Hugh White recently authored an influential essay, Power Shift, which addressed the implications of this phenomenon for Australia, predominantly through the lens of the likely nature of US-China relations in the coming decades.

Two of White’s basic themes are worth highlighting. First, that China is securely on course to acquire raw economic weight that will rival that of the US. Alongside this, China would gradually also acquire many of the qualitative features that have distinguished the US economic machine for most of the last century. This alone sets China apart from the two other states — Japan and the old Soviet Union — which challenged America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent state in the past.

Secondly, White has little confidence that the United States will be capable of accepting China as a genuine peer. White’s thesis includes the further proposition that China, for its part, would have to accept that the US will remain substantively and comprehensively engaged in East Asia which, in itself, would preclude any ambitions that China may have (or may acquire) to be the unqualified hegemon in East Asia. White therefore believes that an adversarial and antagonistic relationship between the US and China is a probable prospect and that the primary cause will be US resistance to stepping away from some of its key positions and roles in the region.

The US has enabled Asia’s economic revival through a capacity and willingness to support export-led development strategies and by preserving a stable security order. It has accomplished the latter with a comparatively light military footprint. The operative judgment in East Asia for over half a century has been that, if pressed, the US could and would impose its preferences in the region. China’s rise has begun to qualify that judgment and will ultimately make it untenable. The established geopolitical ‘rules’ in East Asia are therefore going to be substantially revised.

White offered some provocative thoughts on how to mitigate this looming confrontation.

With East Asia transitioning into new geopolitical circumstances, there are two basic ways in which outcomes closer to the worst case end of the spectrum might come about: the United States could try to make too little space or China could ask for/expect too much. White believes that the US is most likely to be the ‘culprit.’ My guess would be that the two possibilities are closer to equally plausible, and for reasons that link back in important ways to the governance of China.

In one way or another, all governments strike a bargain with the governed.  In absolute dictatorships, the state is prepared to demand and enforce full compliance with the leaderships’ agenda. In liberal democracies, leadership aspirants strive to concoct a package that blends what they think the electorate wants, what the aspirant thinks the country needs and what they think they can deliver and thereby justify re-election. China’s position on this spectrum is interesting and, in my view, an important factor shaping its policy settings.

Over the first three to four decades of the People’s Republic, the bargain with the governed was near the dictatorship end of the spectrum. The consent of the governed was not a high priority, but for its legitimacy the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did draw on the drama and romance of winning the civil war and bringing the socialist revolution to China, on the enormity of the challenge of building a socialist state and on the extraordinary charisma of Mao Zedong.

Over the past two to three decades, China’s government has redefined its bargain with the governed. This is a complex story but the key factors include the judgment that the continued application of socialist thinking on the production and distribution of wealth would not lift China back to the ranks of the great powers, and a recognition that China could not project itself as a great nation if the legitimacy of its government was under constant challenge. At the same time, the initial sources of legitimacy lost their force: the founding fathers passed on, younger Chinese found it harder to connect with the civil war/revolution and socialism suffered a body blow when the Soviet empire (and the USSR itself) disintegrated in 1989-91.

The scholarly consensus is that the CCP has progressively shifted the terms of its bargain with the governed — the legitimacy of the Party’s demand for a monopoly on political power — so that it now rests primarily on economic development and erasing the memories of the ‘century of humiliation’ by demonstrating that China was reacquiring the power to command careful respect of its interests by other states.

This set of circumstances puts the CCP into something of a policy straightjacket. It creates powerful incentives to protect the conditions that allow China to generate fast raw economic growth and to discount sophisticated thinking about the sustainability of this trajectory on grounds like climate change or trade imbalances with key partners that they find politically hard to cope with. It also means that Beijing is strongly inclined to set objectives in the foreign and security policy arena that feed the nationalism it has nurtured, whether positively (when China wins) or negatively (when the government can capitalise on the ‘Cold War thinking’ and ‘containment’ instincts that it must still contest and overcome).

This is an elastic yardstick. As it grows stronger, China can raise the bar on what it considers to be harmonious behaviour on the part of other states.

The point here is to support the proposition that, in the prolonged process of finding an enduring accommodation, it seems that China pressing for too much is just as likely as the US offering too little to be the core source of friction and antagonism. Although there are no clever ideas here to help governments make these judgements, accepting that there is a judgment to make is a useful first step.

Ron Huisken is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, School of International, Political & Strategic Studies at the Australian National University.