I think that it’s fair to say that Hugh\u2019s analysis of the strategic environment has been proven prescient by recent events. Nonetheless, and despite wide exposure, it’s equally fair to say that his proposal is yet to garner serious policy traction in Australia or the United States. But the game isn’t over; Hugh will undoubtedly continue trying to convince US audiences of the imperative to share power with China.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n