The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

By Rush Doshi

Oxford University Press/2021

Reviewed by Colin Robertson

August 1, 2021

So, what does China want and where is its leadership taking it?

It’s a critical question for diplomats and those assessing global risk. As the 2020 Center for a New American Security report Rising to the China Challenge observed, the US and China are locked in strategic competition. At stake is not just the future of the Indo-Pacific — the most populous, dynamic, and consequential region in the world — but the rules, norms, and institutions that will govern international relations going forward.

China-watching is a growth industry and there are lots of books and studies looking at the China question. What differentiates Rush Doshi’s The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order is his reliance on original source material. Doshi amassed a digital database of Chinese language Communist Party documents from libraries and Taiwanese bookstores (the Taiwanese are still the best China watchers) and Chinese e-commerce sites. The book draws heavily from the published work of China’s national security network, as well as memoirs, compendiums and readouts from speeches, study sessions and debates. Based on this evidence, Doshi says Chinese grand strategy since the end of the Cold War is a methodical ‘long game’ to displace the United States first as regional hegemon then as global superpower.

Doshi argues that China’s goal is to peacefully displace the US through sequentially pursuing two broad strategies: first, to blunt the US forms of control on the existing international order by subversion, challenge or displacement especially within multilateral institutions; second, to build forms of control over others through trade and development policies like the Belt and Road Initiative that now includes over 140 countries.

The strategy begins within the Indo-Pacific with China already accounting for more than half of its GDP and half of its military spending, The end result would be the withdrawal of US forces from Japan and Korea and the dissolution of American regional alliances, the retreat of the US Navy from the Western Pacific, deference from China’s regional neighbors, unification with Taiwan, and acceptance of China’s territorial sovereignty in the East and South China Seas. A Chinese order would be anchored in the Belt and Road Initiative and a ‘Community of Common Destiny’ with China exercising a “zone of super-ordinate influence” in the Indo-Pacific as well as “partial hegemony” in much of the developing world.

This new order would not value human rights. Doshi cites scholar Michael Lind’s tart comment that the US would decline into a “deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion, with decayed factories scattered across the continent and a nepotistic rentier oligarchy clustered in a few big coastal cities.” In this scenario Canada would likely return to being a ‘hewer of wood and drawer of water’.

The Long Game is an easy but sobering read. It is important because Dr. Doshi, who headed Brookings China Strategy Initiative, is now a member of the Biden Administration’s National Security Council. Doshi’s mentor, Kurt Campbell, to whom the book is dedicated, is White House Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific. Both are deeply engaged in an inter-agency review of the US relationship with China and the Indo-Pacific. This book gives an insight into both their thinking and the sources informing their thinking. For as Doshi puts it: “Even as the United States faces challenges at home and abroad, it can still secure its interests and resist the spread of an illiberal sphere of influence—but only if it recognizes that the key to defeating an opponent’s strategy is first to understand it.”

To achieve that understanding, Doshi employs the techniques of grand strategy, which he defines as looking for a “coherent body of thought and action” as illustrated through concepts, capability, and conduct. He argues that grand strategies depend on ‘power and threat’. Coercive consensual inducements and legitimacy secure the deference of the states within the order. The prevailing order for the democracies since 1945 is rules-based, American-led and relies on commercial inducements and legitimacy, The Soviet, and now the Chinese model, relies on coercion and technology-abetted surveillance.

Shifts in power perception are “driven more by events, especially shocks, than statistical measures” of GDP growth or fleet size. In the case of China, Doshi says, the pertinent foreign policy shocks  — the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Gulf War, the Soviet collapse, the global financial crisis, and now the pandemic – from which the Chinese Communist Party has drawn a series of conclusions.

The democracies must play to their strengths: using their openness to immigration, innovation and creative culture as assets. It also means calling out China by acting in concert.

Tiananmen confirmed the leadership’s conviction that China’s domestic stability and growth can only be achieved through the CCP. All the power of surveillance technology will be applied to maintain their paramount position. The Gulf War convinced them that the US and its allies will intervene militarily in the internal affairs of sovereign states. The Soviet collapse persuaded them political liberalization undermines economic growth. The 2008-9 financial crisis proved that the vaunted neo-liberal Washington Consensus was a ‘paper tiger’.  No longer master of the universe, for Chinese leadership the combination of Donald Trump, January 6 and the culture wars on race and gender, class and inequality, are all manifestations of an America in irrevocable decline.

