Good afternoon to those of you attending in person at Harvard for this event, in which I’m pleased to be able to participate – even if only “virtually” from here in London.  The organizers have asked me to explore the “root causes” of instability in the Sino-American relationship, and though I can only offer my personal views, I’m happy to offer what perspectives I can.

The question of “root causes” is somewhat analytically tricky, not least because in the enormous complex system of human society it might be possible – if you really wanted to do so – to trace all sorts of elaborate causal genealogies for problems in the U.S.-China relationship far back into the remote past.  You could presumably conclude, for instance, that both China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, and England’s King Henry VIII each played some role in setting up the conditions of Sino-American rivalry in the 21st Century.

But since that kind of deep and attenuated causality isn’t actually very interesting – and because it also seems pretty useless when it comes to providing us policy insights today – we need something more concrete.  To get our brains going a bit, therefore, let me thus offer a causal typology for Sino-American instability inspired by the ideas about causes offered in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics.

A (Sort of) Aristotelean Typology

Aristotle wrote about four different types of cause: the “material,” the “formal,” the “efficient,” and the “final”:

• Material Cause:  For him, the most immediate sort of cause was the “material” one, which identifies the elements out of which a thing or situation is constructed.  (A house might thus be “caused” by bricks and beams, or instance, or perhaps the word “gobsmacked” likewise “caused” by the two syllables “gob” and “smacked.”)

• Formal Cause:  This type of cause sought to identify the essence of the thing or situation you’re considering, responding to the question: “What is it?”  Think of the “formal cause” as a kind of form or blueprint for the thing in question, making it what it is.  (Having a folding screen, keyboard, processing unit, and battery, for instance, might be said to make the device I’m looking at right now into a “laptop.”)

• Efficient Cause: “Efficient cause” refers to what makes or produces the thing or situation in question, answering a question about the origin of the change or motion that gives rise to that thing.  (You probably learned in high school biology about a bunch of processes that might be said to constitute the efficient cause, for example, of a puppy.)

• Final Cause:  Lastly, the “final cause” identifies, in effect, what most fundamentally set in motion the process by which a given thing or situation emerged.  For Aristotle, this answer was teleological. “What is its good?” he asked – meaning, “for the sake of what did it occur or was it done?” 

Since I’m only offering this typology as one loosely inspired by Aristotle rather than actually following him, however, I’ll interpret this fourth cause as referring to something not tied to assumptions about purpose but simply pointing to the deepest usefully identifiable sort of causality: what is the most fundamental causal driver for the thing in question?

Accordingly, as food for thought in our discussions here, let me try to offer a causal analysis of U.S.-China geopolitical instability through a lens inspired by – though admittedly actually drawing only very loosely upon – this fourfold Aristotelean classification.

Material Cause 

You could say, for instance, that the “material cause” of Sino-American instability is some aggregate of specific, discrete policy choices made by the leaders of the countries. Involved.  And indeed, it’s surely true that in some sense problems in the U.S.-China relationship do result from choices such as the determination of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to seize control of Taiwan, America’s commitment to helping Taiwan defend itself and protect the democratic autonomy of its population, Xi Jinping’s nuclear weapons build-up and moves to dominate and militarize the South China Sea, Donald Trump’s tariff policies, Chinese exports of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels, America’s maintenance of military alliances with Japan and South Korea, Beijing’s restrictions on rare earth element (REE) exports and policies of cyber-facilitated intellectual property theft, U.S. semiconductor export restrictions and the U.S. Navy’s conduct of “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOPS), and Chinese human rights abuses in places such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. 

Just as if you took away the “material causes” of a house by disconnecting or removing the stones and timbers out of which it had been constructed – thus making it no longer a house but rather something like a rubble pile – so also there would presumably be less tension and instability in the Sino-American relationship if such specific national policy choices were revised.  If you take away the “bad behaviors” each sees in the other, in other words, it’s not hard to imagine that the relationship would feel a lot warmer.

Nevertheless, I don’t find this “material cause” analysis very interesting, because most such policy decisions aren’t just casual and adventitious choices – made in the same way one might perhaps decide to have chocolate ice cream today but vanilla tomorrow.  Rather, they tend to be tied together in meaningful ways, and to be linked on each side to conceptually antecedent choices of policy and strategy informed by divergent national objectives and value-commitments that neither look nor feel merely adventitious.  We aren’t just accidentally irritating each other; more important dynamics are involved.

That’s why we need to look to other types of cause.

