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international relations. Indeed, this story is central to the mainstream realist

approach to International Relations (IR) and it comes in various forms:

rising and declining great powers, hegemonic (in)stability theory, polarity

theory and power transition theory, among others.1 The historical record

offers a lot of support for the idea that war is a frequent accompanimentwhen rising powers challenge incumbent ones for the top places in the inter-

national hierarchy. France rose to power by challenging Spain and the

Austro-Hungarian Empire. Britain rose to power by defeating the

Netherlands and France, and had to fight two challenges from Germany.

Germany rose to power by defeating Austria-Hungary and France. For a

time during the late 19th century Germany might have aligned with Britain

against Britains colonial rivals France and Russia. But this possibility

closed after 1898 with Germanys decision to embark on a naval challenge

to Britain. Russia rose to power in many conflicts with Sweden, the

Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and France, and became a superpower

on the back of its major role in the defeat of Germany in 1945. Japan rose to

power by defeating China and Russia. Initially, Japan bandwagoned with

the leading power, Britain, but their 1902 alliance arrangements broke down

after the First World War, and Japan moved to a warlike rise. Most of these

rising powers actively sought the wars they fought as part of their strategy

for rising. For this reason it was quite common for rising powers to devote a

lot of their new wealth to acquiring military strength. The general assump-tion of inevitable tension between, on the one side, rising powers wanting to

change the status hierarchy and the rules, and on the other the established

status quoones wanting to defend them, seems plausible. This is especially so

when such tensions are amplified by ideological differences, as they were

throughout the short 20th century (19141989). This weight of history is

interpreted by some IR theorists as meaning that conflict is inevitable when

challengers and incumbents meet at the top of the great power hierarchy.2

The three world wars of the 20th century (First, Second, and Cold) seem to

underpin this view.

Against this model of inevitably warlike power struggles stands another

idea: peaceful rise. China committed itself to this policy a decade ago, and

1 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years Crisis, Michael Cox, ed., (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001[1946]); A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1958); Kenneth N.Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading MA.: Addison Wesley, 1979); RobertGilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1981); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana, 1989);

Ronald L. Tammen, Jacek Kugler, Douglas Lemke, Carole Alsharabati and Brian Efird,eds., Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century (New York: Seven Bridges Press,2000); William C. Wohlforth, Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War,World Politics, Vol. 61, No. 1 (2009), pp. 2857.

2 For example: John J. Mearsheimer, Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after theCold War, International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1990), pp. 556; John J. Mearsheimer,The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

110 Barry Buzan and Michael Cox

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arguably adopted it as far back as the shift to reform and opening up in the

late 1970s. The only other great power than can possibly claim to have risen

peacefully is the United States. Since there are only two cases of attempted

peaceful rise, it is worth asking what parallels can be drawn between the

United States and Chinese experiences. Given their different placements inhistory, what lessons, if any, can be learned for China from the US experi-

ence? These questions are made more interesting by two other factors.

Firstly, Chinas rise is happening now, and its success or failure is therefore

of enormous interest and importance to contemporary world politics.

And secondly, the incumbent hegemonic power that China is trying to rise

peacefully against is the United States: the only other case of peaceful rise.

Could it be that IR has crossed some sort of threshold, leaving behind the

realist history and opening up something new? Looking ahead, might Indiabe the third great power in a sequence of peaceful rise? For the purposes of

this comparison we will take the period of United States rise as running from

1865 (the end of the Civil War) to 1945 (its emergence as the pre-eminent

world power). The United States therefore presents a complete case study

with a well-defined end point after which the United States is definitely

risen rather than rising. Chinas peaceful rise begins in 1978 with the

big turn in policy to reform and opening up, and remains a work in progress.

China might therefore still abandon peaceful rise and revert to the trad-

itional realist formula. If it stays the course, the question arises as towhen, and by what criteria, we might think of China as having moved

from rising to risen. One possible benchmark for this would be acceptance

by the United States of China as a peer, as it did with the Soviet Union on

the basis of nuclear parity during the 1960s and 70s.

The next section looks more closely at both the meaning of peaceful rise

and the credibility of United States and Chinese claims to it. Section 3 sur-

veys the key points of similarity between the United States and China during

their process of rise. Section 4 does the same with the key points of differ-

ence. The concluding section sets out the lessons for China and for interna-

tional society that can be drawn from comparing the two cases. Readers

should keep in mind that we are comparing contemporary China with the

United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not with todays

United States.

Interpreting Peaceful Rise and the United States

and Chinese CasesWe use the label peaceful rise because it is a more accurate statement of

the issues than the more anodyne and diplomatic peaceful development.

But how, exactly, should peaceful rise be defined? What criteria need to be

met for the rise of a great power into the top ranks to count as peaceful?

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As Buzan drawing on Galtung,3 argues, one can think about this in terms of

three models: warlike rise (meeting the realist expectations of the rising

power precipitating a great power war); cold or negative peaceful rise (no

great power war, but an environment of threat and suspicion); and warmor

positive peaceful rise (a friendly environment with a low sense of threat). Thissuggests two general models for peaceful rise: cold and warm. With the

realist criteria in mind, we might thus say that the minimum condition for

peaceful rise is that a growing power is able to make both absolute and

relative gains in both its material and its status positions, in relation to

the other great powers in the international system without precipitating

major hostilities between itself and other great powers. Peaceful rise involves

a two-way process in which the rising power accommodates itself to the rules

and structures of international society, while at the same time other greatpowers accommodate some changes in those rules and structures by way of

adjusting to the new disposition of power and status. The empirical plausi-

bility of peaceful rise rests on two cases: the United States, which arguably

achieved it during the 20th century, and China, which says it wants to

achieve it during the 21st.

