Is a US-China Thucydides Trap Unavoidable? With David C. Kang from the ChinaTalk Podcast
Summary
Kang’s core claim is that East Asia’s decisive transitions have usually come from internal decay, rebellion, or collapse—not wars between rising and declining great powers. From roughly 1000 through the nineteenth century, China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam repeatedly demonstrated the capacity for massive warfare yet maintained unusually stable interstate relations. The implication for US-China risk is not that war is impossible, but that analysts should stop treating a Thucydides dynamic as the self-evident baseline. Kang invokes, while acknowledging he is borrowing it, the formulation: “Empires die from suicide, not murder.”
East Asia’s long peace rested on a legible hierarchy supported by shared institutions, language, and expectations. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam borrowed Chinese script, vocabulary, ministries, examinations, and diplomatic forms, creating what Kang calls a “common conjecture” about legitimate conduct; Chinese-derived words still represented roughly 60%-70% of their vocabularies. Vietnam’s China border, formally negotiated around 1079 in Kang’s account, has remained essentially fixed for nearly a millennium.
The Song-Mongol war illustrates how internal priorities can overwhelm raw national capacity. Kang contrasts Song China’s roughly 50 million people and 3 million-man army with perhaps 1 million Mongols, arguing that the Song remained fixated on the “honorable reclamation” of 16 northern prefectures and even allied with the Mongols despite decades of warning. Jordan Schneider’s important pushback is that the Mongols also possessed extraordinary military advantages and conquered civilizations across Eurasia; Kang concedes their prowess but maintains that this was not a standard rising-power transition.
The 1592-1598 Imjin War shows that East Asia’s peace was not simply imposed by incapacity. Japan mobilized about 300,000 troops and 700 ships—against the Spanish Armada’s roughly 20,000 troops and 130 ships four years earlier—before Chinese forces and Admiral Yi Sun-sin’s navy drove it back. China then withdrew within about a year instead of annexing Korea, declaring in effect, “This isn’t our country”; the region subsequently snapped back into centuries of stability.
Industrial Japan is the strongest objection to Kang’s effort to regionalize the Thucydides trap. Ilari Michaela argues that East Asia offers almost no genuine power-transition cases—and that when Japan finally became capable of challenging China, it immediately did what conventional theory predicts. Kang replies that Japan was adapting to a Western imperial order to secure survival and recognition, never clearly surpassed China in aggregate power, and pursued empire partly to become a recognized great power rather than simply to replace China.
Kang expects Asian governments to accommodate China, not join an unequivocal US containment coalition. His categorical call is: “No. No, they’re not,” because even states that distrust Beijing must continue living beside it and generally do not behave as though China plans to conquer them. For investors, that makes region-wide decoupling and alliance convergence poor baseline assumptions—although the hosts’ counterpoint remains that US security guarantees and the US fleet may help explain the region’s declining military spending.
Taiwan is the decisive stress test because imperial ambiguity now collides with a Westphalian system that recognizes only states. Kang argues that Beijing’s Taiwan interest is “transdynastic,” not merely Xi Jinping’s invention. Ilari argues that the existing formula works: America understands rather than endorses Beijing’s claim and opposes force; Beijing reserves force without committing to invasion; and Taiwan remains self-governing while avoiding a formal declaration of independence. Schneider’s answer is that Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang make promises of durable autonomy harder to trust, while Kang cautions that US intervention against a nuclear power near its own borders is far less certain than alliance rhetoric implies.
Deep dive
1. East Asian history starts with internal collapse, not power transition
Kang’s methodological objection is that “everybody tries to take the European experience and squish it onto Asia,” asking whether China resembles Athens, Sparta, or Bismarckian Germany before examining Asia’s own record. Starting with East Asia would produce a theory of durable, unequal relationships among states with strong identities—not one of endlessly exploited power differentials.
The claim is not that Asian countries never fought. It is that European-style land grabs and wars between rising and declining powers appear far less universal once China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are studied on their own terms.
Kang’s highest-level finding: dynasties generally fell through rebellion or decay. Silla, Goryeo, and successive Japanese and Vietnamese regimes largely broke internally; among Chinese dynasties, the Song’s foreign conquest stands out precisely because external overthrow was so unusual.
2. The Song lost by misreading the threat it had helped create
The apparent textbook transition is the Mongol conquest completed around 1279: a new military power destroys the Song and establishes the Yuan. Yet Kang contrasts Song China at its height—about 50 million people, extraordinary wealth, canals, paper money, and a 3 million-man army—with perhaps 1 million Mongols.
His explanation centers on the 16 northern prefectures lost to the Liao and others. The Song treated their recovery as an internal civilizational imperative, pursued the “honorable reclamation of lost land,” and allied with the Mongols to restore territory they believed inherently theirs—“letting the fox into the hen house.”
Schneider’s pushback—worth keeping—is that population and troop arithmetic understates Mongol superiority; they were almost “coming to the battlefield with assault rifles and everyone else is playing with bows and arrows.” Their record of destroying functioning civilizations makes Song mistakes only part of the explanation.
