Can Collective Resilience Against China Happen?

A few thoughts about Victor Cha's latest

Photo by Ling Tang on Unsplash

A few years ago Victor Cha and Andy Lim wrote a provocation¹ in the Washington Quarterly entitled, “Flagrant Foul: China’s Predatory Liberalism and the NBA.” Building off of China’s bellicose reaction to a tweet in support of Hong Kong protestors by then-Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey, Cha and Lim argued that China was using its market power to bully states and corporations into self-censorship. They labelled the practice “predatory liberalism,” a catchy term that encapsulated how China was using the tools of the market economy to subvert the proponents of liberal, free-market democracies.

Cha and Lim served up a constructive provocation, but in the years since the article it is not entirely clear whether predatory liberalism has yielded China a lot of strategic gains. The United States has pivoted hard towards strategically decoupling its economy, suggesting the limits of this approach toward the United States. As for countries in the region Audrye Wong’s more recent Foreign Affairs essay suggests there are limits to China’s approach:

For all the breathless talk of the geopolitical gains from economic statecraft, so far, Beijing has mostly been able to achieve transactional, short-term objectives—say, public silence on China’s human rights record from a legislator or a veto over a resolution about the South China Sea during an ASEAN meeting. Outside a small subset of countries with little public accountability, China’s long-term strategic influence remains limited. Most of the countries China has targeted have not made major shifts in their geopolitical alignment; at best, they have offered rhetorical and symbolic commitments.

Fast-forward to the present, and Victor Cha’s latest in Foreign Affairs advocates for an even more aggressive U.S.-led response to China’s economic statecraft. Cha argues that in responding to Beijing, Washington has been focused too much on playing defense and not enough on practicing deterrence: “To successfully compete with China, the United States needs to do more than insulate states from Chinese coercion. It needs to stop the coercion from happening in the first place. To do so, the United States will need to band together with its partners and draw up a new strategy, one of collective resilience.”

The essence of Cha’s collective resilience strategy is that interdependence is a two-way street. Even if China is a significant import or export market for lots of countries, China still needs the global economy to grow, no matter how many times Xi Jinping says “dual circulation.” Cha writes, “Washington should organize these countries into a club that threatens to cut off China’s access to vital goods whenever Beijing acts against any single member. Through such an entity, states will finally be able to deter China’s predatory behavior.”

This seems like a pretty tall order! Cha recognizes this but still believes such a coalition is possible:

Having the capability to fight back is only half the battle. The other half is political will: For collective resilience to be credible, countries must be willing to sign up for it in the face of fierce Chinese resistance. Beijing is likely to use a combination of carrots, such as offering discounted digital infrastructure, and sticks, such as more export restrictions, to deter countries from joining and to try to peel them off if they do. States will need to build enough domestic political support to withstand the external pressure and resist the temptation to free-ride by accepting coalition support without ever actually sanctioning China

Given that most participants would be democracies, this will prove difficult. But the pact’s bigger countries can take several steps to help smaller or poorer states endure the discomfort. They can create a collective compensation fund for losses and offer alternative export or import markets to divert trade in response to Chinese sanctions….

Yet despite the challenges, states would likely recognize that joining the pact and staying the course is worth the short-term costs. They would need to recognize and explain to their citizens that ultimately, ending Chinese economic coercion would be in their long-term interests.

Could Cha’s proposal work? His structure leans heavily on the “deterrence” part of the proposal. If the collective resilience alliance is sufficiently robust, China will refuse to even attempt further acts of predatory liberalism. That way no one incurs any costs! At a minimum, however, I would be that Beijing would want to test the credibility of any emergent counter-coalition. Which means that this structure would be tested at least once.

I will confess an aversion to any argument that leans on the phrase “political will” to suggest how it would be politically viable. And just as Cha’s essay came out, the Washington Quarterly released its Winter 2023 issue centered around the realities of any Indo-Pacific coalition to counter China.

Two essays in that collection throw some implicit cold water on Cha’s idea. The title of David Kang’s essay says it all: “Still Getting Asia Wrong: No ‘Contain China’ Coalition Exists.” He writes:

The past 30 years have seen the region become increasingly economically integrated with China. Countries in the region have steadily traded and invested more with China, and there are few signs that countries are backing away in any consistent manner. And China itself has increasingly joined regional institutions.

Perhaps most significantly, almost no country in East Asia has clearly committed to a pro-US, anti-China position. Most countries in the region want to maintain good relations with both. Few countries want to actively choose a side. For example, the 2022 “State of Southeast Asia” survey of elites found that if ASEAN nations were forced to align with one of the two strategic rivals, 43 percent (about 3/7) of respondents would choose China, while 57 percent (4/7) would choose the United States.

When asked about regional priorities, China is nowhere near the top.

Cha’s response to this would be that concerted U.S. and regional leadership could cajole other actors into participating in collective resilience — akin to what the United States did in crafting the Coordinating committee for multilateral export controls (CoCom) during the Cold War. But here we arrive at Mark Haas’ essay, “The Ideology Barriers to Anti-China Coalitions.” Haas argues that CoCom was comparatively easier because the U.S.-led coalition consisted of regimes (democracies, right-wing autocracies) that were vehemently opposed to communism. The current distribution of political ideologies makes any collective resiliency alliance harder to foster:

If the Cold War is any guide, these leaders are significantly more likely to align with the United States if they believe they are ideologically closer to the United States than to China. The problem for the United States is that this condition exists much less frequently in Asia today than it did in Europe and Asia during the Cold War. Coalitions with illiberal regimes against China are therefore much less likely to be formed than they were against the Soviet Union. Adding to this bad news is the fact that illiberal states in Asia today far outnumber liberal ones, and among the illiberal states, Russia is a great power.

To be fair to Cha, his proposal relies more on European allies than the assessment of either Kang or Haas. That boosts its likelihood of success. But the harsh realities of the Pacific Rim suggests that the political will required for Cha’s “collective resiliency” idea to take flight is still a long ways off.

My primary takeaway is that this is not a debate that is going to end anytime soon, and everyone is going to need to keep reading up on dynamics in the region. A lot of reading.

1. If you think I’m using “provocation” wrong, consider that the essay is literally filed under TWQ’s “Provocations” category.