The United States is the only great power that has attempted and accom-

plished peaceful rise by succeeding in replacing the hegemon, Britain, with-

out going to war with it during the period of power transition.4 From the

late 19th century onward, when the United States was becoming the biggestgreat power in the system, its relations with Britain were good enough to

qualify for a warm peaceful rise. But this is not the whole picture, and it

might be objected that the rise of the United States in a wider sense was

hardly peaceful. In fact, one writer has even talked of the United States

during the 19th century as being a most dangerous nation becoming

involved in some early clashes with Britain (and Canada) before and after

independence, wars against the native peoples of North America, and during

the 19th century wars against Mexico and Spain.

5

Rising America also was,and remains still, a highly interventionist power in relationship to Central

and Latin America. The rise of the United States was moreover much facili-

tated by the First and Second World Wars in both of which the United

States was a late and reluctant entrant but a major beneficiary of the

peace settlement. In this sense the United States had the good fortune to

3 Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, Reflections on the Discussion: The Evolution ofInternational Security Studies and Non-Traditional Security Studies in China, Guojizhengzhi yanjiu (International Politics Quarterly), No. 1 (2012), pp. 4962; Johan

Galtung, Foreign Policy Opinion as a Function of Social Position, Journal of PeaceResearch, Vol. 1, No. 3/4 (1964), pp. 20631; Johan Galtung, Violence, Peace andPeace Research, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1969), pp. 16791.

4 Feng Yongping, The Peaceful Transition of Power from the UK to the US, ChineseJournal of International Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006), pp. 83108.

5 Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation: Americas Foreign Policy from the Earliest Days to theDawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 2006).



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be the big winner in great power wars started by others. It could, in a sense,

free ride on the parallel warlike rise of Germany, which did challenge Britain

and precipitate great power wars.6

We are left, therefore, with a rather complicated picture in which the

United States rise takes on a different character in relation to the existinghegemon (Britain) the other great powers, and the neighbours of the United

States in the Americas. In relation to Britain as the reigning hegemon, the

United States rise fits the warm peace model. The United States rose

through the 19th century, and then assumed a hegemonic position in the

20th, without having to engage in a serious or extended war with Britain. On

the contrary, it rose (as we shall see later) in concert withand at key points

in alliancewith Britain and the British. Indeed, long before Churchill

officially referred to the relationship as being distinct and special after theSecond World War, it had in fact already become so.7 In relation to other

great powers the picture is mixed between warm and cold peace, with the

United States being twice drawn into great powers wars precipitated by the

rise of great powers other than itself. But it did not initiate these wars, joined

them very late, and sided in both cases with Britain. In relation to its neigh-

bours the picture is again mixed. The United States fairly quickly developed

a warm peace with Canada, but in relation to Mexico, Central America, and

the Caribbean its rise was a mixture of warlike, cold and warm. The United

States record thus raises some difficult questions for defining a rise as peace-ful or not. By narrow realist criteria confined to great power relations,

a plausible case can be made that the United States did rise peacefully.

But from the perspective of its neighbours to the south, its rise might well

look to be on the more warlike end of the spectrum.

What about the case of China? China began its own peaceful rise after

having adopted its policy of economic reform at home while opening up to

the West in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Various rhetorics have

surrounded this attempt, with the phrase peaceful rise being only briefly

in vogue in 20032004.8 But the general logic behind the policy was clear.

Chinas leadership decided that the country needed to modernize, become

wealthy and powerful, and recover from the excesses and chaos of the

6 By the time of the Cold War, the United States already was the leading power, andtherefore the controversy over how responsible or not it was for initiating that war isnot relevant to the question of peaceful rise.

7 Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (New York:Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1990).

8 Christopher R. Hughes, Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era (Abingdon: Routledge,

2006, Kindle edn.), locs. 3042-3201; Bonnie S. Glaser and Evan S. Medeiros, TheChanging Ecology of Foreign Policy-Making in China: The Ascension and Demise ofthe Theory of Peaceful Rise , The China Quarterly, No. 190 (2007), pp. 291310;Dominik Mierzejewski, Public Discourse on the PeacefulRise Concept in MainlandChina, Discussion Paper 42, China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham, 2009,http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cpi/documents/discussion-papers/discussion-paper-42-mierzejewski-power-rise-discourse.pdf.



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Maoists years culminating in the cultural revolution. They understood that

it could only do this if it abandoned total state control over the economy,

and created significant space for the market to operate. This move in turn

required that China engage economically with both its neighbours and the

world, and become part of the global systems of trade, investment, andfinance. Chinas commitment to peaceful rise was thus instrumental, but

deep. As Zhang argues, China put its own economic development as top

priority, and deduced from that the need for stability in its international

relations both regionally and globally.9 This change was driven by internal

developments in China during the late 1970s and early 1980s in which the

country underwent a quite profound change of national identity, strategic

culture, and definition of its security interests, all of which transformed its

relationship with international society.

10

Chinas rhetoric of peaceful rise is ongoing, but what does its record for

the past three decades look like in terms of the three models? So far there has

been no warlike rise either against other great powers or Chinas neighbours.

