China is still an authoritarian state

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the character of the Chinese state, rather than any particular dispute, is what makes a peaceful rise unlikely. China continues to be controlled by the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party, which suppresses the press and is increasingly cracking down on dissidents within the mainland, including the imprisonment of one million Uighurs in detention camps. Each of those practices, on this account, shows a system that handles disagreement by removing it rather than by accommodating it, and supporters treat that as a habit of rule unlikely to stop at the border. The argument also rests on a failed prediction. Western hopes that economic liberalisation within China would lead to democratic liberalisation have proven to be false: the country integrated into world markets without the political opening that was expected to follow. Proponents take the presidency of Xi Jinping as the clearest evidence, pointing to his making himself ruler for life in 2018 and his regular purges of political opposition. If growing prosperity was the mechanism by which China was supposed to converge on the political norms of other major powers, then the concentration of power at the top indicates that the mechanism has not operated, and convergence should not be assumed. The inference to conflict follows from both halves of the case. A state that is not checked internally faces no domestic constraint on how it pursues its aims abroad, and a state that does not share the political commitments of the United States has no common framework in which disputes can be settled as differences of interest rather than of system. As China attempts to reshape the world in its image, supporters of the position hold, the scope for friction with the United States widens accordingly. Because China is still an authoritarian state, they conclude, its rise will not be peaceful.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Over the last thirty years China has successfully integrated itself into the international rules based system, including taking up its seat at the World Trade Organisation, playing a constructive role in the G20, a lead member of the BRICS, and increasingly building up a group of supportive countries within the United Nations. Aside from these pre-existing multinational institutions, China has also created the Belts and Road Initiative to drive infrastructure investment with international partners across the world and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to offer loans to developing countries. It's clear from these developments that China has become one of the largest beneficiaries of the international rules based system and would therefore have little interest in seeing it upended.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] It is in China's interest to ensure conflict doesn't happen.