Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture

The stakes of the United States–China rivalry, as everyone knows, are enormous. But rarely do accounts of the transpacific relationship acknowledge its mirror-like nature. Commentary has focused on the singularity of China's rise, on the differences between the two countries, and on their each being historically exceptional—when in reality today the two have, as "peer competitors," become models for one another and increasingly alike. As Americans deny the implications of China's emulation of American ways, insisting the Chinese "dream their own dream"; as Americans effectively tell Chinese "our spying is better than your spying"; and as China continues to expand into Africa much as Western powers did in the last century, the relationship indeed appears to be a mimetic rivalry on a global scale.¹ And the mirror-like dynamic here, the "double mediation," is making the contest more unstable and unpredictable than is usually recognized. Since "mimetic rivalry obeys the same laws on both the individual and national levels," as René Girard observed, the United States and China clearly are, according to mimetic theory, setting each other an example, knowingly or not, with the feedback loops of desire escalating tensions all round.² [End Page 9]

Older concepts that are often applied to the twenty-first-century rivalry—such as the notion of a cold war—emphasize ideological differences as being a cause of the trouble. But as Girard writes, "The looming conflict has nothing to do with a clash of civilizations. It is rather a dispute between two forms of capitalism that are becoming more and more similar, except that the Chinese … have been theorizing for three thousand years about how to use the adversary's strength against him. Their policy understands and masters mimetism."³ Chinese policy does appear more farsighted, at least when compared with recent American foreign policy. In contrast to the United States-led occupation of Iraq—widely considered myopic for its failure to anticipate the disastrous repercussions—it is easy to see in China's "peaceful rise" a demonstration of strategist Sun Tzu's maxim that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without even fighting.⁴ Many countries do appear to be unable to resist China's economic expansionism—a predicament for many, including the United States, all too apparent in the recent struggle to establishment the Trans-Pacific Partnership.⁵

Complicating the transpacific power balance, at the same time, and undermining China's stated ambition of a harmonious rise are East Asia's simmering regional rivalries. Given the U.S. "pivot" to the Pacific, recent tensions in the South China Sea between China and its neighbors Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines suggest any of several ongoing disputes could trigger a larger, hemispheric confrontation. Regional leaders have drawn parallels with European events before the Second World War. Former Philippine President Aquino, for example, observed in the increased Chinese presence in the Spratly Islands a threat similar to Nazi Germany's 1938 occupation of the Sudetenland.⁶ In Northeast Asia, a more critical pressure point may be the United States–Japan security pact. If the United States failed to support Japan as the latter's relationship with China deteriorated, China, some argue, would be provoked into attacking its long-time enemy—for the same reasons Girard has argued the attempted French appeasement of Germany's occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 was a failure.⁷ It was this mimetic tipping point (Germany's successful gamble), Girard contends, that led irreversibly toward war. An American betrayal of Japan—a U.S. refusal to back Japan, say, in a fight over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands—might be a similar turning point.

Regardless of how a conflict between China and the American-led West started, the human and economic costs would be incalculable, so colossal that its prospect surely is acting to some extent as a brake on the escalation of tensions. Also giving everyone pause must be the memory of the earlier cross-Pacific conflict and rivalry between Japan and the United States. Despite some [End Page 10] commentators' denials...