China’s actions are defensive
Jackson 23 [Van Jackson is a Professor of International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington and a Senior Research Scholar at Security in Context, where he co-directs the Multipolarity, Great-Power Competition, and the Global South project. A leading voice of progressive foreign policy thought, Jackson is also the author of Pacific Power Paradox (2023). He is a Distinguished Fellow with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and Defence & Strategy Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies. Interviewed by Nathan J Robinson who is Current Affairs EIC, “Why This Foreign Policy Expert Thinks Americans Dangerously Misunderstand China,” Current Affairs,” 5-16-2023, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/05/why-this-foreign-policy-expert-thinks-americans-dangerously-misunderstand-china, accessed 7-28-2023, HKR-SWY]
It’s a hard thing to answer. China experts, the same ones, would tell you that China’s trajectory of deciding that it needed to be able to militarily deal with the United States is not designed to fight America, one on one, and instead is designed to be able to keep America at bay while China deals with a smaller actor in the region. China’s not trying to actually conquer the United States, it’s just trying to keep the United States out of its sphere of influence, in the worst-case scenario. China’s PLA [People’s Liberation Army] started out on that track after the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996. We made nuclear threats at that point, sort of subtly, and put an aircraft carrier in the area as a very veiled threat. They were aware of a military imbalance, basically, and that we have a conflict of interest over Taiwan. And so, they decided to set out on that track.
But those are defense decisions, just like America’s defense decisions to pursue primacy and all this stuff. They’re based on chasing shadows, but it’s in a reasonable, rational state of foreign policy that’s kept in its own silo—you don’t let that dominate the rest of the foreign policy agenda. Statecraft should not be reducible to what your military does; the military should be subordinate to a larger apparatus. And so, just because the PLA committed to that military track of balancing against us does not mean that we were off to the races, by any stretch. It doesn’t mean that China was a rival, but the neocons were plotting in the 1990s, and when they came on to George W. Bush’s campaign in 2001, they were trying to create great power competition back then and set on rivalry. But then the War on Terror happened and sidetracked everything.