Mini-MAD cooperation offers a clue to a safer world

Working together to address challenges threatening mutually assured defeat could help the US and China find ways to overcome the contradiction between rivalry and partnership

According to the new Washington consensus on China, the longstanding US policy of engagement has failed, and China has emerged as a strategic rival of the United States. According to the US administration's 2018 National Security Strategy, US assumptions about engaging with China "turned out to be false", and instead, China wants to "shape a world antithetical to US values and interests".

In this environment, highlighting China's success has become an act of heresy to many in Washington. Rivalry－indeed intense rivalry－is inevitable between the two countries. But since neither can defeat the other without destroying itself, there is a premium on finding issues where cooperation is necessary and/or beneficial. China's success in reducing the number of its citizens living in poverty provides an inspiring example in this regard.

No poverty alleviation initiative in history has ever lifted so many people out of abject poverty than the national economic development program China launched four decades ago by opening up its economy to the world.

In 1978, nine out of every 10 individuals in China's population of 1 billion were struggling to survive on an income below the "extreme poverty line"－set by the World Bank at just under $2 a day.

Most of the waking hours of previous generations would have been spent attempting to provide enough food for themselves and their children to survive. Today, almost all of the more than 1.3 billion individuals who previously would have spent most of their life hungry have doubled their calorie intake.

Since 1978, China has seen more than four decades of rapid economic growth. According to the "Rule of 72"－divide 72 by the annual growth rate to determine when an economy or investment will double－the Chinese economy has almost doubled every seven years. Some individual Chinese citizens have experienced a 50-fold increase in their standard of living. It could be argued that 40 years of miracle growth have created a greater increase in human well-being for more individuals than occurred in the previous more than 4,000 years of China's history.

Many in the West are concerned when they think about how a wealthy China will define its role in the world. But the World Bank reminds us that our hands should sometimes do less wringing and more clapping. In 2000, the United Nations announced eight Millennium Development Goals for the planet. At the top of the list was the goal of reducing by half the number of people living in extreme poverty before 2015.

Just four years later, in 2004, World Bank President Robert Zoellick declared that "China's efforts alone" put the world on track to achieve this goal. "Between 1981 and 2004, China succeeded in lifting more than half 1 billion people out of extreme poverty. This is certainly the greatest leap to overcome poverty in history." And in 2010, five years before the deadline, thanks primarily to China's success, Zoellick declared the mission accomplished.

The thought that another country could become bigger and stronger than the US challenges Americans' conception of themselves and the country's role as the leader of the world. But turning a blind eye to China's rise does nothing to diminish the fact.

The rivalry between the US as the existing superpower and a rising China creates a dangerous dynamic, which I have referred to as the Thucydides's trap. This dynamic leaves both vulnerable to third-party provocations or events that could trigger responses dragging the two into an unwanted, catastrophic war. The last 500 years saw 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a major ruling power. Twelve ended in war.

The Chinese people are rightfully proud of what they have achieved. But they should also recognize the fact that this was possible only because of the international economic and security order that the US constructed in Asia in the aftermath of World War II and has maintained for the past seven decades. That order has enabled all the Asian miracles－and none more than that of modern China itself.

Going forward, could an understanding that such a remarkable outcome could only have been produced by cooperative actions provide insights into ways the two countries might work together to alleviate the debilitating poverty that continues to grind down billions of people in other parts of the world? And if both could cooperate in such an ennobling and mutually beneficial undertaking, perhaps that experience could stimulate more imagination about other ways each can protect and advance its own national interests without war.

As US and Soviet Cold War warriors realized, despite each having huge arsenals capable of destroying the other, neither would survive a nuclear war. Both came to recognize the necessity to constrain their competition. The shared fate of the US and China does not stop with mutually assured destruction. In our interconnected world, it instead goes beyond to a number of "mini-MADs"－challenges threatening mutually assured "defeat", if not "destruction", for both countries that neither can overcome alone. The novel coronavirus being an iconic example

Pandemics are one "mini-MAD". Preserving a biosphere in which citizens can breathe the air, managing financial crises to avoid great depressions (and their political consequences), and preventing the spread of the means and motives for mega-terrorism are others. For each of these, intense cooperation and partnership will not simply produce mutual benefits. In these arenas, neither state can ensure its most vital interest in survival without cooperating with the other.

Can the US and China be ruthless rivals and intense partners at the same time? Holding two seemingly contradictory ideas in our head simultaneously will be difficult. But securing our mutual interests requires nothing less.

The author is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard's Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.