The Sino-U.S.Frictions and Global Security under the Backdrop of Changes Unseen in a Century

By Feng Weijiang

Director and Research Fellow for National Security Studies, Institute of World Economic and Political Studies, Chinese Academy Social Sciences

Since the first half of 2019, the Sino-U.S.trade frictions have become more and more intense since the United States has announced higher and higher tariffs, having attracted a lot of attention and resources given by academia,diplomacy and business circles at home and abroad.In fact, many assessments of the economic consequences of trade frictions have shown that the direct impact of Sino-U.S.trade frictions on the economic growth of both sides is insignificant.What various sides are concerned about is the risk of trade frictions breaking up the global industrial chain, even slipping into sanctions and counter-sanctions in monetary,financial and other fields, and even falling into a more serious security conflict or full-scale confrontation.If we broaden our observations with a view of the unprecedented changes unseen in a century in the world, it is not difficult to see that trade frictions are only a small fragment of the long-term geo-movement of "rising East and falling West".

At the beginning of 2017, speaking at the headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva,President Xi Jinping raised a question: what’s wrong with the world and what should we do ? At the end of the same year, when he received the delegates to the 2017 Diplomatic Envoy Conference, he pointed out that looking at the world, we are faced with great changes unseen in the past century, Since the beginning of the new century, a large number of emerging market economies and developing countries are developing rapidly, the development of multi polarization accelerating in the world, the international pattern is becoming increasingly balanced, and the mega-trend of the international situation is irreversible.The "unprecedented changes unseen in the past century" are his concise explanation of the question of "what's wrong with the world".In June 2018, he elaborated on the characteristics of the unprecedented changes unseen in a century in a dialectical perspective at the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs.Since then,President Xi Jinping has repeatedly expounded how to understand and respond to the great changes unseen in the past century on issues relating to military affairs, national security,economy and diplomacy, as well as in his speeches to young people, leading cadres, leaders and people of other countries or signed articles.

From the perspective of international relations, the unprecedented changes unseen in the past century are mainly as follows: the accelerated development of world multipolarity,the increasing balanced international pattern, the international situation at the new turning point,the division and reconfiguration of various strategic force, the accelerated evolution of the international system, and the in-depth adjustment of relations among major powers, meanwhile the threat of hegemonism and power politics still in existence.

From the economic perspective, a large number of emerging market economies and developing countries represented by China are developing rapidly, economic globalization continues to develop in depth, and the world economic structure has undergone profound changes.Meanwhile, the U.S.inward-looking tendency, protectionism and unilateralism are raising heir heads.The dramatic economic change is reflected in China's catching up with the United States on economic scale.

According to the data of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2014, China's GDP(purchasing power parity index, or PPP value)accounted for 16.5%, which was more than 15.8% of the U.S.share in the world economy,which was overtaken for the first time by others since the late 19th Century as the United States surpassed Britain.It is estimated that by 2024,China and the United States will account for 21.4% and 13.7% of the global economy respectively.

Of course, judging from other indicators,such as current-price GDP or per capita GDP, the process is much slower and much more complex.According to the current price of GDP, China's economic growth rate from 2021 to 2024 will be lower than before, but will still remain at a high level, so as to maintain the momentum of catching up with the United States.However, due to the large U.S.economic volume, the United States will still maintain the role of economic No.1.

From per capita GDP, the European Parliament predicts that by 2035 China's per capita GDP in terms of PPP will increase from about US$10,000 to about US$21,000, but is still less than half of the EU level in 2035.IMF is more optimistic about China's per capita GDP growth, and thinks that by 2024, China's per capita GDP in terms of PPP will be US$22,419,reaching 53.7% of that of EU, and 37.7% of that the United States, which will be close to the current bottom level of the developed countries(in 2018, the lowest per capita GDP in PPP terms of developed countries is US$ 25,887 for Greece).The prediction of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO)of the Russian Academy of Sciences shows that by 2035,China's per capita GDP in terms of PPP will reach US$37,400, which is 43.3% of that of the United States, and China's per capita GDP in terms of exchange rate will be US$21,400, which is 24.8%of that of the United States.Although there is still a big gap at per capita level, because of the huge scale of China's population, the per capita level moving towards the developed countries reflects a big rise of the overall strength.

From a security perspective, under the circumstances of profound changes, the international environment is generally stable, but the challenges of international security are complex and intricate, there are wars and conflicts and terrorist attacks, as well as rise and fall of famine and epidemic.Although global strategic stability is threatened by U.S.withdrawal from the INF Treaty and other actions,yet, there is little probability that serious conflicts between major powers, or between China and the United States, will break out to bring about systematic global security risks.The expected most destructive losses for China or the United States may not be generated by the direct conflict between the two.Just as the U.S.RAND says in the report entitledWar with China -Thinking through the Unthinkablethat nuclear weapons would not be used, even in high-intensity conventional wars.Neither side would run the risks of nuclear retaliation to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike since the war costs are so great, the prospects are so unimaginable, or its stakes are so significant.

