Between Scylla and Charybdis: An Investigation of China’s Prosperity and Stagnation in the Face of Thucydides’ Trap

Abstract

This study explores the People’s Republic of China’s arc of national development in the context of the Thucydides Trap. Harvard political scientist Graham Allison conceived Thucydides’ Trap as a theory to explain the dynamic that arises when the established hegemon of an international system is made to reckon with another nation recently growing in wealth, influence, and military power. The strain on the international system from two rival nations jockeying for primacy becomes too much to absorb, and the end result is often war between the hegemon and the challenger, with the potential to replace it. Allison uses this conceptual framework, with a historical link to the Classical Era’s great power conflict between ancient Athens and Sparta, to illustrate the looming danger of a new great power war in the 21st century. The hegemon of the contemporary international order, the United States, must now reckon with a potential challenger to that order—a rising and prospering China. Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins University and Michael Beckley of Tufts University offer a response to Allison and a reinterpretation of Thucydides’ Trap. A rising power introduced to the international system does not invite war so much as that ambitious power’s subsequent stagnation in the face of its rivals, and the desperate behavior that follows when ambitions fall out of grasp. Brands and Beckley identify a China that is no longer rising but rather stagnating. This thesis aims to empirically assess the state of China’s development between the portrait of a rising China (painted by Allison) and a stagnating China (painted by Brands and Beckley). I examined a selection of statistical trends identified by either group that were offered as evidence for their cases. The results are mixed. Many positive trends, established over decades, continue to the current day. There are also several negative trends that have manifested themselves: many in the short time between the published works of Allison, and Brands and Beckley on this subject, and some much more durable.