Kang accepts Genghis Khan as perhaps history’s greatest general, not a lucky beneficiary. His narrower point is that the Song had decades of evidence that the Mongols were consuming neighboring powers but remained emotionally and politically focused on historical territory until adjustment came too late.
3. Shared institutions made hierarchy legible and peace durable
East of China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam were settled, territorially organized, bureaucratically administered states. Conventional balance-of-power logic says they should have feared an enormous China and built walls against it; instead, they constructed relationships that remained remarkably stable.
Their compatibility was literal as well as conceptual: all used or adapted Chinese script, roughly 60%-70% of their vocabularies consisted of Chinese-derived words, and elites borrowed six-ministry governments, civil-service examinations, and related administrative forms. They were consciously learning to govern in recognizable ways.
Kang calls the result a “common conjecture”—a shared vocabulary for what mattered, what conduct was legitimate, and how disagreements should be handled. It was not a frozen rulebook inherited from the Sui; Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Chinese continually negotiated and revised the relationship.
Ilari’s useful periodization is that the peace becomes especially visible after these institutions spread around the first millennium. Earlier China-Vietnam and China-Korea conflict does not disappear from the record, but it belongs to a different institutional era.
4. Vietnam used tribute to turn overwhelming asymmetry into autonomy
Kang argues that Vietnam preserved independence partly by entering tributary relations after becoming independent around 1079. He is examining the Ming Shilu and Qing Shilu, records covering roughly 1400-1900, and points to debates in which Beijing considered which Vietnamese faction deserved recognition—not repeatedly asking whether turmoil offered a chance to annex Vietnam.
Vietnamese rivals actively solicited Chinese recognition because it strengthened their own legitimacy. The discussion also invokes a quoted scholarly interpretation of Korean diplomacy: smaller-state elites used China’s “moral empire” language to press the empire toward conduct that matched their expectations. Tribute therefore operated as more than simple domination.
The concrete result is extraordinary durability. Kang dates formal demarcation of the China-Vietnam border, marked by bronze pillars, to around 1079 and says it remains essentially where it was placed nearly 1,000 years ago.
Schneider’s harsher framing is that China was surrounded by “gnats,” some of which learned how not to be squashed while Yunnan’s kingdoms, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other peoples fared far worse. Kang accepts that overwhelming asymmetry was constant, while insisting that power alone cannot explain why hierarchy produced accommodation in one direction and conquest in another.
5. A hegemonic system does not behave like Europe’s balance of power
Kang concedes the structural distinction explicitly: Europe was a multipolar balance-of-power system, while East Asia was hegemonic—“one massive power and a bunch of smaller countries.” Those smaller states optimized for survival and autonomy in China’s permanent shadow, not for overtaking it.
Schneider argues that this fixed imbalance is precisely what made the “common conjecture” possible from roughly 500 to 1870. Kang agrees, but says material hierarchy still underdetermines conduct: states needed shared expectations to turn an unequal distribution of power into predictable coexistence.
That history drives Kang’s contemporary call. Every Washington aspiration that Asia will balance China prompts the same answer: “No. No, they’re not.” Regional states may resist particular policies, but they cannot move away and are unlikely to join an unequivocal American containment coalition.
6. The Imjin War shows capacity for war—and a choice to stop
The 1592 Japanese invasion dwarfed contemporary European warfare. Four years after Spain sent roughly 130 ships and 20,000 troops in its Armada, Hideyoshi mobilized about 300,000 troops and 700 ships against Korea as the route to conquering China.
East Asian scale came from administrative capacity. Kang contrasts a Japanese bureaucracy of roughly 7,000 people around 700 with the Catholic Curia’s approximately 500 personnel five centuries later; even supposedly less-developed Japan possessed organizational and logistical machinery Europe could scarcely reproduce.
Hideyoshi had unified Japan after about a century of fragmented central rule, but Kang finds little balance-of-power calculation behind the invasion. Ego, hubris, and domestic incentives to remove armed daimyo factions and reward them abroad are plausible; detailed scouting of Korea and China’s relative strength is not evident.
Korea and China initially reacted as if invasion were absurd—“You must be kidding.” Chinese intervention and Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who famously fought about 300 Japanese ships with 13 of his own, severed supply lines; after negotiations and Hideyoshi’s death, Japan withdrew in 1598.
7. China’s postwar withdrawal makes the Imjin case more revealing
Chinese forces effectively controlled Korea after the fighting and could have remained. Instead they left within roughly a year, even as Koreans asked them to stay against a possible third invasion: “This isn’t our country. This is Korea.”
For Kang, that decision defeats the metaphor of power behaving like gas that expands into every available space. “Countries don’t,” empirically, “simply expand as much as they can”; conceptions of legitimate identity and territory mediate what military opportunity produces.
The Imjin War was the only war among China, Korea, and Japan across roughly 600 years, from about 1200 to 1800. Its vast mobilization rules out incapacity as the explanation for peace, while the Tokugawa era’s ensuing stability shows the system “snapping back” after an exceptional domestic rupture.
8. Industrial Japan is the hardest case for Kang’s thesis
Ilari presses the book’s central vulnerability: East Asia may not demonstrate peaceful power transitions because it barely contains any transitions at all. Once industrialization made Japan capable of challenging China in the late nineteenth century, war followed—the one plausible case appears to support conventional theory.