Chinas relations with the United States as the prevailing hegemon are

mainly cold peace, as are its relations with two of its major power neigh-

bours, Japan and India. Even Chinas strategic partnership with Russia can

hardly be described as warm, and its relations with Europe are more about

indifference than either cold or warm. China has failed to make any great

power friends. Chinas relations with its smaller neighbours have been

mixed. For the first 25 years there was a slow but quite steady trend towards

warming relations with Southeast Asia. But since 2008 China has taken a

more aggressive line, pushing most of its relations with Southeast Asia into

the cold peace model. This policy shift, along with rising nationalism, and

by 20122013 open talk of war between China and Japan over the islands

dispute between them, raised the possibility that China would exit from

peaceful rise and revert to a more realist model. Chinas peaceful rise thus

shares with the United States the complexity of operating in three domains.Like the United States, it could in theory achieve a peaceful rise in relation

to the prevailing hegemon, while having elements of warlike rise in relation

to other great powers and its neighbours. That option is more difficult for

9 Yongjin Zhang,China in International Society since 1949 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998),pp. 10225, 194243.

10 Yaqing Qin, Nation Identity, Strategic Culture and Security Interests: Three Hypotheseson the Interaction between China and International Society, SIIS Journal, No. 2 (2003),

http://irchina.org/en/xueren/china/view.asp?id863; Yaqing Qin, Chinas SecurityStrategy with a Special Focus on East Asia, transcript of a talk and discussion for theSasakawa Peace Foundation, July 7 2004, http://www.spf.org/e/report/040707.html. Thequestion of whether pre-modern China was a notably peaceful hegemon, and whether orhow this might matter for contemporary China, is beyond the scope of this article. SeeDavid C. Kang, Civilization and State Formation in the Shadow of China, in Peter J.Katzenstein, ed., Civilizations in World Politics (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 91113.



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China than for the United States, because the United States is allied both

with Japan and many other of Chinas neighbours.

One other issue that needs to be addressed is how the strategy of rising

peacefully relates to what happens after a country has risen? The spectrum

of possibilities here is large. On one end of it lies the realist reading ofpeaceful rise as a mere strategy of deception aimed at facilitating a transit

through a dangerous period of relative weakness. Once risen, the new power

then reverts to power-maximising behaviour. On the other end of the spec-

trum is a follow-through of peaceful rise into some form of benign and

consensual leadership. China is sometimes suspected of the deception strat-

egy, not least because it has been reticent to set out its grand strategy, or say

what it will do once it has risen.11 Some Chinese backers of peaceful rise may

support it for that reason: a key theme of Sun Tzes Art of Waris, after all,

the merits of strategic deception. The United States likes to think of itself as

the benign and consensual leader, and even though many would contest that

interpretation, there is some truth in it. What actually happens after peaceful

rise is beyond the scope of this article. But perceptions of what will happen

once a rising power has risen do affect the process, and even the viability, of

a peaceful rise strategy, and are therefore important to the argument here.

For the United States, its commitment to peaceful rise was more or less

implicit in its liberal character. China cannot make the claim that its

internal structure necessarily supports peaceful rise, yet has made its rhet-orical commitment to peaceful rise quite explicit. That combination puts a

premium on whether or not China will be able to persuade others that its

peaceful rise is something other than a temporary manoeuvre in a longer

game of the art of war.

Key Points of Similarity During the Process of Rise

Perhaps the most obvious similarity between the United States and China is

that in geographical, demographic, and economic terms both are relatively

big actors in the international system. In terms of land area, they are nearly

the same size at a bit over 3.5 million square miles, currently ranking 3rd

(United States) and 4th (China) in the world. During the period of its rise the

United States was also relatively big. In 1900, it ranked 3rd (after Russia and

China) or 4th (if one counts the British Empire as a single unit). In terms of

population, China has for long been number one, and currently has close to

20% of the worlds population, compared to the United Statess 4.5%, which

ranks it 3rd after India. During its period of rise the United States benefittedfrom mass immigration during the 19th century. Fifty million Europeans

emigrated between 1800 and 1914, most of them to the United States, helping

11 Jisi Wang, Chinas Search for a Grand Strategy, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 90, No. 2 (2011),pp. 6879.



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to increase its population from 5 million in 1800 to 160 million in 1914.12

During its period of rise, the United States thus still ranked high: in 1900 it

was fourth after China, India (or the British Empire) and Russia. In terms of

economy (Gross Domestic Product (GDP)), China currently ranks third after

the EU and the United States, and just ahead of Japan. During its period ofrise the United States took an early lead, surpassing Britain during the 1870s

and increasing its lead as number one thereafter. The First World War

enabled the United States to become a net creditor, and to take over financial

leadership from a weakened Britain. By 1930, the US GDP was roughly the

size of the next three (Britain, Germany, and Russia) combined.

Interestingly, and perhaps a bit more surprising, both countries have lived

in relatively benign international environments during their periods of rise.

The United States has been, of course, famously favoured by geography.Thus it has always had, and still has, relatively small and weak neighbours to

its north and south. Indeed, it is perhaps the only great power that has not

been neighboured by other great powers. Its geographical remoteness has

also made its ascent both less threatening to the rest of the world and

reinforced its disinclination to dominate other great powers.13 With huge

insulating oceans to east and west, it has moreover been difficult to reach

militarily, giving it options for degrees of isolation from the balance of

power not available to other great powers. The United States, in addition,

was able to set up and largely dominate a regional political and securitysystem in the Western hemisphere. It was also helped in its rise by its cultural

and linguistic affinity with the leading power, Britain. Britain not only

provided over 6 million emigrants to the United States between 1880 and

1914,14 but also was by far the largest investor in the US economy. By 1914,

Britain was responsible for well over half of the investment into the United

States.15 Contrary to realist expectations, it very quickly came to accept

Americas rise as being both inevitable following the Unions victory in

the Civil War, and potentially beneficial as Britains rivalry with Germany

began to assume an increasingly serious form in the late 19th century.

Britain became, in effect, a major collaborator in the rise of the United

Statesthough this fact of course does not feature much in United States

self-understandings of its rise.