Formal Cause

If asked to identify a quasi-Aristotelean “formal cause” for Sino-American problems – identifying the essence of the thing – you might respond that this is an example of clashing conceptions of national interest in the economic, military, and political arenas.  China, for example, feels it to be essential that it seize control of Taiwan, ideally through what Beijing terms “peaceful reunification,” but by means of outright invasion if necessary.  The United States, however, perceives a strong interest in not permitting China to acquire that island as a stepping stone toward unimpeded power-projection access to the Pacific beyond the “First Island Chain,” fears that such Chinese military advances would undermine Washington’s alliance relationships with others in the region, does not wish China to gain control over Taiwan’s vital semiconductor manufacturing industry, and does not wish to see Taiwan’s thriving (and friendly) democracy destroyed and subjected to authoritarian CCP rule.  Where such interests clash, policies will naturally conflict and instability increase.

This level of causal analysis can yield policy-relevant insights, at least if it proves possible to identify trade-space in which each side has something to offer the other.  It was recently announced, for instance, that U.S. President Trump and CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping had reached an agreement to resolve or reduce some of the then-outstanding friction points between the two countries, with Trump backing down from most of his tariff restrictions on China in return for Xi relaxing the REE controls and soybeans purchase embargo Beijing had imposed in response to Trump’s tariffs, and also reducing exports of fentanyl precursor chemicals.  This kind of bargaining is the stuff of day-to-day diplomatic relationship management.

Yet this also seems to me still to be a somewhat analytically unsatisfying level of causal understanding, for there is more to the challenge of Sino-American instability than simply the sum total of diverging conceptions of national interest on a laundry list of specific, discrete policy questions.  I think there are still bigger themes involved that we must understand if we are to understand the “root causes” of the challenges we face.

Efficient Cause

For a quasi-Aristotelean “efficient cause,” we need to look to the origin of the change or motion that gives rise to the thing in question.  Here, one might say that the efficient cause of Sino-American instability is great power competitive rivalry.  This lets us see something beyond merely the fact that many of our perceived national interests clash, opening the door further to some understanding of why and how they do so. 

Here, I would offer an account of “efficient cause” that is made up of two closely-related elements: (a) the enormous growth of Chinese power in recent years in economic, military, and poetical terms; and (b) the particular, highly ambitious strategic vision of regional hegemony and global systemic centrality to which this power is wedded, and in support of which that power is increasingly being wielded.  (It is important that these elements exist in conjunction.  Neither Chinese muscle tied to a more benign strategic vision nor a bold vision without the capacity to implement it would be particularly problematic; challenges of instability arise when growing power gives more and more options to those harboring aggressive ambitions.)

I’ve written and spoken about this challenge for years, and indeed it’s a problem to which I first began to draw attention as a scholar nearly two decades ago.  In its own somewhat romanticized (though not entirely fictitious) vision of itself, China enjoyed a well-deserved centrality in the global system for thousands of years as the “Middle Kingdom.”  It was, in that imagining, a realm ruled by a benevolent emperor – the “Son of Heaven” – and a cadre of Confucian mandarins selected through a meritocratic examination system, and it was comfortably situated at the center of a regional system of tributary states.  In this vision, China received respectful and even awestruck status-deference by all other peoples as its due, excepting only the most scandalously un-Sinicized barbarians on the geographic periphery – brutes who needed (for precisely this reason) to be kept at bay by great frontier walls and periodically subjected to expeditionary military “chastisements” to keep them in line.

This happily Sinocentric order – which to Chinese thinkers seemed quite the natural order of things, derogation from which was offensive and aberrant – was shattered by European imperialism (and, not long thereafter, Japanese imperialism) in the 19th Century.  As a result of abuses beginning with the Opium War in 1839, China was subjected to what came later to be described as the “Century of Humiliation.” 

It has been the objective of Chinese nationalist thinkers ever since to rectify things, returning the world to its proper state of (Sinocentric) order and China to its birthright of dominance within that world.  General Secretary Hu Jintao talked about this as building a “harmonious world” modeled on the supposedly “harmonious society” created by CCP rule in China; his successor Xi Jinping terms it the global “shared community of common destiny” that will arise out of China’s “national rejuvenation.”  But while the phrasing may vary, the dream remains deeply and ambitiously Sinocentric.

Making achievement of this dream seem increasingly possible, in turn, is the dramatic expansion of Chinese power that has occurred since the CCP finally abandoned Maoist madnesses and began to embrace market-based economics and export-driven growth in the early 1980s under Deng Xiaoping. 

Even the weak may have dreams, but the flush of expanding power and influence can make dreams feel increasingly like plans.  And, as I warned back in 2006 when I first began to publish on issues of U.S.-China strategic competition, with strength can come options and opportunity: 

“As China’s strength grows …the Middle Kingdom may well become more assertive in insisting on the sort of Sinocentric hierarchy that its history teaches it to expect and its traditional notions of power and legitimacy will encourage it to demand.” 