Kang describes a collision of world orders. In an 1879 dispute involving Taiwan, China invoked tributary norms and Chinese-language relationships while Japan demanded French-language writing and contracts; the parties no longer shared even the conceptual machinery for settling disagreement.
Japan adapted rapidly because it needed recognition and survival. The emperor changed from traditional robes to “cosplaying as Bismarck”; the state acquired flags, German military practices, British commercial methods, colonies, and eventually advanced a racial-equality clause at the League of Nations in 1919.
Kang therefore reads Japanese imperialism partly as a project aimed at Western powers, not simply a rising Japan exploiting a declining China. He also doubts Japan ever equaled China in aggregate strength; Schneider counters by asking whether China could have defeated Japan without American support, while Kang notes Japan was already bogged down before deep US involvement.
9. Western frontiers followed a different logic from eastern diplomacy
Kang’s cultural explanation for steppe conflict is that nomadic peoples and agrarian China had incompatible ideas of the good life. The nomads did not fundamentally want settled bureaucracy, examinations, or Chinese institutions, so neither side could build the same shared order found with Korea or Vietnam.
Ilari supplies a material bridge: grass is low-density energy that humans access through animals, requiring mobility across large areas. That ecology produces horsemanship and nomadism, not officials studying Confucian classics to administer granaries; culture then channels the underlying energy constraint.
Pressed about Yunnan and Sichuan, Kang compares China with the United States: both began with populated eastern cores, pushed into less-institutionalized western frontiers, displaced Indigenous peoples, and expanded until encountering another power or geography. His “one-sentence history of the world” is the conversion of frontiers into borders.
10. Today’s China may be returning, not rising
Kang’s present-day test is whether Xi Jinping wakes more concerned about internal strains—including the endlessly predicted real-estate crash—or eager for foreign land grabs. East Asian precedent directs attention inward. Kang invokes the borrowed formulation that “empires die from suicide, not murder.”
He characterizes China’s turmoil from the mid-nineteenth century until 1949 or 1979 as roughly a century of periodic internal chaos. In the long arc, contemporary power is therefore “not a rise, it’s a return,” and neighboring states are again adapting to the large China they historically knew.
Schneider challenges continuity with the modern PRC: Marx, Lenin, and Engels—not classical thinkers—supply its official ideological reference points, while Mao funded revolutions abroad and threatened nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Kang emphasizes that passports, nationalism, and even the Western-sounding national anthem demonstrate how fully China inhabits modernity.
Yet Kang sees most core foreign-policy interests as “transdynastic,” inherited through the KMT and Qing rather than invented by Xi. Taiwan is the clearest case; he finds no comparable evidence that taking Taiwan is conceived as a springboard to the Philippines, Vietnam, or Japan.
11. Taiwan survives through an intentionally unresolved status quo
The discussion treats Taiwan as an encapsulation of incompatible systems. A less rigid world could recognize it as some non-state polity, but Westphalian modernity allows only sovereign nation-states, making an intentionally ambiguous relationship exceptionally difficult to formalize.
Ilari argues for continuity: America understands without endorsing Beijing’s claim and opposes force; Beijing reserves force without committing to invasion; Taiwan retains its flag, currency, government, capitalist economy, and democracy without declaring formal independence. “The status quo actually works. It’s not perfect, but it works.”
Schneider’s strongest objection is Beijing’s conduct in Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang. A tributary-style compromise could be tolerable if Taiwan retained substantive autonomy, but those cases make promises of enlightened, arm’s-length rule much harder to credit.
Kang responds that Beijing treats those territories as internal, distinct from relations with Korea or Vietnam, while admitting Taiwan is genuinely anomalous. The nearby Ryukyu Islands and Hawaii once had organized kingdoms yet were absorbed; Taiwan’s contested future reflects the larger political balance more than a clean historical entitlement.
12. US alliances do not guarantee balancing—or intervention
Schneider offers the alternative explanation for Asia’s declining military spending as a share of GDP: the US fleet may be the “elephant in the room” enabling states to relax. Kang’s counterexample is Vietnam or Malaysia, which lack equivalent guarantees yet do not behave markedly more frightened of China than treaty ally the Philippines.
Nor does realist alliance arithmetic reliably predict alignment. Decades of American urging that Korea and Japan should unite because “Japan’s your friend and China is your enemy” have not made that framing politically compelling.
Ilari reports that after Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, Asian countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia, publicly reaffirmed one-China policies. South Korea avoided a fresh reaffirmation, and no government official greeted Pelosi at the airport; President Yoon Suk Yeol cited vacation. Kang reports that a top Korean national-security adviser told him Seoul’s 1992 policy remained unchanged and that US bases would not be available for a Taiwan war.
Kang’s Ukraine lesson is aimed less at Beijing than Taipei: the United States remains extremely cautious about direct war with a nuclear-armed superpower near that power’s borders over territory nonessential to US survival. Whether Americans would fight over Taiwan or the Philippines is therefore a live question, whatever alliance documents say.