Why China will continue to disappoint as a "near-peer" rival

NYT's Keith Bradsher in early Sept regarding a visit by Larry Summers in Beijing:

Top Chinese officials are calling for quiet discussions instead of open friction with the United States, after a summer marked by bilateral disagreements over the value of China’s currency, American military exercises off the Korean Peninsula and American efforts to resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

State media showed China’s president, Hu Jintao, meeting Wednesday with Lawrence H. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, and Thomas E. Donilon, the deputy national security adviser. American and Chinese officials have been trying to lay the groundwork for a state visit to the United States this winter by the Chinese president.

Wednesday’s meeting with Mr. Hu followed earlier talks this week in Beijing by the two American officials that were aimed not at fashioning new pacts, but at maintaining a dialogue that had been strained at times in recent months.

“Strategic trust is the basis of China-U.S. cooperation,” said Dai Bingguo, a Chinese state councilor who met with them, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told the two Americans that China and the United States should not view themselves as rivals, according to the Chinese state news media.

Part of the dynamic we witness in elite US circles right now is an attempt to redirect our fears away from non-state actors and back toward the rising "near-peer"--an old Pentagon code phrase for China.  It is seen as part and parcel of admitting our need to get our own economic house in order, pull back from "empire" and keep our powder dry for the real threat down the road.

For many, this is a highly tempting path.

But the problem with it is, the Chinese will continue to disappoint.  They simply will not maintain sufficient counter-party status to sustain a truly hardened competition.  There will never be an opportunity for a true American shove because the Chinese will always be careful enough to avoid the push necessary to trigger that. They simply have too many stakes in the fire to ever fully give themselves--and their future--over to America and its tendency to go overboard in "crusades." Yes, we can chase them around that block for quite some time, but it will not give us the economy nor the military power we need for the future; it will just give us familiar detours from the changes we ultimately must make.

Meanwhile, vast collective problems will remain poorly addressed, because so long as Sino-American strategic partnership remains stunted, a critical mass of great-power cooperation will remain out of reach.  And no, I'm not being unrealistic about what that partnership may entail.  China and the US have vastly different economic needs:  China has no choice but to shrink the Gap economically while the US has little choice but to continue working the Gap militarily.  There is vast strategic overlap there that provides both sides missing assets, so long as both sides can become far more realistic about what cooperation would entail and yield.

Both sides currently lack the leadership to make this happen, I fear, especially in combination with even more unrealistic and uninformed domestic constituencies standing behind them.  But the efforts to foster such links will and must continue, even if we're collectively just killing time.

There is no faster nor surer path for America and China to become second-tier powers than for rivalry to fester into conflict. That's the real lesson to take from Britain and German in the first half of the 20th century.

Our present success in fostering an American-style globalization vastly outpaces Britain's success in establishing its colonial-style globalization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so the strategic risks we face is sharing power are completely different, no matter how slowly China has evolved toward something more pluralistic in terms of their politics.  We have won all the major battles worth winning in getting China's buy-in on markets and globalization, securing a fifth-generation-warfare victory that--yes--may still take a good two decades to unfold.  

The greatest danger we face today is our own desire to self-sabotage that delayed win, primarily because we are led by too many people lacking the strategic imagination to see it in the distance.

But fear not, our numbers are growing--and not just in business circles.