Beyond Power Transitions: The Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of U.S.-China Relations

by Xinru Ma and David C. Kang

Columbia University Press 2024

There's comfort to be had in applying highly structured theories and predictive models to an increasingly volatile world, a reason why chess analogies are still naively thrown around in geopolitical discussions. International policy frameworks are dominated by the "power transition" theory, used for analysing shifts in global power, especially when ruminating on contemporary dynamics between the United States and China. The theory relies heavily on status quo considerations of the material balance between nations, predicting a high risk of conflict between a declining hegemon and a rising power, using exclusively European examples as fodder for explication, from the Peloponnesian War to the Anglo-German rivalry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In Beyond Power Transitions: The Lessons of East Asian History and the Future of U.S.-China relations, authors Xinru Ma (research scholar at Stanford University) and David C. Kang (Professor at University of Southern California) argue that this Eurocentric approach to global power dynamics has deep theoretical problems, and that a focus on the East Asian experience offers a fresh perspective on the forces that shape war and peace. They rightly point to the fact that historically, East Asia was a hegemonic system rather than a European style balance of power system, and that extrapolating general claims from such a geographically bounded data set is not exactly a holistic approach to these international issues. Charting the rise and fall of East Asian powers over 1500 years, the authors find remarkable stability in the region, despite massive status quo disparities in material and military terms. Instead of hostile international competition, they underscore the domestic risks and constraints on these nations, and the importance of a "common conjecture" where:

If two countries share ... mutually accepted rank-order roles and statuses, then their relations can be stable no matter what the distribution of material capabilities. If they do not share a common conjecture, then their relations can be unstable regardless of the distribution of material capabilities.

This is provocative, at least to the peddlers of seemingly "intuitive" power transition theories obsessed with material distributions between nations. Luckily, the general reader not interested in arcane scholarly debates will not find himself muddled in much jargon here, as the most intriguing sections of this book are dedicated to dissecting historical case studies from East Asia to support the authors' central theses, and these sections are largely fascinating. The first example is of the Song-Yuan dynastic transition following the conquest of China by the Mongols. The authors focus on the internal disturbances and inconsistencies of the Song dynasty, where a determination to recover "lost" territories led to collapse against an external threat, and how it sheds light on a “key element of East Asian political and social organisation”: the “enduring idea” of the Mandate of Heaven. “The Song elites could not conceive of submitting to the Mongols simply to survive,” the authors write. “This would have been literally unthinkable at the time.”

Next is an appraisal of the Imjin War, a series of Japanese invasions into Korea between 1592-98, with the aim of ultimately conquering China. An oddly under-studied massive war that, in the authors' estimation, stemmed from debates over common conjecture, the conflict showed how "the long-enduring East Asian countries had the logistical, organisational, and political-economic capacity to wage war on a scale unimaginable in Europe at the time." In the centuries of peace between China, Japan, and Korea, the authors see a political choice, and not a by-product of material constraints. In the Ming-Qing transition of the 17th century, they highlight a curious absence of any regional power scramble, and the fact that instead of:

taking advantage of Ming weakness, [the other states] wanted to see who could rule all of China. Both Korea and Japan were concerned that the Manchus did not have the Mandate of Heaven to rule China. These were shared, unquestioned beliefs that existed around the region.

The last case study looks at Korea, and how it utilised the common conjecture between small and large states to remain independent until 1910, a diplomatic feat straddling more than a millennia, which involved “interpolating Korea into the repertoire of imperial legitimation, which rested on the idea of Korea’s submission confirmed imperial legitimacy and that a proper empire ought to preserve Korea’s political integrity.”

All four of these historical revaluations point to deficiencies in the traditional power transition theories, and an absence of key causal dynamics (including that of regional jockeying for power), while highlighting an abundance of diplomatic frameworks nourished largely on a common conjecture.

The authors finish by looking at U.S.-China relations today, especially in an East Asian context where they argue that China has already completed a peaceful regional power transition, overtaking the Japanese success story of the second half of the 20th century, when the Land of the Rising Sun was poised to dominate East Asia, and China was at best an afterthought in discussions of regional peace and prosperity. They point to a steady decline in defense spending from other nations in the region, and the fact that countries are dealing with the new reality by seeking "diplomatic, commercial, and multilateral relations with each other and China, not primarily military strategies," further chopping the legs from under the grand imperatives of power transition theory. While it remains to be seen how useful these new perspectives on internal degradation and the high value of a common conjecture will remain in predicting patterns in great power relations, or how the ancient idea of the "manifest civility" of China as hegemon will survive the collapse of the East Asian international system post-collision with the Western colonizing impetus of the late 19th century, the historical reappraisals in this book remain engrossing, and provide a keyhole of insight into the traditions of an ancient realm.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi