Upstart: why it took the West so long to pay attention to China's rise
Beijing has accumulated power by avoiding emulating the methods of its main competitor, argues Oriana Skylar-Mastro in her new book.
That China and America are on a collision course is by now well-known, thanks to the hundreds of books on the topic, gilding the landing pages of global think-tanks. Graham Allison’s Destined for War remains the gold standard, at least for its provocation factor: China and America are destined for war as Britain and Germany were a century ago, he argues, because America fears being displaced.
Oriana Skylar-Mastro, a scholar at Stanford University, examines the rivalry from a different angle in her new book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power. How did China accumulate so much power, so quickly, without inciting American suspicions for so long? Since 1990, China has not only transformed its economy but has pulled itself out of the diplomatic isolation of Tiananmen and created a fighting force of astonishing – though untested – strength. Yet it took twenty-five years for the West to really pay attention.
The answer, Skylar-Mastro suggests in her new book, is the "Upstart strategy". Drawing the analogy with a start-up technology company, she shows how China has risen by avoiding emulating the methods of its main competitor. Rather, China has exploited gaps in US power and developed novel strategies which capitalise on China’s strengths, including so-called "entrepreneurial" strategies such as the Belt and Road Initiative.
On the diplomatic front, for example, China has exploited the US neglect of African diplomacy to build its global reputation - hosting African leaders over twice as many times as the US between 2010 and 2019 - and eschewed the alliance system for economic partnerships with a much broader range of countries. To this day, China has one security pact with North Korea but is the world’s number one provider of state-backed financing, lending out twice as much money to the developing world as the US did in the years after the recession from 2009-13.
The assumption that underpins Skylar-Mastro’s theory is that China has crafted its whole strategy around avoiding a US backlash. By 2010, for example, China had no aircraft carriers and perhaps "one advanced submarine", recognising that such projects would sound the alarm in Washington. "Many of the observable signs of military build-up arrived late", Skylar-Mastro writes.
China’s most ingenious turn here was entry into the World Trade Organization. At the time, President Clinton believed welcoming China into the global free trade order would "move China faster and further in the right direction" towards something like democracy. But he was wrong. China was not another East Asian "tiger", and while WTO entry gave China an economic boost it also provided an opportunity to reassure the US that China was indeed on "the right track".
That China was not on the right track means there is a second question to answer. But Skylar-Mastro’s analysis avoids discussing what China ultimately wants to do with the power it has so skillfully accumulated. Instead, she urges the US and allies to re-think strategic competition. While it is too late now to contain China, it is not too late to channel the contest into peaceful means. "Just as emulating US successes is not always the best option for China", Skylar-Mastro argues, "emulating China’s success is not necessarily the best option for the US".
This will mean thinking harder about what the US and its allies should be doing to deal with China. Is it time, for example, to revisit Bidenomics, the current administration’s foray into industrial policy? Why is the US not capitalising on what it does best, rather than trying to emulate an economic strategy which China will always do better?
America’s strengths lie in its competitive markets and its open capital flows. Washington is not good at picking winners. Nor do China’s high barriers to global capital provide a good template: the Biden administration’s attempt to “reshore” US companies has already aggravated partners in Europe and elsewhere.
Skylar-Mastro’s call for the US to play to its strengths raises a fundamental problem, too, with the tightening of bipartisan immigration policy. High-skill immigration is the unique American strength – its defining feature - even as illegal and low-skill immigration should be curtailed. Politicians who want to put the debate in context could begin by noting why China has not needed a border wall for over four hundred years: for all its diplomatic courtship, the world is not rushing to break in.
Healthy competition between the US and China is possible and can "push all countries to be the best versions of themselves". Seven years ago, Allison’s book spoke to a generation freshly fearful of China’s rise. His analysis focused on the fear so often instilled in the established power, and the likelihood that this fear would lead to a defensive military build-up and a tactical over-reach that would lead to war.
In 2024, the US-China relationship has stabilised ever so slightly. Communication has improved. Red lines for conflict are clarified. And "Upstart" offers a way out of the zero-sum strategic thinking that Allison’s prism of history encourages.
Skylar-Mastro’s study, however, does not provide a way out of the fundamental dynamic identified by Allison - fear.
That China has sought to build power without antagonising the US does not prove anything about its intentions. Indeed, we know that the US has been at the centre of China’s strategic thinking for decades.
A note from the 1907 Crowe Memorandum, handed to King Edward VII to explain why British foreign policy had become so hostile to Germany, comes to mind: "Ambitious designs… are not as a rule openly proclaimed".
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