Alas, that is exactly what happened, and this conjunction of power and ambition has had huge implications for U.S.-China relations, because it is the United States that has long been the central and dominant state in the global system that this rising China seeks to reorder into a more Sinocentric form. 

This should be in no way surprising, for some Chinese nationalists had begun to identify America as their country’s ultimate rival and competitor for hegemony even in the earliest years of the 20th Century.  As early as 1903, for instance, the nationalist thinker Liang Qichao visited the United States and learned of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s construction of a powerful naval fleet.  This distressed Liang, who felt that the growth of U.S. naval power in the Pacific would preclude China from its own ultimate destiny of global hegemony.  Liang wrote that “no country is in a better position to utilize the Pacific in order to hold sway over the world than China,” but he lamented that as long as China remained weak and the United States dominant, his country would remain “unable to become the master of the Pacific” in the ways he clearly felt it eventually needed to be.(1) 

The challenges created as the ambitions of rising powers rub up against the interests of dominant, status quo ones – and the stresses that such friction can place upon the system of order in which such dominant states hold sway – are an old story, but they are no less real for all that.  Nor do such situations invariably result in war, for from the example of U.S.-British relations in the early 20th Century one can see that under certain conditions it is at least possible for the strategic baton to be handed off with relative amity from a formerly dominant power to an upstart rival.  Nevertheless, the peaceful succession of the Anglo-American case may represent the exception more than the rule, and one can certainly see a recipe for dangerous geopolitical instabilities along the Sino-American axis.

Accordingly, if you’re looking for a quasi-Aristotelean “efficient cause” for Sino-American instabilities, I would point you to the ways in which China’s huge growth in wealth and power since the 1980s has increasingly encouraged it to try to operationalize the dreams of Sinocentric systemic “return” and regional hegemony that Chinese nationalists have nursed in their hearts since the Opium War. 

Final Cause 

But what about a “final” cause, representing, here at least, the deepest usefully identifiable sort of causality?  Though, as noted, I’m veering away from Aristotle by looking not at teleology but at historical and structural factors, let me offer a thought.

I suggest that the deepest cause for the current challenges of the U.S.-China relationship lies well below the level of ideological confrontation between Leninism and democracy, the pressures that globalized free trade and capital mobility place upon industrialized economies in a world when labor costs are lower in developing countries, or the idiosyncratic ways in which romanticized memories of Sinic civilizational centrality inform contemporary CCP dreams of “national rejuvenation.” 

More basic than all of these case-specific things are the more fundamental general dynamics of how the evolution of economic and military power occurs in eras of disruptive and transformative technological change.

The story of the traumatic encounter between an ancient and complacently arrogant China and a brash Europe that in the early 19th Century had just been gifted vast new power and dynamism by the scientific and technological advances of the First Revolution represented a radical new type of phenomenon, for no such full-spectrum range of interconnected and self-reinforcing human advancements had occurred before.  The arrival of technological modernity in the 19th Century was stunningly disruptive, transforming the lives of people and the trajectory of nations more and faster than in any prior era of human history.

As I noted to an Oxford University alumni group earlier this week, however, while such transformative technology-driven change produced enormous benefits in many fields, it also 

“turned geopolitics on its head, creating huge new asymmetries in power as some reached technological modernity far in advance of others. This asymmetry made possible a century of European politico-economic domination and imperialist expansion around the world.”

And while the First Industrial Revolution was the first major example of transformative science and technology (S&T)-based change, it was not the last.  As Chinese strategic writers have themselves emphasized, a Second Industrial Revolution grounded in oil, steel, and heavy industry soon came along in the early 20th Century, itself also producing major changes in the geopolitical balance of power as the “first mover” in that second revolution (the United States) came to supersede the first-mover in the first (Great Britain) as the leading state in the international system.  The Americans were then able to perpetuate their geopolitical advantages in the late years of the 20th Century through their first-mover status in Third Industrial Revolution.

Today, Chinese and U.S. officials alike seem to believe that a Fourth Industrial Revolution is coming, and each country is maneuvering against the other in hopes of seizing first mover position for itself – or at least of denying it to the other, for fear of catastrophic disadvantage.  Much of the “through line” of Chinese nationalist thinking since the late 19th Century, moreover, has revolved around rectifying the so-called “Century of Humiliation” China faced at European and Japanese hands after those competitors first beat the Middle Kingdom to the mark in acquiring 19th Century industrial power and then exploited the resulting power advantages in their dealings with the Qing Dynasty. 