The Long Game is laid out chronologically and in three parts looking at China’s successive displacement strategies: ‘Hiding capabilities and biding time’(1989-2008) with China employing ‘blunting’ as its first displacement strategy; ‘Actively Accomplish Something’ (2009-16) with building as China’s second displacement strategy; ‘Great changes unseen in a century’ (2017) with global expansion and a China ‘standing tall and seeing far’ designed to displace the US by 2049 — the centenary of the People’s Republic of China.

Doshi has an eye and ear for the telling anecdote. Lee Kuan Yew—the wily visionary father of modern Singapore cultivated Chinese leadership and he was once asked if the Chinese were serious about displacing the United States. “Of course”, responded Lee, “Why not? They have transformed a poor society by an economic miracle to become now the second-largest economy in the world—on track . . . to become the world’s largest economy…. How could they not aspire to be number one in Asia, and in time the world?” China might want to “share this century” with the US, as “co-equals” said Lee, but certainly not as subordinates.

From 1987-92, I would regularly take the train from Kowloon to Guangzhou to observe the economic development and minister to our consular cases. I would pass through Shenzhen and, for me, it came to represent the Chinese success story. Over five years, I watched bucolic rice paddies and water buffalo give way to the booming frontier town of Shenzhen. There was no regard for labour or environmental concerns, it was a case of getting it done. And they did. Today, Shenzhen with its nearly 13 million citizens is the home of Huawei and one of China’s tech centers.

So, how do the US and the democracies respond?

The kind of containment that the US employed against the Soviet Union won’t work, in part because of the deep economic integration between China and the rest of the world. Doshi says the US should take a page from the Chinese playbook and respond asymmetrically.

First, argues Doshi, it needs to blunt Chinese power by re-building multilateralism, earning back the leadership it abdicated when Donald Trump proclaimed ‘America First’. At the 2021 Munich Security conference, Joe Biden told the allies ‘America is back’. Despite European skepticism, Biden is making the right moves: at the virtual climate, G7, NATO and EU summits, and through focusing American diplomacy on the Indo-Pacific with the Quad and the promise of vaccines. But the US can’t do it all nor will the American public stomach the kind of interventions that led to debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. The message to the allies is still about burden-sharing as the Canada-US Roadmap makes clear in the section on bolstering security and defence.

Second, Doshi contends, it requires an asymmetric approach to competition with China across military, political, economic and other domains while avoiding “dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan”. The democracies must play to their strengths: using their openness to immigration, innovation and creative culture as assets. It also means calling out China by acting in concert. In recent months, the allies, including Canada, have publicly condemned human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and China’s illicit cyber campaigns. These have included targeted sanctions.

I recall a bibulous dinner conversation with a Chinese Colonel at the Seoul Defence Dialogue in which he pressed me repeatedly to explain why Donald Trump was upending what the Chinese viewed as America’s critical advantage — its allies and preferred trading relationships. As he acknowledged, China had tributaries, but none of them were reliable.

At a news conference at the conclusion of the G7 summit in Cornwall, Joe Biden declared: “We’re in a contest, not with China per se … with autocrats, autocratic governments around the world, as to whether or not democracies can compete with them in a rapidly changing 21st century.” On China, Biden said: “I think you’re gonna see just straightforward dealing with China. As I’ve told Xi Jinping myself, I’m not looking for conflict. Where we cooperate, we’ll cooperate; where we disagree, I’m going to state this frankly, and we are going to respond to actions that are inconsistent.” With advisors like Rush Doshi, the Biden administration is developing an astute understanding of Chinese grand strategy and its goals.

Executing a counter-strategy that both accommodates and deters China is the new ‘Great Game’ of our time. Efforts to shape and liberalize China’s internal politics are unlikely to succeed. Sustaining the rules-based order will depend on the democracies sticking together. For Canada, it means a clear-eyed assessment of our risks and assets and then, in tandem with our allies, making the necessary investments in diplomacy, defence, security, and intelligence.

A former Canadian diplomat, Colin Robertson is vice president and Fellow of the Canadian Global Affair Institute. In addition to postings in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, he served five years as Consul in Hong Kong with joint accreditation to China.