The new Cold War: Sino-US rivalry heats up

The world has had a good long break from aggressive great power rivalry. It's twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the kind of jousting on the world stage that left bystanders fearing world war and nuclear holocaust.

Almost a generation has passed without the need for smaller nations to take sides on one side or another of the geo-political divide. We've grown used to a more or less benign state of unipolarity.

Now it seems we were dreaming. On a basketball court in Beijing recently, players from China's Bayi Rockets punched and kicked their opponents, a team from upscale Georgetown University in the US. As the American players walked off the court, racist catcalls and missiles were thrown at the visiting team's supporters.

US-China rivalry, long mulled over sedately in seminars and workshops, has become an ugly reality. Visit the comment pages on news sites in the US and expressions of fear and hatred towards "Commie" China are commonplace.

Equally, China's micro-blog sites and online chat rooms are filled with nationalist rhetoric aimed at Americans, who they accuse of wanting to see China contained, constrained and kept under control. "You want chaos for China, don't you?" One Chinese man shouted at US ambassador John Huntsman on a Beijing street – the incident caught on video.

These popular under-currents mirror an emerging reality. Recently, there has been a revival of the notion that Asia is about to overtake the United States and Europe as the world's economic powerhouse. There's nothing fanciful in that. China is now the world's second largest economy.

The fear is that whilst Western economies are mature and relatively complacent, the rise of Asian economic potency will be accompanied by aggressive even belligerent behaviour – just as the rise of the West from the 18^th into the 20^th century was characterized by long periods of war and aggression.

Logically, Asia's rise will be attended by competitive strategic urges, as it was when the Soviet Union and the United States emerged as nuclear powers after World War Two. Peace in the post-war western world was eventually secured and guaranteed through a variety of multilateral mechanisms that ensured the Cold War never became a hot war and steadily reduced the numbers of weapons and threat profiles of various powers. This achievement was relatively unsung. It was the product of relatively unglamorous diplomacy deploying mundane acronyms like START and SALT.

The problem in Asia is that the immediate Post Pacific War era was organised by departing colonial powers. The new neighbourhood that emerged was brashly nationalistic and resistant to multilateral meddling. Hence SEATO, the original idea for an Asian NATO, floundered. So have local efforts to create a nuclear free zone (SEANWFZ) and indeed any other attempt to design collective security architecture.

The key to lasting peace and security in Asia will be some emulation of the inter-state arrangements that were present at the end of the Cold War. China preaches exceptionalism in this regard, arguing that it maintains traditional arrangements whereby China eschewed aggressive expansionism and supported peace and harmony with its surroundings.

While there is no doubt that centuries of tributary relations between China and its barbarian rim did essentially result in peace and a balance of trade in favour of the rim, there's a new and more disturbing dynamic emerging that suggests that legacies are not immutable and that civilization, however ancient, does modernise and adapt.

When the US navy sailed its seventh fleet through the Taiwan Straits in the mid-1990s to head off a Chinese missile threat to Taiwan, Beijing had no choice but to back down. If this happened today there would likely be a stand off. As if to demonstrate this more active posture, in late July Chinese fighters chased a US spy-plane into Taiwanese airspace.

A month later, as Washington wrestled with a humiliating credit downgrade and a costly Wall Street rout, China showed off its first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Russian cast-off, which is destined to patrol the South China Sea.

The PLA Navy is the fastest growing element of China's armed forces. A new underground submarine base in Hainan gives the Chinese a commanding position in the South China Sea. For now, China's force projection capabilities are constrained – both by technology and the slow pace of force development.

But while China may be what Australian defence expert Paul Dibb calls "a power with very substantial weaknesses," the perception on the other side of the Pacific is that US supremacy is challenged - and military parity is potentially a recipe for military confrontation.

The test of this assumption is the rising temperature in the South China Sea. China's claim to sovereignty is defined by a line of 9 dots and dashes that extends like a cow's tongue across the South China Sea and overlaps with the territorial claims of Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Last year US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton drew a line of her own and promised to guarantee safe passage for all vessels in the South China Sea. This has prompted China's navy to more aggressively assert its claims and has led to some minor incidents of harassment.

"It is through sea power that China will psychologically erase two centuries of foreign transgressions on its territory - forcing every country around it to react," writes Robert Kaplan. He claims rather dramatically that the South China Sea is the "future of conflict."

Kaplan goes onto say that war is far from inevitable even if competition is a given. Unfortunately, China's patience is being tested against a backdrop of more fragmented and contested power in the People's Republic, which doesn't always mean that the coolest heads will prevail.

So whilst there is some cause for optimism after China agreed with ASEAN member states in mid-July on a set of draft guidelines to govern activities in the disputed waters, it remains to be seen whether the, as yet undisclosed guidelines, will be translated into a concrete code of conduct.

Underlying the kinds of tension expressed on basketball courts and in chat rooms is the fact that China feels goaded and provoked by the US, and also a little threatened. As the value of the dollar plummeted and stock prices crashed after the credit downgrade, Beijing wagged a finger at Washington and warned: 'Put your house in order or we all go down.'

The US for its part, seeks to preserve its strategic power. China's rise has prompted Washington to fear that its strategic dominance of the Pacific is threatened. Unfortunately, the weakness of the US dollar and the US economy means that it must increasingly assert itself using military rather than economic prowess.

China's hubris and America's pride are together unraveling the notion of China' peaceful rise. Zheng Bijian, a Communist Party scholar who was close to President Hu Jintao, nurtured this idea.

Peaceful rise was propounded to allay regional and international concerns about the rapidity of China's economic growth and the inevitable flexing of its political and military muscle. Zheng anticipated, correctly, the spread of "China threat theory."

Sadly for Zheng, seeing China as a threat is now on the agenda of international discourse. US officials have started urging erstwhile allies in the region, like Australia and Indonesia, to beef up their military capacity so they can stand 'shoulder to shoulder' with the US against China.

Equally, It is becoming harder for China to continue using platitudes and soft words to mask the wielding of hard power. China's energy needs are strategic and there is pressure in Beijing to defend lines of supply aggressively.

Welcome to the new Cold War.