Chinas history in this respect is more complicated.16 Up until the early

19th century it was insulated from other great powers by distance (although

12 Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 16364, 168.13 G. John Ikenberry, American Power and the Empire of Capitalist Democracy, in G. John

Ikenberry, ed., Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 154.14 Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London: Zed Books,

1990), p. 132.15 Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investments in the US: 19141945 (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 9.16 Odd Arne Westad,Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750(London: The Bodley

Head, 2012).



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not from Asian steppe barbarians), and could usually dominate its civilized

neighbours. But from the 1840s through to the last decade of the Cold War,

China was vulnerable to all manner of foreign bullying and intervention,

both from the West and from a rapidly industrializing Japan. During the

period of its current peaceful rise, however, China has been lucky enough tolive again in a relatively benign environment. The Soviet Union may have

been a rival of sorts but by the late 1980s it had ceased to be threatening.

Japan, under US tutelage, did not cultivate offensive military power. The

United States broadly allowed China entry into the world economy and

encouraged its domestic reforms. The association of Southeast Asian

Nations drew China into its regional diplomatic arrangements. Chinas

policy turn was partly responsible for creating this benign environment be-

cause it made China both less threatening and more attractive economicallyto its neighbours and to the West. But China also benefitted from the gen-

erally more benign international and regional security and economic envir-

onment following the end of the Cold War. It might be argued that, like

Britain in relation to the United States, the United States has played a

significant facilitating role in the rise of China, mainly in terms of economic

policy. Like the United States, China is similarly reticent about acknowl-

edging this helping hand from the leading power. What links their cases in

this respect is that both the United States and China were rising in the

context of an international society led by a liberal power.Part of this relatively benign environment for both the United States and

China was that during their ascendant periodsAmericas after 1865 and

Chinas after 1978both countries benefitted from very substantial foreign

direct investment (FDI) as an important vehicle facilitating their own devel-

opment. Thus FDI in the United States accounted for close to 20% of

annual GDP by 1914around $7.1 billion in total stock.17 Indeed, in key

sectors such as steel, chemicals, and transport, FDI was crucial. Admittedly,

this proportion declined precipitately thereafter as a result of war, the ex-propriation of German assets, the depression, and a growing association in

the American official mind of foreign investment with threats to national

security. Nonetheless, for a critical period following the Civil War, FDI did

play a critical (and now little recognized) role in Americas 19th century

take off. FDI was similarly important to China following the abandonment

of Maoism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At first careful not to move too

precipitately, China gradually abandoned economic isolationism and began

to open its doors to increased outside investment. Initially the great majority

of this came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau, moving China fromnearly zero FDI in the 1970s, to over $900 billion by the late 1990s.18 But as

17 Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investments in the US, p. 9.18 Yinqui Wei and Xiaming Liu, Foreign Direct Investment in China: Determinants and

Impact(Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2001), pp. 1, 158.



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time went on, the United States and the European Union became more

heavily involved too. The bulk of this investment tended to be concentrated

in the main coastal cities and the Special Economic Zones. However, China

fast became the most open and most attractive economy in the whole of the

developing world. Indeed, by the first half of 2012 it had overtaken theUnited States in becoming the most important destination for FDI world

wide.19

Another more obvious similarity between them was that both experienced

a traumatic civil war before their period of rise. In the United States, this

took place between 1861 and 1865, immediately before the dramatic take-off

in the USs population and economy. In China, things were again much

more complicated, with the civil war running for many decades. China frag-

mented after 1911, and from 1927 to 1949 there was an organized civil war

between communists and nationalists interspersed with foreign interventions

and invasions. Chinas civil war ended three decades before its peaceful rise

began, but nonetheless the experience of civil war left a similar legacy in both

countries: both thereafter placed an enormous emphasis on remaining

united. Parallels could in fact be drawn between the ruthless military

anti-secessionism and rejection of self-determination that underpinned the

US civil war, and Chinas similar current attitudes towards Tibet, Taiwan,

and Xinjiang. Abraham Lincoln and the Chinese Communist Party would

perhaps have understood each other quite well on this question. The UnitedStates has been more fortunate in that its unity question was largely laid to

rest after the Civil War, and did not much affect its peaceful rise. For China,

the unity question is still not fully resolved, especially over Tibet and

Taiwan. It plays significantly into Chinas international image, and therefore

into its wider foreign policy and IR.

A particularly interesting similarity between the United States and China

is the way in which the main lines of their foreign policies show striking

parallels during their period of rise. Both pursued economic engagement

with the rest of the world, and a focus on economic self-development (indus-trialization) while remaining politically aloof, self-defensive, and not want-

ing to participate in the global balance of power. The culturally and

economically expansive, but politically and militarily isolationist policy

of the United States up to 1917, and again during the interwar years, does

not look all that different from the Dengist policy of reform and opening up

economically, and seeking stability and keeping a low profile regionally and

internationally. In this context, both countries practiced military restraint as

opposed to building up their armed forces as fast as, or faster than, theireconomic growth. Except during wartime, United States military forces

remained modest right up to the start of the Cold War; China likewise,

even during Maos time, gave a relatively low priority to military expansion

19 UNCTAD, Global Investment Trends Monitor, No. 10, October 2012, p. 23.



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and modernization in relation to the development and growth of its

economy.

