Is a US-China Thucydides Trap Unavoidable? With David C. Kang from the ChinaTalk Podcast

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share a fascinating crossover episode from the ChinaTalk Podcast, hosted by Jordan Schneider and Ilari Michaela of the On Humans Podcast, and featuring David C. Kang, Professor of International Relations at USC and author of Beyond Power Transitions, The Long Peace in East Asia. While the topic of artificial intelligence never comes up in this conversation, a notable first for this feed, Professor Kang's approach echoes one of my core principles for studying AI. Things are best understood on their own terms, and analogies can all too easily lead us astray. Taking a ground up or you might say first principles approach, Professor Kang questions the approach that Western scholars have historically taken in their study of East Asian international relations, arguing that if we were to ground our analysis in East Asian history itself instead of in European paradigms, we might well develop dramatically different theories of how states interact, and arrive at very different conclusions about how the Chinese state should be expected to project its power going forward. Considering the fact that so much AI analysis treats a US-China Thucydides trap dynamic as inevitable, and therefore US-China AI competition as existential, this in my opinion is an extremely valuable alternative perspective. Professor Kang's core observation that from around the year 1000 until the 19th century, while Europe was locked in near-constant warfare between competing powers, East Asia experienced remarkable geopolitical stability, is for those who have not studied Asian history in depth, myself included, a real eye-opener. Professor Kang describes East Asia as a unipolar, largely hegemonic system, with one massive power and several smaller states. China, despite its internal ups and downs, was practically always the dominant power in the region, and yet it did not seek to conquer Korea, Japan, or Vietnam. Instead, these neighbors maintained consistent peace through a system built on compatible cultures, mutual understanding, and a recognition of China's centrality. An approach Professor Kang thinks might still be available to Taiwan today were it not for the conceptual dominance of the Westphalian system. I was particularly interested to hear Professor Kang note that most East Asian dynasties have ended due to internal collapse, not external pressure or invasion, and argue that internal challenges remain most important for China today. Certainly, from my perspective, the same is true about the United States. Of course, the future is unwritten, and Professor Kang's paradigm may or may not yield correct predictions going forward. As you'll hear, Jordan, who knows far more about China than I do, and is also far more confident that we do in fact need a containment-style policy toward China, pushes back at several points along the way. Especially considering that disagreement, I really appreciate Jordan for engaging so deeply and publicly with alternative views, and thank him for allowing me to cross-post this conversation, thereby giving all of us a chance to re-examine our assumptions.
As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd share it with friends or colleagues who might be interested in how these big geopolitical questions interact with AI developments, and we welcome your feedback via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. Now, I hope you enjoy this thought-provoking conversation with Professor David C. Kang, considering Asian history and international relations on their own terms. From the ChinaTalk Podcast with Jordan Schneider and Ilari Michaela.

**Jordan Schneider** (3:31)
How do great power transitions work in East Asia? And what lessons from the foreign relations of Imperial China can we take to understanding East Asia today? To discuss, we have on David Kang. He's a professor at USC and recently co-authored alongside Senior Ruma, who's currently out on maternity leave, of Beyond Power Transitions, the Lessons of East Asian History, and the Future of US-China Relations. Continuing on our Imperial China Series, Ilari Michaela of the On Humans Podcast is co-hosting. Welcome to China Talk, everyone.

**David C. Kang** (4:03)
Professor Kang, what do you think people who are not familiar with the East Asian history get wrong when they think about international relations and war?
You know, the biggest thing that came to us from starting to research this book was how many times great power stumbled for internal reasons and not because of great power war or challenges from the outside. I mean, to me, that's the biggest lesson. And when we take the history and we look to the present, we think we see both US and China with considerable internal challenges that are probably more important than their relations to each other. So that's what I'd say is probably the biggest lesson that I would have people take away. You say that the countries we're familiar with, a proper state of China, a proper state of Japan, of Korea, of Vietnam. This forms towards the end of the first millennium. And from the time on that you start having these clear states, it's only a handful of times that there is a kind of land grab, a war in the kind of thing that's so familiar from European history. And that they, at least if you look at their dynamics with each other, it's remarkably peaceful. Well, I mean, this is the thing that I've, you know, I've sort of spent my career trying to make that argument. And it doesn't mean that Asian countries don't ever fight. They fight a lot sometimes. But the way that wars worked and the types of land grabs, and in this case, the type of power transition that we think are universal as part of the inevitable human condition, actually seem to be pretty European, a bit space-free, right? And so one of the main points of the book is, we started by asking, what do power transitions look like in Asia? Because everybody tries to take the European experience and squish it onto Asia. So it's like, is China today like Athens? Is it like Sparta? Is it like Bismarck in Germany? And we said, why would we try and figure out what European analogy fits with Asia? Why wouldn't we start with Asian history first and see what lessons we would learn? And if you had actually started studying international relations, and you didn't start with Europe and you started with Asia, you would never come up with a theory of power transitions, of rising and falling powers grabbing land and tiny advantages being exploited. You just would never come up with that theory. Instead, you'd come up with a theory of a bunch of really stable countries that have very clear conceptions of their own, for lack of a better word, national identity. There was some conception there that Korea was clearly not China and clearly not Japan. Clearly differences in their power and how big they are, but also very clear recognition that they can work out these types of relations that are unequal. And so instead, what you look at is what happened internally. And almost every single dynastic transition in East Asia came from internal reasons. When one of the dynasties collapsed or decayed or there was a rebellion, remarkably few changed because of external invasion.