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Mackenzie Lang's avatar

Regarding the idea of decades-long internment: if that were the plan, is it practicable? Or would it be pushing too far?

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Paul Heer's avatar

Bill: regarding your comment that "The US may not actually have a fully formed containment strategy but Xi and his team believe it does" -- I fully agree; this is largely a matter of definition and semantics. When George Kennan formulated the doctrine of containment, he defined it as the “adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” That is what the US has been seeking to do in an effort to compete against--and if possible resist--China's accumulation of power and influence relative to that of the US; and Pence's speech reaffirmed that this is central to Washington's China policy. We don’t call that containment, but Beijing does.

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Oct 17, 2018
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Paul Heer's avatar

Beijing is certainly competing to maximize its power and influence relative to that of the United States. But since China is the "rising" power and the US is the "established" power (as per the so-called Thucydides framework), it's hard to frame the Chinese approach as one of "containment." But it is "counter-containment."

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