“How Will China’s National Power Evolve Vis-À-Vis The United States?” - By CWP Alum Andrew Erickson

The United States and China increasingly differ in their national systems, interests, and objectives. Never before have they been powerful simultaneously. China’s leaders scrutinize trends in relative comprehensive national power and attempt to finely calibrate policies accordingly. China’s economy is already at least the world’s second largest and funds the world’s second-largest defense budget. While the United States leads in overall military quality, sophistication, and coordination, China’s armed forces enjoy increasing advantages. Much is at stake in their great power competition, including regional and global security, governance of all domains beyond national boundaries, and international rules, institutions, and order. All this makes how China’s national power will evolve with respect to America’s among this era’s greatest questions.

TALLIES, TARGETS, AND TRENDS

Precise national power calculations are problematic. It is more productive to compare national goals and the required capabilities with forces affecting efforts to meet them.

Tallies

Comprehensive national power can be defined as a nation’s ability to exert or resist influence in all major dimensions of the international system. For the US government, this is often divided into diplomatic, information, military, and economic categories. Measuring national power, however, has proven elusive. Empirically rich attempts to systematically quantify these various components can be extremely complex yet often miss critically important intangibles, such as “soft power” influence and the potential for innovation and transformation. As a result, analysts, whether in the United States or the People’s Republic of China (PRC), have produced widely divergent estimates for the ranking of nations’ relative power. A more realistic approach to assessing comprehensive national power involves considering a range of potential future scenarios and surveying and weighing key dynamics that will likely inform the great powers’ trajectories across them. … … … More information here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-harvard-up-volume-china-questions-2includes-chapter-erickson/

VOLUME INFORMATION

About the Editors

Maria Adele Carrai specializes in the history of international law in East Asia and is the author of Sovereignty in China: A Genealogy of a Concept since 1840. She is Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at New York University Shanghai.

Andrew S. Erickson, “How Will China’s National Power Evolve Vis-à-vis the United States?” in Maria Adele Carrai, Jennifer Rudolph, and Michael Szonyi, eds., The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into U.S.-China Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 161–170.

Dr. Andrew S. Erickson (艾立信) is a professor of strategy and the research director in the Naval War College (NWC)’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI). A core founding member, he helped establish CMSI and stand it up officially in 2006, and has played an integral role in its development. CMSI inspired the creation of other research centers, which he has advised and supported; he is a China Aerospace Studies Institute associate. Since 2008 he has been an associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center. Erickson has taught courses at NWC and Yonsei University, advises NWC student research and curricula, and supports NWC’s scholarly research relationship with Japanese counterparts.

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/jensjunge-402508/