Sino-American conflict stems from rival visions of East Asia’s power balance.

Evidence

The end of the Cold War, the increasing interaction between Asia and America, and the relative decline in American power thus brought to the surface the clash of cultures between the United States and Japan and other Asian societies and enabled the latter to resist American pressure. The rise of China posed a more fundamental challenge to the United States. U.S. conflicts with China covered a much broader range of issues than those with Japan, including economic questions, human rights, Tibet, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and weapons proliferation. On almost no major policy issue did the United States and China share common objectives. The differences go across the board. As with Japan, these conflicts were in large part rooted in the different cultures of the two societies. The conflicts between the United States and China, however, also involved fundamental issues of power. China is unwilling to accept American leadership or hegemony in the world; the United States is unwilling to accept Chinese leadership or hegemony in Asia. For over two hundred years the United States has attempted to prevent the emergence of an overwhelmingly dominant power in Europe. For almost a hundred years, beginning with its “Open Door” policy toward China, it has attempted to do the same in East Asia. To achieve these goals it has fought two world wars and a cold war against Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. This American interest remains and was reaffirmed by Presidents Reagan and Bush. The emergence of China as the dominant regional power in East Asia, if it continues, challenges that central American interest. The underlying cause of conflict between America and China is their basic difference over what should be the future balance of power in East Asia. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 613

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Central thesis distillation: Huntington identifies the true driver of US-China conflict as power-balance rivalry layered over cultural difference, a frame that remains the default lens for reading the current superpower competition.
• XREF: Connects to US containment doctrine (Halberstam’s Coldest Winter, Mearsheimer’s offensive realism) and to the stated reading interest in concrete policy-mechanism claims. — connects to: Asian internal conflicts spring from contests over legitimacy, identity, state building, and distributive justice. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 494
• SEED: Article angle: whether the US ‘one dominant power’ doctrine in Asia, born of the Open Door era, is anachronistic or still operative — a testable historical continuity claim.