Utility vs. Inadequacy of Realist IR Theory: Assessing China's Rise

Abstract

Looking for Balance: China, the United States, and Power Balancing in East Asia. By Steve Chan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. 282 pp., $50.00 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-8047-7820-6). China, the United States, and Global Order. By Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 340 pp., $33.99 paperback (ISBN 978-0-521-72519-4). Great Games, Local Rules. By Alexander Cooley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 252 pp., $29.95 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-19-992982-5). The three books under review represent a third wave of intellectual dissent following the initial realist prognostication of China's rise as a potent “threat” to the world order under US hegemony. To varying degrees, they convey a thinly veiled dissatisfaction with the earlier simplistic reading based on the realist conviction that any unbalanced power, whoever wields it, is a threat, and so is a rising power. Each in its own way offers an alternative way of ascertaining China's rise and its possible effects on US influence. To fully grasp the implications of this point, we need a review of the unfolding debates in reaction to both China's rise and to the realists' reading of its dire consequences. In the three decades that the world has been treated to the spectacle of China steadily on the ascent, there has been no scholarly consensus as to what to make of it, except among the realists (mostly in America) who drew the negative conclusion that it is a distinct threat. Some realists even openly advocated a US policy to block its rise (for example, Mearsheimer 2001). Other colleagues predicted that the rising China, like other possible candidates, will seek to balance against the unipolar power of the United States (Waltz 2000:28–32; 41). However, as Van Ness (2000) poignantly noted, well into the second decade after the collapse of Soviet power, China, no more than the other candidates on Waltz's list for the next great power, has not shown even the slightest sign of seeking to counterbalance the US unipolar dominance. The Van Ness skepticism, in retrospect, represents a first wave of intellectual discontent with the neorealist mode of analysis. It coincided with the independently rekindled interest in hierarchy, as opposed to anarchy, in conceptualizing about the international system. The shift in focus …