China benefits from the rules-based system

The argument

Proponents of a peaceful rise begin from the observation that the last thirty years have been years of integration rather than confrontation. China took up its seat at the World Trade Organisation, plays a constructive role in the G20, is a lead member of the BRICS, and has increasingly built up a group of supportive countries within the United Nations. These are not gestures made at the edge of the international rules-based system; they are positions held inside it, and holding them means accepting the obligations that come attached. The pattern extends past the institutions China inherited. It has also created the Belt 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. What matters on this view is the form those took. A state intending to overturn the existing order would have little reason to build lending institutions and long-horizon investment partnerships whose value depends on stable trade, agreements that hold, and predictable relations with the same countries the existing order serves. Building new bodies in the mould of the old ones is a way of committing to the mould. From this the argument draws its conclusion about future conduct. Thirty years of integration have made China one of the largest beneficiaries of the international rules-based system, and being a beneficiary of a system means bearing the cost of disrupting it. Conflict, or the coercion that leads to it, would fall first on exactly the trade, investment, and institutional relationships through which the rise itself has been achieved. China's interests therefore run with the order rather than against it, and a power whose interests run that way has little interest in seeing that order upended. On this reading the rise will be peaceful because peace is what China's own position pays for.

Premises

Counter-arguments

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 imprisoning one million Uighurs in detention camps. Western hopes that economic liberalisation within China would lead to democratic liberalisation have proven to be false. Nowhere is this more evident than in the presidency of Xi Jinping, who in 2018 made himself ruler for life and regularly purges political opposition. The authoritarian nature of China makes conflict between itself and the US increasingly likely particularly as China attempts to reshape the world in its image.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] This does not mean conflict is unlikely.