Joshua Stone

The Cipher Brief’s Academic Incubator partners with national security-focused programs from colleges and Universities across the country share the work of the next generation of national security leaders.

Joshua Stone is a U.S.-China relations specialist and Ph.D. Political Science student with the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. His research concentration centers on U.S.-China security relations, U.S. foreign policy toward China, and methods of coercion in international affairs. Stone is a combat veteran of the United States Army.

ACADEMIC INCUBATOR - China’s great power status has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. Its last hegemon, the Qing Dynasty, lost its Mandate of Heaven and collapsed in 1911 as resentment mounted over the imperial court’s failures to meet domestic and foreign challenges, creating a political, ideological, and security vacuum in China.

In the 20^th century, China attempted to fill these vacuums that had once led the country into turmoil. Now, China is looking outward to ensure its survival and restore its preeminence. International scholars need not speculate whether China’s rise to great power status will be peaceful: its past and present are prologue. Nor should nations misperceive the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) position. Indications of violence by the CCP at home and the regime’s tendency to lash out abroad signal a desire to subvert East Asia’s institutions and stability. The CCP is interested in primacy, not peace. The United States must lead an international coalition to push China back from coercion to compliance. American passivity will prove fatal to the liberal order.

Today, many actors across East Asia benefit from a hub-and-spoke system with the United States at its center, informing the conduct of the region’s affairs in favor of cooperation and absolute gains. China aims to replace Washington as the hegemon of this system; to reform this status quo in favor of a hierarchy with China at the top feeding its interests to the detriment of others. China’s cyber espionage activities, Beijing’s actions against the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, the CCP’s walled-ff response to COVID-19, and its territorial aggrandizement on land and sea demonstrate its intentions.

No Beijing-led misinformation campaign can distract from the evidence that China is on the offensive abroad. It has violated the territorial sovereignty of India, Taiwan, and other neighbors. Intellectual property theft and China’s foreign investment practices with regional actors demonstrate its pursuit of relative gains. Economic stratagies that pull developing nations across Asia into China’s sphere of influence with promises of mutual prosperity come with coercive debt-traps to enhance its position over others. China’s recent expansionary preferences do not reflect the adoption of a good neighbor policy. They signal an approach to foreign affairs consistent with offensive realism. China is maximizing military capabilities for primacy in the international system, while at the same time using economic rewards in the form of development initiatives to pacify its neighbor’s concerns about mounting security threats.

If the present picture of China’s moves in the region are still insufficient indicators of its aggressive intentions, perhaps East Asia’s recent history provides evidence of a turbulent future. The U.S. strategy to contain perceived communist dominoes from falling across East Asia after the Second World War culminated with conflict in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Though the United States is responsible for the many just and unjust actions it took to establish a new order in East Asia, the U.S. supplanted a hierarchical system with a more favorable liberal order that now breeds cooperation across the region—primarily for the purpose of predictability to prevent conflict. Should China continue attempting to upend this status quo, regional actors, including China, will suffer from loss of trade, investment, and security.

The United States cannot sit idly by under these circumstances, nor forgo its role in providing stability in East Asia. China, like its neighbors, continues to benefit tremendously from transfers of industrial knowledge from one leading economy to laggards downstream seeking development and take-off. Moreover, China’s neighbors are no longer kowtowing members to dynastic rule or some disparate community of nations throwing off shackles of colonialism following the Second World War. Hierarchy across East Asia evokes memories of days not romanticized over. Like China before them, India, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, and others will preserve at any cost the gains of a long-fought struggle to reclaim their territorial and administrative autonomy.