By Dingding Chen
China needs to reassure the U.S., reassure other Asian states, and be more transparent with its ambitions.
After a U.S. P8-A Poseidon surveillance plane flew over China’s man-made islands in the South China Sea, all attention is focused on what China will do next and whether the situation could escalate into a much more dangerous confrontation between the U.S. and China. This provocative move by the U.S. leaves no doubt that Washington is not going to tolerate China’s ongoing reclamation activities in the South China Sea, even though these reclamation activities do not violate international law as U.S. officials have admitted.
This is by far the clearest evidence that U.S.-China relations are indeed entering a tipping point, a claim made by renowned China expert David Lampton and perhaps shared by many others. It seems that a consensus has been reached within DC policy circles that something must be done to stop China’s seemingly expansionist behaviors in the South China Sea. Gone was the old ‘China consensus’ which hoped—or naively believed—that China could be brought into a U.S.-led liberal order and become a responsible stakeholder.
Thus, it should be crystal clear something is very wrong with the current state of U.S.-China relations. The key question is: where do we go from here? Unless one is already convinced by the was-as-inevitability thesis put forward by offensive realists, there is still lots of room for both countries to maneuver if they want to avoid war and enhance cooperation. As I have argued elsewhere, there is a worrying rise of anti-China discourse in the U.S., trying to exaggerate the China threat and China’s willingness to overthrow American hegemony in Asia. Likewise, there is a similar anti-U.S. discourse within China that interprets every U.S. move as evidence of containing China’s inevitable rise. Reasonable people from both sides would agree that both are worrying and both need to be carefully repelled. Thus it is very important, at this delicate stage, not to point fingers and blame the other side for growing tensions.
This means that both sides have responsibilities to reduce the tensions. Instead of a ‘rapid downward spiral of tensions,’ both sides should adopt a new approach, advanced by Professor Lyle Goldstein, that is titled ‘cooperation spiral.’ To that end, China can do the following three things to demonstrate China’s willingness regarding cooperation.
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