At the end paragraph of an very interesting essay published on Foreign Policy^[1], the author gives his own speculation why there’s not a clear goal or endgame plan from the US government for its strategic competition with China:

A primary reason the Biden team has rejected end states appears to be that no single end state is simultaneously realistic and acceptable to two key audiences: the American public and policymakers in ally and partner countries.

This makes me wonder what’re the possible end states of the competitions they don’t want to talk about, here’re my own speculations:

1. Peaceful Evolution^[2] accomplished: Communist Part of China collapsed, a western style democratic parties / electoral system replaced the current system. This is not a realistic outcome. It maybe possible 50 years ago, but since China’s Opening Up policy in 1979, its GDP has increased a whopping 100 times, 800 millions people have been lifted from extreme poverty^[3] and the communist party enjoyed a very high support rate among the Chinese people. The confidence of the ancient civilization awakening in the blood of new generations, they genuinely don’t acknowledge the western system as a more advanced one.

2. Hot war: US and China open fired over Taiwan’s Independence, or conflicts in South China Sea. As world’s factory, China has unparalleled war production capacity: it currently produced 12 times as much steel as United States^[4] in 2022, almost double the manufacturing output of US. Without nuclear weapon involved, no one wants to start a war with China, let alone at their front yard. Thus, this is possible but not acceptable to both the public and ally countries.

3. Cold war: China is not Soviet Union, whose economy has no significant impact to United States or its allies. China’s economy and its supply chains are deeply integrated into the global economy. The cost is too high to decouple with China and rebuild all the supply chains in friendly countries. Even it’s doable, the efficiency and time it needs won’t be acceptable.

4. Nuclear war: not realistic, not acceptable. China has a smaller nuclear arsenal comparing to United States, but it’s still more than enough to destroy US one time. Only a crazy person will think annihilation of our planet an acceptable outcome of anything.

5. G2 or multi-polar world : possible but not acceptable to US and its allies since this means US and its allies lost their dominance positions.

6. US folding back to continent America: possible but obviously not acceptable to the US public and allies.

1. Foreign Policy: Does America Have an Endgame on China? ↩

2. Wikipedia: Peaceful Evolution Theory ↩

3. Wikepedia: Poverty in China ↩

4. List of countries by steel production ↩