From the cultural perspective, the great changes mean that various civilizations exchanging and learning from each other, and different ideas and cultures interact with each other.Meanwhile, with further development of cultural diversity, the argument of "clash of civilizations" has also become sediment coming to the surface and has pushed its impact in the direction of "self-fulfillment prophecy".For example, in April 2019, K.Skinner, Director of Policy Planning of the State Department said at a security forum in Washington that the current trial of strength between China and the United States is different from that of the Cold War.The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union is "the internal struggle of the Western family".Marxism the Soviet Union had belief in is also rooted in Western political theories, while what is happening between it with China is very different struggle between civilizations and between ideologies, and the United States has never had such experiences.This is the first time that the United States faces a strong competitor from a non-white race.Skinner also said that the United States is developing a relations framework with China based on the"clash of civilizations".Although this statement has been severely criticized by many political and diplomatic scholars in the United States, we should not regard it as an accidental and careless slip of tongue made by an individual U.S.government official and ignore the supporting forces and possible supporting actions behind it.

From the perspective of science and technology, the era of great changes is the era of deepening development of information society and the surging of new industrial revolution.Every country knows that whoever occupies the commanding height in the field of science and technology will have a greater initiative and a stronger voice in the great changes.Among the three pillars of science & technology, system and population, which support the in-depth adjustments of the pattern of economic force, the population structure is a slow variable, which can only be possible to make marginal adjustments through immigration policies, but it is easy to cause internal division within a country.Institutional competition is not only a high-cost competition, and it is also difficult to require the counterpart side or its "camp" countries to be more flexible through coercive measures, but to strive for (or to buy over)the institutional support of the intermediate zone is also costly, and difficult to gain and easy to lose.So the competition of science and technology may become one of the main battlefields that will influence the changes unseen in the past century.

Human society has experienced a one-dimensional economy highly dependent on the input of labor factor, and a two-dimensional economy in which capital elements replace labor in the way of diminishing marginal substitution rate, and is moving towards a three-dimensional economy in which scientific and technological elements strengthen labor productivity and capital output rate in a completely new way.Under the three-dimensional economic conditions, the way wars can be won will undergo subversive changes.Firstly, the domain of war is greatly expanded.With the help of advanced technology, wars under the three-dimensional economic conditions have expanded and transformed from traditional sea, land and air to space, from macro-space to micro-space, from physical world to virtual world,and from battle paradigms scenes to life paradigms scenes.Secondly, the means of confrontation are more abundant.The development of directional energy, life sciences,artificial intelligence, cyber network, hypersonic technology and other fields in the direction of military application may diversify the way of commanding, performing and testing war.Thirdly,the war ethics has changed.under the one-dimensional economy and the two-dimensional economy, whether to win the population or to destroy effective forces through war reflects that human beings themselves as the provider of labor elements are valuable.Despite the substitution of capital or technology for labor(population), generally speaking, the low-dimensional economy obeys the law of diminishing marginal substitution rate, i.e., with the growing capital or technology investment scale, the number of labor that can be replaced by one unit of capital or technology decreases,which means that capital or technology can not completely replace labor in theory.Under the three- dimensional economy, with the development of artificial intelligence and other technologies, the law of diminishing marginal substitution rate is broken, and labor can be completely replaced by unmanned operation, so,the value of laborers as labor carriers may become insignificant.Contradictions between human beings will change from exploitation of one part of it by another part to ignorance of one part of it by another part.Under the exploitative paradigm, the exploiters acknowledge the value of the exploited, and under given conditions can reach a certain "sympathetic understanding", just like those farmer who take good care of their bulls like partners although they sometimes uses whips on them.Under the ignorance paradigm,the affluent population no longer regards the surplus population as their peers, or even classify them as a different kind by the labels of religion,race, culture, native place, class and so on,without feeling the joy and sorrow of the latter,just like scientists who use rats in their experiments will not necessarily hesitate to feel any guilty at all.While the later will not be allowed to give full play to their subjective role,but only be manipulated or slaughtered by the former.The rise of long-range combat technology and unmanned combat platforms based on virtual reality may exacerbate the ignorance of human life by war-fighters, thus increasing the brutality of war.

The basic features of economic and social development under the profound changes in the world is that a few major countries are competing for stepping toward the three-dimensional economic world, while hoping that their main competitors will remain in a low-dimensional economic state for a long time.The basic logic of competition is to launch de-dimensional attacks,holding back the further development of major competitors from 2.5-dimensional economy to high-dimensional economy by means of economic and trade investment, military operation, diplomatic hedging and international rules, etc., and hopefully forcing them return to a low-dimensional economy and stay.If the developed countries represented by the United States reduce the dimensionality of the economic formation of major emerging economies represented by China and lock them in a two-dimensional economic situation and cut off the possible path of upgrading their technological dimensionality, the trend of "East rising and West declining" may stagnate or even reverse.

It is a long-term process to cope with the unprecedented changes unseen in a century.In this process, the pressure of tension, anxiety and panic caused by the forces of continuous extrusion resulting from rise and decline between the United States and China (as well as other countries)impacting on the areas of internal religious frictions, ethnic contradictions,polarization between rich and poor,environmental pollution, corruption, cadre-mass relations, labor conflicts and other vulnerabilities,one or a few areas of which are particularly vulnerable catalyze fault lines, which lead to serious problems such as economic collapse,social disorder and political subversion, as well as global turbulence or security crisis in the backdrop of high-tech caused by countries,especially major powers that guide these contradictions to the outside world in order to temporarily alleviate these problems, which may be truly destructive.In this sense, we should unite with the developing partners along the Belt and Road and the developed partners participating in the "third party cooperation" to jointly expand the open space, and deepen reform and opening up in order to prevent all kinds of "grey rhinoceros",and give equal importance to preventing the Sino-U.S.trade friction “black goose” from sliding out of control.