Opinion | World has more to fear from an aggressive US than peaceful China

Some 2,200 years ago, the first emperor of China built a wall to fend off marauding barbarians from the north. The Great Wall of China kept the invaders at bay for long periods, but it did not prevent it from being breached from time to time. In 1644, despite the Great Wall, China fell to the Manchu. They established the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China.

Today, the United States – considered by some the most powerful empire in human history, thanks to its many natural advantages and benefits from the Enlightenment and European migration – is building a great wall of hi-tech to stymie China’s economic and technological advancement.

In another major step forward in this tech war on China, US President Joe Biden issued an executive order on August 9 which restricts US flows of knowledge and capital into “certain national security sensitive technologies and products in countries of concern”. China was identified as the only “country of concern” – alongside the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau – posing a national security threat and warranting the use of economic emergency powers.

Earlier this month, Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt wrote an opinion piece asking how scared the world should be of China. There are no definitive answers to the five questions he posed, which concerned China’s economic prospects, the effectiveness of export controls, the directions of China’s leadership, the effectiveness of Asia balancing, and the reaction of the rest of the world.

I think a different question – how scared should the world be of the United States? – should be posed instead. We have a lot more to fear from the US than from China, which faces strong economic headwinds, challenging demographics and well-coordinated economic and technological containment by the US and its allies.