Figures for US military expenditure as a percentage of its GDP during the

period of its rise are not easy to come by. But it is probably true that

between the end of the US Civil War and the United States entry into theFirst World War, United States military expenditure seldom if ever exceeded

1% of GDP and was often much less than that. By the late 19th century this

was, of course, 1% of a fast growing economy that was already the worlds

largest, so it was not an inconsiderable sum. But despite its huge economic

lead, in the run-up to the First World War the military expenditure of the

United States was generally less than that of Britain, Germany, or Russia,

and about the same as France. The US army was not designed, and was

not strong enough, to fight wars against other significant powers. Instead it

was designed either to hold the country together (the role of the armies

of the North) or to be directed against weak opponents including native

Americans, rebellious colonials like the Philippinos, feeble neighbours like

Mexico, and relatively weak outside powers like Japan and Spain.

Finding reliable figures for Chinas military expenditure as a percentage of

GDP after 1978 is almost equally problematic, with Chinas government

pitching the numbers for military expenditure low, and the US military

pitching them high. The estimates from Stockholm International Peace

Research Institute (SIPRI) are perhaps a reasonable compromise.20

Theyshow considerable consistency for the period 19892010, with Chinas mili-

tary expenditure as a percentage of GDP fluctuating within a narrow band

of 1.62.5. As with the United States, of course, this modest-looking figure

has to be seen in the context of a very rapidly growing economy. This has

made Chinas military expenditure until recently roughly comparable to that

of the big European states such as Britain, France and Germany, and with

Japan. Even if China is now pulling ahead of these, it still falls extremely far

short of the massive US figure. In some parallel with the United States,

therefore, China has favoured economic development and growth over mili-tary expenditure. It has focused on military modernization to be sure, but

unlike powers rising in warlike mode, it has done so at a measured pace, and

has not sought to rival US military power across the board.

Despite their relative military restraint, both countries have exhibited a

certain weakness for navalism: the United States in building the Great

White Fleet during the 1890s; and China now looking towards a blue-water

navy during the second decade of the 21st century. The Great White Fleet

brought the US navy more up to international standard than its army. Bythe outbreak of the First World War, the United States had more of the

modern dreadnought battleships (12) than France (7), Japan (7), or Russia

(5), but many fewer than Britain (41) or Germany (24). Naval might was

20 SIPRI Military Expenditure database 2012,http://milexdata.sipri.org.



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partly about showing off their new power, but more instrumentally it also

reflected the keenness of both to insulate their regional sphere from outside

interference. For the United States, this was embodied in the Monroe

doctrine (1823), the building of naval power, the Panama canal, and a

policy of self-interested interventionism in Central and South America andthe Caribbean. Chinas position is again more complex, partly because there

are substantial powers within its region, and partly because the United

States is deeply embedded as an intervening power in East Asia.

Nevertheless, Chinas military policy is aimed at establishing sea control

out to the first island chain, and in asserting expansive territorial claims in

the South and East China Seas. Like the United States before it, China

wants to be able to exclude outside powers from its region, though in at-

tempting this it faces much more challenging circumstances than those thatfaced the United States.

In line with politically isolationist policies, both states were extremely

reluctant to take on international leadership responsibilities commensurate

with their rising power. This reticence was easier to pull off when their power

was relatively small during the early phases of peaceful rise, but increasingly

difficult as their relative power began to weigh significantly in the global

balance. In the case of the United States, this policy left international society

seriously under-managed during the first half of the 20th century, when the

United States had for long been the biggest economy and Britain, especiallyafter the First World War, was no longer strong enough to lead effectively.

The United States was a reluctant entrant into both the First and Second

World Wars, and having taken the lead in setting up the League of Nations,

then abandoned it. China has only just arrived at the point where the

question of matching its responsibilities to its power is becoming pressing,

both for China itself and for international society.21 At the time of writing

there has been no significant display of willingness in Beijing to begin taking

more responsibility for global management, and some disturbing signs of

self-interested swaggering. The concern to maintain domestic development

and domestic stability (harmony) continues to reign supreme.

Despite their reluctance to take a leading role in international society,

both a rising United States and a rising China nonetheless took firm pos-

itions in relation to it. Both joined the general framework of international

society, but took dissenting positions on key points. The United States,

along with most of the Americas, was happy to assume the status of sover-

eign equality and thereby to convert European into Western international

society. But the United States rejected the institution of balance of power,and via the Monroe Doctrine tried to set itself up as hegemonic in the

Western hemisphere, not least by sponsoring the first International

21 Barry Buzan, China in International Society: Is Peaceful Rise Possible?, ChineseJournal of International Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2010), pp. 536.



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Conference of American States in 1889. It led the building of a regional

international society in the Americas distinctive for its high degree of legal-

ism and commitment to intergovernmental institutions.22 Because of their

highly racialised societies,23 the states of the Americas were also laggards in

the early human rights campaigns against slavery. Since 1978, China haslikewise sought to integrate itself into Western-global international society.

Like the United States, it has taken a very strong line in favour of sovereign

equality and non-intervention: both states are strongly sovereigntist in their

attitude towards international society. And like the United States it has

resisted those parts of the prevailing international society that disagreed

with its internal makeup, in this case most obviously the Western under-

standing of human rights. There are signs that China would like also to

follow the United States in establishing regional hegemony, for example inits support for narrower memberships of Asian regional institutions. But as

explained above, Chinas neighbourhood is much more complex than that

faced by the United States, and it has so far had little success with this

strategy.24

Perhaps more curiously given their isolationism, both countries projected

a rhetoric of international harmony, albeit of profoundly different types.

The United States one was based on universalist liberal ideas about har-

mony of interests through a market economy, and the peaceful effects of

trade and democracy and individual freedom. Put simply, the United Statesview was that if all countries became like America, there would be a peaceful

world. American exceptionalism was thus outward looking and open.25 As

noted above, American liberalism gave some reassurance, especially to

Britain, that once risen the United States would remain relatively benign.

