POL 175B: The Clash of Empires: The United States and China in the Struggle for Global Supremacy in the 21st CenturyInstructor: Ralph Thaxton Prerequisites: None Course Description: The Clash of Empires: The United States and China in the Struggle for Global Supremacy in the 21st Century. </br></br>The United States and China are now the two most powerful nations in the world. Their relationship is extremely important, complex, and potentially explosive. This relationship is not only bi-lateral but also international, involving key nations in the global political economy (Japan, the two Koreas, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar, Taiwan, India, Australia, Cuba and Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy and Greece, Russia, and much of Africa). How the United States and the People’s Republic of China manage this relationship will impact a) who rules the world—authoritarian China or democratic America and its allies and b) whether the intensifying competition and conflict between these two superpowers explodes into war. This course will focus on how these two superpowers attempt to manage their relationship in the global arena. </br></br>We begin the course with a historical analysis of U.S.-China relations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, coming up to the end of WWII. We then focus on the Cold War and how it shaped critical aspects of the U.S.-China relationship itself and with key nations, including Japan, Korea, Vietnam in Asia and England, France and Germany in Europe, and with the Soviet Union. We will pay special attention to the new American relationship with Japan, the war in Korea, and the Vietnam conflict. We next turn to U.S recognition of the PRC and rapprochement and “normalization” in the 1970s and 1980s, and to the post-Tiananmen relationship in the 1990s. We next focus on the present, taking up economic issues like competition over intellectual property rights and, importantly, control of technology innovation. We will pay considerable attention to the U.S.-PRC struggle over new internet ecosystems. We will explore the intensifying competition to control and dominate smart phone technologies and new generation 5-G technology, Blockchain (the technology of tomorrow), information systems used to survey and track online dissidents, and critical national defense and strategic military technologies. The low-profile war over technology is especially intense, and so we will spend considerable time on this subject. Finally, we will attempt to understand whether China is a fragile rather than an unbreakable superpower, and investigate how the insecurity of the Communist party ruling group influences China’s relationships with U.S. aligned democracies, particularly Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, and Taiwan. We are especially interested in whether the current hyper-nationalism and xenophobia promoted by Xi Jinping and the Communist party might increase the prospects for a hot war over Taiwan or the South China Sea, both of which are seen as critical to China’s national security. In the final week, we will reflect on why and how other established empires have been challenged by rising powers (Germany Challenging the evolving British Empire--WWI, Japan Challenging the evolving U.S. Empire—WWII), and we will attempt to draw lessons from these episodes to better judge whether the U.S. and China are headed for war. Session: Session I Day: T, W, Th Time: 11:10am - 1:40pm Credit Hours: 4 Credits Course Format: Remote Learning Course for Summer 2023 Brandeis Graduation Requirement Fulfilled: DJW Enrollment Limit: 20 students Course Classification: Undergraduate Level Course Course Tuition: $3,490 Course Fees: None Open to High School Students: No |
