How can China and the US avoid the “Thucydides Trap,” in which an established power and a rising power get caught up in a costly, risky, and unnecessary power struggle to determine which country will be the dominant power (hegemon) in a region? One solution that has been suggested is that the major countries currently involved in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the US.) could create a Concert of East Asia through which those countries would collectively negotiate and maintain a regional balance of power in which no country would be dominant.¹ That would make moot the issue of who would be the “King of the Mountain” (or in Chinese terms, who would be the sole tiger on the mountain). Such a concert can be formed when all the major powers in a region are satisfied with the existing distribution of power among them, and all feel secure within it. With no power perceived as a threat, rather than the weaker powers forming a defensive alliance against a dominant power, they join together in a sort of “alliance of all against each other,” to jointly maintain the desirable situation.

Joining such a Concert would be keeping with China’s frequent pronouncements that its rise will be a peaceful one, a policy assertion that has so far served China’s interests very well. In the South China Sea controversy among the littoral countries, China initially followed the “peaceful rise” approach, agreeing in 2002 with the ASEAN nations on a declaration on a code of conduct for the settlement of disputes about territorial claims in the Sea on the basis of non-use of force and peaceful negotiations. However, in recent years China has taken a more assertive approach to the South China Sea imbroglio, questioning the legitimacy of territorial claims by Vietnam and the Philippines, claiming sovereign rights and jurisdiction over most of the Sea on the basis of the contested “nine-dash line,” and building up reefs into artificial islands with airplane runways potentially useful for military purposes. These steps have frightened the smaller littoral countries into moving closer to the US, so as to build a stronger coalition against China’s increasingly robust posture.²

With these new and growing tensions in the South China Sea, the Concert idea might have useful application to the regional disputes there, not just to the broader East Asian issue of preventing a China-US rivalry for hegemony. More could be accomplished in the South China Sea by the littoral countries working together than by working against each other. Now we have each littoral country trying to get unilateral control over as large an expanse of territorial waters as possible (and underlying oil and gas deposits), by trotting out a variety of maritime claims. All of them could be better off if they formed a “Concert of the South of China Sea” and managed the region collectively, through an arrangement designed to assure that there would not be any dominant power in the area. Given the size and power of China, other powers with key interests in maintaining free passage through the Sea, such as Japan, Korea, and the US, could be added to the Concert to help balance off the massive Chinese presence.

Formation of the Concert would require negotiating two agreements: an arms control arrangement setting limits on each member country’s air and naval forces in the region (drawing on the precedent of the Washington Naval Arms Limitation agreements in the 1920s), and a negotiated formula for apportioning among the littoral member states the proceeds from mining the region’s sub-sea resources. A partial precedent for such a Concert could be the Arctic Council composed of the littoral states around the Arctic Sea. (China is not a member, but is already actively working to expand its political influence and economic position in the Arctic).

Collective management of the Sea would satisfy China’s security and economic national interests (even if not its nationalistic emotions). It would prevent the littoral states, Japan, and the US from ganging up against Chinese efforts at control of most of the Sea. It would assure the free passage for merchant vessels that is a crucial Chinese economic necessity. It would end the US naval and air military dominance in the area, with the Concert providing the US with an alternative means of assuring free passage through the sea. (As observers such as Mel Gurtov, Hugh White, and Robert Kaplan have pointed out, while China may or may not aspire to such regional military dominance itself, it certainly does intend to end US military dominance there. The South China Sea under US military dominance is as unacceptable to China as would be Chinese dominance of the Caribbean Sea to the US.)³

The present tensions over the South China Sea are dangerous. They could easily get out of control and escalate to a military crisis disastrous to the interests of all the countries involved: China, the other littoral countries, and the US. This danger could be avoided, and the interests of all the countries concerned could be substantially advanced, by forming a “Concert of the South of China Sea.” Such a move could provide a concrete example of President Xi’s vision of “a new type of relationship between major powers.”

1. For example, see Hugh White’s comprehensive and persuasive presentation of the concept in his book The China Choice (2012) and more recently, this author’s endorsement of the idea in Douglas, William A. “Security Stability in East Asia,” Asian Perspective, January-March 2016.

2. For useful summaries of recent moves in the South China Sea imbroglio, see Nakamura, David, and Lamothe, Dan, “China Tests US By Asserting Control in Southeast Asia”, Washington Post, March 2, 2016, p. 19, and The Economist, March 26, 2016, pp. 47 and 50.

3. Gurtov, Melvin. 2013. Will This Be China’s Century?, pp. 153, 164; Kaplan, Robert D. 2014 Asia’s Cauldron, Chapter 2, “China’s Caribbean”, especially pp. 38-39 and 42, also pp. 166-167; White, op. cit., p.153.

William A. Douglas is professorial lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Developing Democracy and Promoting Democracy, among other publications. He was the Fei Yiming Visiting Professor of Politics at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in 2009-2011.