China meanwhile has retreated from the ideological universalism of its

Maoist period based on Marxian notions of structural conflict rather than

on harmony. Now it projects ideas of harmony based loosely on Confucian

prescriptions about all under heaven (Tianxia).26 This has been allied to

a strong interpretation of non-intervention, non-discrimination and the

right of peoples to determine their own political and social development.

In Chinas case, harmony seems now more to be based on the respect

for, and preservation of, differences, rather than the cultivation of homo-

geneity along some particular ideological line. Chinese exceptionalism is

inward looking and closed, broadly summed up in the much used phrase

22 Charles A. Jones,American Civilization (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas,2007), pp. 6, 6674.

23

Ibid., pp. 3, 36.24 Barry Buzan and Yongjin Zhang, eds., International Society and the Contest over East

Asia, forthcoming.25 Barry Buzan, The United States and the Great Powers (Cambridge: Polity, 2004),

pp. 15465.26 Tingyang Zhao, Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept All-Under-Heaven

(Tian-xia),Social Identities, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2006), pp. 2941.



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with Chinese characteristics when describing almost any social, economic

or political policy.27 Again as noted above, this poses the problem for

China that other powers will be suspicious about what happens after

China has risen.

Rather less surprisingly, both China and the United States practiced pro-tectionism during their period of rise. The United States (or more precisely

the northern states) practiced protectionism throughout its rise until the

Civil War. Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1791 that to maintain between

the recent establishment of one country and the long-matured establish-

ments of another country, a competition upon equal terms is in most

cases, impractical. Tariffs followed in 1816, 1824, and 1828. By 1857 tariffs

averaged 20%. The defeat of the South was in fact a defeat for the kind of

free trade policies favoured by the Confederacy and more generally the

Democrats. Protectionist tariffs remained the bedrock of the Republican

Party between 1890 (the McKinley Tariff) and 1909 (Payne-Aldrich

Tariff). Wilson liberalized trade somewhat, but after the First World War

the Republicans reintroduced high tariffs (The Fordney-McCumber Tariff,

1922). In short, throughout its rise before 1914 the United States accorded

high tariff protection to its economy, manufactures in particular such as

textiles, iron, steel, glass, and tin plate. Nor did the situation change at all

in the inter-war period. If anything, the situation deteriorated in the 1920s

and got even worse in the 1930s with the onset of the depression. This kindof overt protectionism was further reinforced between the two wars when

(as we have seen) the United States became less open to inward FDI and a

battery of legislation was passed to ensure that Americans retained control

over an increasingly American economy.

China has been more constrained by the rules of what is now a much more

highly institutionalized global economy than that faced by the United States,

and also by its need to keep export markets open. But China has never fully

bought into the notion of an open door broadly associated with the

Western ideal of globalization. On the contrary, many of its instinctsremain protectionist. Thus while it might protest the protectionism of

others (as it did at the 2012 18th party congress) it practices its own form

of the same, keeping its own goods cheap by ensuring that the reminbi

remains weak. Furthermore, though it may practice competition at home,

its own economyand its own leading corporationsremain very much

under the direction of an all-powerfuldirigistestate. Indeed, state-led enter-

prises continue to command the heights of the Chinese economy. Finally, as

Western economists have for long been pointing out, China engages in moresubtle forms of protectionism: not by putting up tariff barriers but rather by

demanding technology transfers from Western investors for being allowed

access to the Chinese market.

27 Barry Buzan, China in International Society, pp. 2021.



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The final similarity may be more difficult to quantify but nevertheless has

potentially large significance. Despite their massive cultural differences,

which might broadly be summed up as being individualist versus collectivist

societies,28 American and Chinese societies have much in common including

amongst other things a strong sense of patriotic pride (often verging onthe chauvinist) married to a much-commented upon commitment to materi-

alism and materialist measures of success. This may in part help explain

Americas very real fascination with a modern entrepreneurial China that

might have much more in common with the United States than some

Americans would care to admit. It would certainly help explain Chinas

very deep respect for American power and American economic success.

In fact, one of the more obvious measures of this respect is where the

new Chinese elite now seem to prefer to send their children (to theUnited States) to get a gold standard education. At the political level

these broader similarities may also help us explain why both states are

much inclined to bean counting in terms of their military and economic

strength. This quantitative approach to power plays easily into zero-sum,

realist, materialist ways of thinking about international relations, and could

easily reinforce the views of those on both sides who either want to, or think

they have to, construct their relationship as one of rivals or enemies.

It perhaps also plays into some of their current policy similarities. Most

obviously both have been obstructionist at global environmental negoti-ations on the grounds that they are unwilling to put restraints such as

commitments to pollution control in the way of maximizing their economic

development and GDP growth.

Key Points of Difference

The most obvious difference between China and the United States, as many

Chinese like to point out, is that theirs is a very old country, indeed a civ-ilization, that measures itself in millennia, whereas the United States is a

quite new country with a history not yet spanning a quarter of one millen-

nium. The United Statess history is nevertheless quite long compared to

many other contemporary states, including many in Europe. And although

the United States is definitely a recent start-up compared with China, in one

important sense, as Jones points out, the United States is the oldest state in

that it has a good claim to be the first modern state.29 Since China aspires

to modernity it is in this key sense younger than the United States. This

difference is closely related to another one, that China rests on the culturalhomogeneity of a people who have been in situ for a long time. Chinas

28 Yaqing Qin, Rule, Rules, and Relations: Towards a Synthetic Approach to Governance,Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2011), pp. 11745.

