China is cautious and seeks to maintain peace – trying to contain China makes it worse.
Overholt 21 [William H. Overholt is a senior research fellow at John F. Kennedy School of Government's Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard University and principal of AsiaStrat LLC, a consulting firm. He is an expert on Asia and US-Asia relations, with a long history of analyzing Asia for both the public and private sectors. He has served as political advisor to Asia's major political figures and has done consulting projects for Korea Development Institute, The Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Philippine Department of Agrarian Reform, and Thailand's Ministry of Universities. His consulting experience ranges from strategic planning to foreign affairs to economic development to political strategy for the Conference Board, U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute, the Foreign Service Institute, Dean Witter Reynolds, and numerous other corporations and political leaders. He is the author or co-author of nine books, including the The Rise of China, which was the first book to predict China's economic and geopolitical success and won the Mainichi News/Asian Affairs Research Center Special Book Prize. He served as head of the Asia Policy Task Force for the 39th President of the United States Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976, “China and America: A New Game in a New Era.” PRISM, vol. 9, no. 2, 2021, pp. 34–45. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27008974. accessed 7-27-2023, HKR-SWY]
In national security, this combination of competition and shared interests mirrors the economics. Everyone knows the conflicts. They are very important. But also:
■ The world’s greatest threat of nuclear war is North Korea and there the Chinese goal of denuclearization overlaps 90–95 percent with ours. ■ Middle East stability matters even more to China than to us because China is far more dependent on Middle East oil. ■ The United States and China combine efforts to combat piracy. ■ The greatest long-run threats to us are environmental degradation and climate change. China is now the world leader in those areas. ■ The national security benefits of the global development created by Sino- American collaboration are never counted but they are vital.
Chinese leaders are very conscious of common interests and do not seek to destabilize the U.S. and EU democracies the way Russia does. To live in a peaceful world, we Americans must accept that we have a peer competitor, something that never occurred to us during the President George W. Bush years. We can manage that or choose nuclear war. China wants to be number one but is not trying to destroy the United States. We can no longer rule the seas to the beaches of Fujian. We can no longer dominate space unilaterally. We can no longer make all the trade and investment rules or set all the IT standards. No strategy will get us to that dominant end-state; the likely future is simply competition forever. Our assertion that democracy is the best path to human dignity for all societies at all levels of development will be challenged for the indefinite future. This will be a really difficult adjustment for Americans. However, when we have tried to confine China to a disproportionately small role, we have harmed ourselves and created a vacuum that actually strengthened China. We have to live in the world as it is.