To the same end, Xi Jinping’s great project of “national rejuvenation” now revolves around asserting Chinese power and prerogatives in ways that displace American power at the center of international order, thus returning China to the status, norm-setting role, and dominant global position it imagines to be its ancient birthright.  Meanwhile, Beijing’s relative degree of success so far in advancing this agenda is beginning to elicit increasing resentment in an America that became accustomed to such a centrality as a result of its successes in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. 

Such dynamics, in fact, are widespread.  Longstanding themes of perceived grievance keyed to real or imagined abuses of Western power made possible by the asymmetric advantages of differential modernization also continue to be powerful sources of political energy and mobilization – and drivers of various revisionist geopolitical agendas – in countries as diverse as Russia, Iran, and some states of the anti-imperialist Global South. 

So let me make a sweeping claim:  This kind of thing is a general characteristic of transformative technological change, which occurs unevenly and hence creates vast asymmetries in power between those countries that achieve the next level of S&T modernity first and those who lag behind.  This makes technological development a powerful engine not just for material progress but also for geopolitical instability.  The power asymmetries it produces become a locus of strategic competition, a source of imperial arrogance in some, and a reason for resentful grievance and oppositional counter-mobilization in others – even while also giving countries ever more sophisticated tools with which to attack or intimidate each other.  They also give technological “haves” an incentive to slow or block particularly sensitive or empowering advancements by others.(2) 

All of this naturally conduces to pervasive instability.

For all the wondrous advances they have brought the world, in other words, the disruptive changes of technological modernity have also been the engine for continuing cycles of advantage and resentment that have rippled through the international arena for two centuries – cycles of which today’s Sino-American challenges are just one example, and which show no sign of abating as the headlong rush of scientific and technological progress continues. 

How’s that for a “final cause”?

Conclusion

I know it’s an important priority for the organizers of this conference to identify constructive agenda items for a diplomatic summit between U.S. President Trump and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping.  To the degree that my analysis is correct, however, the ability of such a summit to ameliorate instabilities in the Sino-American relationship may be quite limited. 

To be sure, there may yet remain some limited trade-space in the “formal cause” arena, in which diplomatic bargaining over specific, discrete issues may sometimes be able – at least temporarily – to relieve a degree of pressure.  So there’s every reason to continue to seek such possibilities, and I wish our respective pre-summit “sherpas” well.

Especially at a time in which disruptive and potentially transformative technology-driven change seems to be accelerating and both Beijing and Washington already feel themselves to be in an acute strategic competition, however, I think we may be stuck with a great deal of baked-in instability for a long while yet.  Nor is it hard to imagine things getting worse before they get better.

Nevertheless, if I had to suggest an agenda item for a Trump-Xi summit that speaks in some way to the deepest and most problematic dynamics here, I’d recommend we look for ways not to “solve” problems between us – for in some sense they may be insoluble except perhaps by time and structural change – but rather means by which to channel or to manage those tensions in ways that are at least somewhat less destructive than would otherwise be the case. 

Doing more to routinize and institutionalize diplomatic engagement with each other over national security policy, for instance, could hardly be a bad thing – and might help, at the margins, in at least keeping things from being worse   between the two rivals than structural circumstances all but compel them to be.  This could include finally persuading China to accept a regularized security and strategic stability dialogue with the United States, and ideally also plugging Beijing into the existing multilateral communications network of the U.S.-based Nuclear Risk Reduction Center. 

That way, at least, we would have a fighting chance of being able to talk reliably to each other on a regular basis.  To be sure, there will surely continue to be lots of ways in which we each choose policies that raise tensions with the other, and it is likely wrong to attribute Sino-American problems primarily to a “lack of mutual understanding.”  (To some extent, it’s possible that we actually understand each other – or at least the real divergences of interest and strategic objective that divide us – all too well!)  Nevertheless, better communications links and habits can at least help prevent actual   misunderstandings, as well as giving our leaders better tools with which to try to manage the challenges and crises that are sure to arise along our two countries’ intersecting trajectories.

This may seem rather a “small beer” answer to the world-historical and intractable dynamics of asymmetrically advancing modernity, but it’s something.  And it may be, at least for now, the best we can hope for.

—Christopher Ford

Notes:

(1)   Quoted in R. David Arkush & Leo O. Lee, Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (University of California Press, 1989), 83.

(2)   It is perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that the “Dark Forest hypothesis” that animates so much of the second and third novels of Lu Cixin’s award-winning Three-Body Problem science fiction trilogy – namely, the idea that a scientifically advanced world will fear being overtaken by an initially less-advanced one capable of innovating rapidly, and will hence feel an incentive to block scientific progress in that world or perhaps even destroy it before such advances occur – came out of a China that is in the modern era obsessed with recovering from its own 19th Century techno-economic overmatch by the West and by threats of “containment” by the United States.