29 Charles A. Jones, American Civilization, p. 51.



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nationalism is therefore of the ethno-cultural type, which differentiates it

strongly from the rest of the world in terms of Chinese characteristics. The

United States, in contrast, is mainly a country of immigrants. Its nationalism

is civic rather than ethnic, and combines with a multicultural identity.

Americas civic nationalism also gives it a unique identity that differentiatesit strongly from the rest of the world. But, as noted in the discussion of

American exceptionalism above, this differentiation is open and potentially

inclusive, rather than closed and exclusive. For all of its many faults and

hypocrisies, Americas ideology and commitment to individual freedom does

have considerable worldwide appeal. And alongside this inclusive ideology is

the fact that Americas multiculturalism allows many parts of the world to

see themselves in some sense as represented in America. The American

melting pot both homogenizes its citizens into Americanness, while allowingthem to keep hyphenated identities as Mexican-, Chinese-, German-,

Korean- and many other national types of American. In this area of identity

and culture/ideology, therefore, the US and China could hardly be more

different.

On top of this deep intrinsic difference, lie equally big ones in the timing

and historical conditions under which the two have conducted their rise. The

trajectory of the United States began more than a century before Chinas

recent start, and the nature of international society has changed profoundly

between the two periods of rise. In terms of modernity and industrialization,the United States was a late developer, along with Germany and Japan

coming in the second round after Britain. China is a late developer, arguably

in a fourth round, meaning that it is rising in a context in which the world

economy as a whole is much more developed, and there are many other

industrialized and industrializing countries rather than just a handful. This

matters in several ways. Most obviously the United States rose during a

period in which great power wars were normal and regular occurrences,

commitment to maintaining a global economy was thin and episodic, andempire building and racism were legitimate practices. China, in contrast, has

risen into a world where nuclear weapons have made great power wars

irrational, when empires and racism are neither legitimate nor fashionable,

and when commitment to maintaining world trade, and a stable world econ-

omy more broadly, is stronger and more uniform.

Both the United States and China rose in a context where other large

powers were also rising (the United States rose alongside Germany,

Japan, and Russia/USSR; China is rising alongside India and Brazil). But

beyond that, the differences are great. The United States rose in a context inwhich there were major ideological differences amongst the great powers,

and several of the rising ones were making extreme military and ideological

challenges to the liberal status quo. Although the United States did not start

any of the consequent wars, it was drawn into both of them as a key player.



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In a sense, the United States was the major beneficiary of the First and

Second World Wars, where it joined late, suffered relatively little damage

or casualties, and was able to pick up the pieces after the other great powers

had been destroyed or depleted by the conflicts. China is rising in a context

where ideological differences amongst the powers are much lower, the insti-tutional framing of international society is much stronger, and none of the

rising powers seeks to overthrow the existing order by force (though they

may well of course want to negotiate modifications to it). Like the United

States, China will probably not start any hegemonic wars. But neither will it

get drawn into any such wars, nor have the option to benefit from them by

standing back.

As argued above, both China and the United States have experienced a

shift from being relatively insulated from the core of the international systemby distance and geography, to being inescapably enmeshed in it. While this

might at first look like a similarity, it is in fact more of a difference. For the

United States, the end of its insulation, although foreshadowed by the First

World War, took place relatively late, during the Second World War, by

which time the United States was already the leading great power. So during

its rise, the United States had real choices about the degree to which it would

engage or not with the rest of international society, and for the most part it

chose isolationism. For China, this shift took place in the middle of the

19th century, when outside intrusion burst in on it and exposed its weakness.China suffered a major fall from power between 1840 and 1945, a traumatic

experience that influences its current outlook heavily. The United States has

never had that experience, and even on the worst declinist scenarios would

have only a relatively mild version of it should it fall from global primacy

during the coming decades. Since the foreign intrusions began, China has

never had the choice to engage or not. It had only the choice about how and

on what terms to engage, and sometimes, as during the period up to the

1940s, not even that. During its Maoist period China engaged by beingoppositional to Western-global international society. Under Deng it chose

engagement and peaceful rise, and has so far stayed with this choice.

A similar caveat, perhaps turning an apparent similarity into a difference,

applies to the point argued in the previous section, that both China and the

United States have benefitted from a relatively benign international envir-

onment and help from the leading power. While this similarity remains

valid, the United States was always part of the Western identity and project,

whereas China, despite its adoption of some features of modernity, remains

culturally and politically strongly non-Western. This difference matters inany consideration of hegemonic succession. The US took over from Britain,

its nearest kin country in terms of ethnic stock, culture and ideology.

This was perhaps a unique transition in that Britain could let its world

leadership go without feeling deeply threatened by the likely nature of the



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new global order led by the United States. If it came to such a transition

between China and the United States, China would have to take over from a

hegemon with a culture and a political order deeply different from its own.

Chinas adoption of capitalism would help a bit, making it easier than a

transition involving a profound ideological difference, such as one from theUnited States to the Soviet Union would have been. But it is almost impos-

sible to imagine the United States feeling as comfortable about China as

Britain was able to feel about the United States. If China became more

democratic that would help a lot, as shown by the Wests relative lack of

concern about the rise of India. But it still would not recreate the unique

conditions that applied between Britain and the United States.

Both China and the United States rose in the context of a liberal economic

order in which they were embedded. Neither rose in isolation. But whilethere are some similarities (see on protectionism in the previous section)

the differences are greater. In domestic terms, the United States has

always had a foundational commitment to a free enterprise system. This is

part and parcel of its liberal commitment to individualism and the market.

