Review | Overreach: how China derailed its peaceful rise

Charlie Hore reviews Overreach which provides insights into US policy on China and why China scares them so much.

As Trump’s tariff war with China escalates, Overreach is a very timely read for understanding why the US sees China as its mortal enemy. The author Susan L Shirk is very far from being a Trumpian – she served in the Clinton administration and is firmly on the Democratic wing of the American policy establishment. But as she establishes very early on, hostility to China runs across the spectrum of official politics: ‘George Soros…called the [first] Trump administration’s tough China policy its greatest foreign policy achievement’.

The book’s basic argument is simple and clearly outlined. China’s economic transformation began as a very good thing, and ‘…no country has done more to promote China’s rise as a global leader than the United States’. But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) became increasingly greedy and assertive, has thrown its weight around in east and southeast Asia and has ‘dared’ to confront American political, economic and military interests. 

In one revealing passage, Shirk is clear on what constitutes the military ‘threat’:

China wants to raise the cost to the US of sending its soldiers or sailors into a Taiwan crisis or another regional dispute…The Chinese call them defensive “counter intervention” operations. The US calls them “anti-access, area denial” operations, a terminological difference that highlights the two countries’ different views on the legitimacy of America’s military role in the region. If China succeeds…the United States would effectively be locked out of a region that has been declared ‘a vital security interest by every administration in the last sixty years’…

So far, so familiar. It’s an argument that sees China as the only bad actor and all other governments and states as simply defending their legitimate interests. In reality, China’s recent evolution can only be properly understood in the context of growing inter-imperialist tensions between China and the US and the militarisation of the region by all ruling classes. For a fuller explanation, see this review from last year. 

Although its core argument is flawed, Overreach possesses several notable strengths. One is the very detailed account of the fragmented nature of decision-making inside the CCP. This leads to a process the author calls ‘log-rolling’, a process of policy drift where bureaucrats support each other’s empire-building. She also makes a compelling argument that fragmentation and rivalries have led to many of the recent military escalations in the South China Sea. Local authorities and military/para-military units stage provocations which the central government is then obliged to back up.

Ironically, her account of Xi Jinping begins by praising him for trying to tackle the rivalries and divisions inside the CCP. Although he is portrayed as the main villain, her description of Xi’s rise to power is sharper and more nuanced than many others. She looks beyond personalities to focus on CCP structures and the changing relationships between the CCP and government, to give a much fuller picture of the Chinese state’s inner workings. 

She also gives a very relevant, if too short, account of Trump’s targeting of China in his first term. Her verdict is unequivocal: Trump lost and in the process boosted Xi Jinping. This was particularly true of the first phase of Covid-19, when China’s successes stood in sharp contrast to the US’s failure. Though she also details how China failed to cope with later variants of Covid-19. She draws a number of parallels between Xi and Trump, quoting a senior Chinese official who ‘…speculated that Xi might be modelling his truculent behaviour on former president Donald Trump, who acted unilaterally, without heeding foreign reactions. ‘If an American president can do it, why can’t I do it too?’.

The book takes a catastrophist view of China: increasingly unpopular abroad, with a corrupt, oppressive and inefficient bureaucracy that stifles private enterprise and the middle class. A lot of this is true, though it doesn’t explain how China has become the world’s second biggest economy. Some of the criticisms evoke similarities rather than differences. For example, ‘By openly threatening governments and private actors who criticise its behaviour China presents itself as a country that would rather be feared than loved.’ Remind you of anyone? Further down the same page, she describes how ‘…intimidation has also chilled the climate of academic freedom in universities.’ 

It is slightly surreal to read a US academic deploring how China’s internet managers ‘…distract ordinary users from politically sensitive information by flooding the Internet with photos and articles about movie star divorces and other entertaining stories’. She also quotes Joe Biden in 2011, describing Xi Jinping as ‘having the look of a man who is about to take on a job he’s not at all sure is going to end well.’ Talk about writing your own epitaph…

This is very much a work about elite politics and it was published too soon to take in Trump’s second term. Opposition on the streets is addressed briefly, but only as a cause for the CCP’s fears about ‘stability’, rather than a possible source of change. But it gives a great deal of insight into how the US ruling class think about China and why China scares them so much.

Overreach: how China derailed its peaceful rise by Susan L Shirk is published by Oxford University Press £18.99

Charlie Hore is the author of The Road to Tiananmen Square available from sfbbooks for £10 + postage.