Chinas conversion to capitalism is very recent, and comes in authoritarian

form.30 It remains unclear how deep its commitment to the market actually

is, and this uncertainty plays into the doubts about what a risen China

would be like. In this regard, Chinas recent drift back towards favouring

State Owned Enterprises is worrying. The Chinese Communist Party clearlyhas no interest whatsoever in liberal individualism, and feels deeply uneasy

about the capitalist society that its hugely successful economic reforms are

inevitably creating.

In systemic terms, the United States experience was rather mixed. The

United States was unquestionably part of the world economy during the

period of its rise, but it could be argued that the world economy before 1945

needed the United States more than the United States, with its vast re-

sources, technological know-how and large market at home, needed the

rest of the world. The systemic context for the United States rise was an

unstable liberal order waxing and waning during the 19th and 20th centu-

ries. The US economy was big enough to make it significantly responsible

for these instabilities, most obviously in 1929. After decades of denying its

responsibilities, the United States had eventually to take on the role of

liberal hegemon after the Second World War. China has risen into a

well-established and highly institutionalized liberal economic order, to

which it was initially fiercely opposed, but with which since 1978 it has

been seeking accommodation. But Chinas policies of reform and openingup made it far more dependent on the more advanced worldfor a market

for its goods, for inward investment, for political support, and in its own

30 Michael A. Witt, China: What Variety of Capitalism?, INSEAD Working Paper2010/88/EPS, 2010.



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region, for successful examples it could follow, if not necessarily imitate.

In this sense, and ironically, although both were dependent on foreign cap-

ital, markets and technology, China as a formally communist-led country

seemed to lean on the capitalist world far more than democratically-led

America with its special mission to spread the gospel of free enterprise.It remains an open question whether the economic crisis beginning in

2008 will create turbulent conditions for China more similar to those experi-

enced by, and in part created by, the United States.

In relation to international society, the United States was reformist revi-

sionist, wanting negotiated change in international society towards more

legal and institutionalized practices. China says it is a status quo power,

wanting to join the US-led order and seeking stability above all. But there

are hints that it might be either another kind of reformist revisionist(wanting increases in its own status, and negotiated changes in some

norms and practices), or possibly a radical revisionist (the nationalist

position wanting China to start flexing its muscles as soon as its relative

strength allows, or shift more sharply back towards a state-run economy).

The universalist ideology of the United States on international society

gave it a relatively clear position. As yet, and apart from its strong pluralist

commitment to sovereignty, non-intervention, and the protection of cul-

tural and political distinctiveness, Chinas position on what kind of interna-

tional society it would like to be part of remains murky. This differenceperhaps relates to the relative stability of the basic character of the US

polity after the Civil War, and the relative uncertainty both within China

and outside it about what kind of polity China will become over the

next decades. After its civil war, the American polity settled into a stable

form within which it has evolved ever since. For better or for worse, this

provides considerable continuity and predictability about how the United

States relates to international society. Chinas civil war is still within living

memory, and as the ongoing pressures for major social reform indicate, thecountry has probably not yet settled into an enduring form of political

economy.

At the regional level, there are some similarities in the roles of China and

the United States in their respective local spheres, but as already discussed,

large differences too. The United States was always the elephant in the

Americas, having a lovehate relationship with its neighbours from very

early on in its rise. It has mainly been able to exclude rival powers from

its region. It can, and up to a point still does, dominate the Western hemi-

sphere, and has some legitimacy as regional leader. China was for nearly twomillennia secure as the elephant in its region, enjoying both primacy and

legitimacy as the hub of civilization. But from the 19th century it was unable

to keep rival powers out of the region, and was displaced as the dominant

power from within the region by Japan from the late 19th Century until



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recently. Huge resentment over Japans challenge to Chinas hegemony still

poisons relations between the two (and thereby greatly benefits the United

States position in the Western Pacific). China still cannot exclude outside

powers from its region, and neither does it yet have the power or the legit-

imacy to reassert regional leadership. China lives in a region with other greatpowers and the United States does not (though it might do with the rise of

Brazil). So while the United States feels relatively secure in its region, China

still does not.

Conclusions

We have shown that the similarities between the United States and

China touch at enough points of significance to make the comparisonbetween them intriguing, particularly in relation to some conspicuous simi-

larities in their policies (e.g. protectionism; general restraint in acquiring

military strength, yet also having a weakness for navalism; giving primacy

to economic growth over agreements on dealing with global warming,

and refusing either to lead or be led on this issue). Yet there are also

many big differences between the United States and China both in them-

selves and in the timing and placement of their rise to power. The remaining

question to be answered is therefore: So what? This comparison is enter-

taining, but is it useful beyond helping the United States and China to

put their relationship into an interesting historical context, and perhaps

thereby to understand each other better? Does it suggest any lessons

about the process of peaceful rise, either generally, or in relation to

Chinas current policy? What does comparing these two cases of peaceful

rise, one completed nearly seven decades ago, the other still in process, tell us

about Chinas prospects? Despite the differences between the two cases we

can see six useful lessons.

The first general lesson is that one can see from the United States casethat a kind of peaceful rise is indeed possible, despite the predictions of

realist theory. In a narrow but important way, the United States achieved

a warm rise in relation to the existing hegemon, though a colder and some-

times warlike one in relation to other great powers and its neighbours. That

accomplishment makes the Chinese case a lot more interesting than it would

be if the realists were always right. But peaceful rise is much more compli-

cated and differentiated than at first appears to be the case. Because it

involves different domains it can be partly peaceful and partly warlike, as

was the case with the United States. The key to seeing the United States

as a genuine case of peaceful rise is that it did not challenge the reigning

hegemon, and indeed supported it. On that model, a Chinese rise that

avoided direct rivalry with the United States, but involved similar neigh-

bourhood bullying to that of the United States, would still, in a narrow way,



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