Welcome to Aspects of History, Tim. The United States and China are the two dominant superpowers of the 21st century. How did we arrive at this point, and what has driven this rivalry you recount in War or Peace?: The United States and China, 2026–2049?

 For the vast chunk of human history, China has been, insofar as the concept of a superpower was viable, a superpower. It contained a very large percentage of the world’s population at one or two points, possibly as high as a third. And certainly before the early nineteenth century it was the largest single economy in the world.

But rather like the modern United States, paradoxically, it was predominantly an insular economy. It was such a large internal market that, although trade did take place, trade was secondary to the primary scene, which was China itself.

We’ve had a curious period of history between roughly the 1840s and the 1940s, in which China entered what it regards, and still refers to, as the century of humiliation: being sliced a bit by foreign powers, collapsing as an economy, really wobbling as a society. This more or less coincided with the beginnings of the rise of the United States on the global stage.

In a sense, we’ve now come to a kind of reversion. The United States has remained an incredibly important power, with an economy way out of line with its share of the world’s population. But China, after a period firstly of this century of humiliation and then of deep and damaging introspection during the Mao era, has re-emerged in some ways to be what it was for most of human history.

Your book looks ahead to 2049. Why did you choose this period, and how useful is the so-called Thucydides Trap when considering the relationship between the two countries?

The choice of dates is at one level random. 2026 is, amongst other things, the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, and 2049 will be the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party coming to power. However, it does also more or less coincide completely with the second quarter of the twenty-first century.

It’s an argument and a thesis about these two dominant players over that period of time. It’s an experiment, as you rightly say, in that, on the basis of its title, it’s not a book about history. But the arguments underneath it are powerfully historical.

The Thucydides trap is significant in that not merely the sort of political argument about how the US should deal with China has got rougher, but actually there’s a genuine academic and intellectual debate too. The author of the Thucydides trap theory, Graham Allison, is an extremely eminent, long-standing Harvard figure. He doesn’t say that war is inevitable, but he does come quite close to saying it’s quite likely, unless people realise the elephant traps that are opening up in front of them.

I moderately agree with him, but my main concern is that this has become a dominant narrative in parts of American thinking, on the centre-left as well as on the centre-right. And there is the danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start looking at everything that China does, or if China starts doing everything the United States does, in the terms of Athens and Sparta, you know, centuries ago, there is the risk that you will see things that aren’t really there, but just happen to fit the thesis that’s become lodged in your mind.

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are likely to be in office during the opening years of the period you cover. How do you view the two men and the effect they might have on the relationship?

 What’s interesting about them, firstly, is that in general tensions between the two countries ease if the two men have a dialogue. There appears to be a level of mutual respect, or at least a mutual understanding of where each other’s coming from.

Both Trump and Xi are outliers in terms of the internal debate as to how, in their respective countries, to deal with China. Donald Trump’s views on China are exceptionally transactional. He doesn’t really give a damn that they’re called the Chinese Communist Party. They could be called the Chinese Lollipop Party as far as he’s concerned. He’s not bothered about things like Tibet or the Uighurs. He’s interested overwhelmingly in the trade relationship and the trade deficit relationship between the two countries, and what he can get out of it.

Because Mr Trump is up for a deal, a deal might be had. Xi is also, I’m arguing in the book, probably unrepresentative of what post-Xi China will be like. My argument is that the force of demographic change, the realities of the military imbalance between the US and China, and different approaches to such areas as AI, probably mean that post-Xi China is going to shift back a bit in a Dengist direction.

The need to deal with this unbelievable change in population structure over the course of a single generation is going to force the CCP, which is a most pragmatic entity at heart, to make China become more like Sweden. It has to become more social democratic in the provision of services to the Chinese population if it wants to resolve what’s otherwise going to become an endemic situation.

You argue that demographic change could be the most important factor in the US-China relationship. What are the challenges facing China?

 What’s unique about China is that we can make fairly confident statements about the demography over the next 20 or 25 years, because the aftershocks of the one-child policy are still there, even though the one-child policy was notionally abandoned in 2015.

China still has a one-child policy, but by choice, not by enforced choice. People think because it’s a communist country, it must be like Cuba, that everything must be free. And that’s simply not true. The cost of raising a child in China is about seven times per capita income. That’s double that of Europe, almost double that of the United States. It’s extremely expensive to raise a child in China.

We’re seeing three big trends playing themselves out. One is that the overall population of China is in decline. Some people who specialise in these things argue that by the year 2100 the population of China will have halved between now and then, which is an astonishing situation.

The second is that it’s still got a skewed gender ratio. This year, there will be 119 men for every 100 women in the cohort of Chinese people generally marrying between roughly the age of 23 and 35. That’s going to leave a lot of disappointed men, and that is potentially socially very disruptive.

But really the biggest thing is the shift in age. By the year 2055, there will be more Chinese people aged over 80 than aged 14 or under. Just think, on a rudimentary day-to-day basis, about the number of people who are of working age in China sustaining people who are not of working age, and particularly older people. It’s transformative.

How does this demographic challenge influence China’s approach to artificial intelligence, and is the AI race between the US and China really a race at all?

 The reason why I think the US and China have slightly different priorities in the so-called AI race is that, for China, what matters is the widespread adoption of the most practical forms of AI as quickly as possible.

The Chinese leadership can see a world that in less than five years’ time the labour force is going to be 300 million people fewer. Now, how the hell do you compensate for that? AI is potentially a get-out-of-jail-free card, in that it enables you to allow a smaller number of people to be as productive, or indeed even more productive, than they were previously.

China is incredibly focused on the user guide to AI. It is less interested in this kind of mentality in the United States, that we must get to this thing called artificial general intelligence first, stick a damn great Stars and Stripes on it, like they did on the moon, and then nobody else will ever bother turning up there.

If they are in an AI race, they’re in slightly different events. The US big tech companies, because they’re throwing so much money at this very moonshot-type approach, are generally speaking a little bit ahead much of the time. China does a pretty efficient job of seeing the direction in which Americans are moving and catching up pretty quickly. But it’s not obsessed with being number one in this sphere. It’s obsessed with being number one in the application of AI across the economy.

Taiwan is perhaps the most obvious geopolitical flashpoint. How significant is the military dimension to the competition between the two countries?

The argument I try and make is that, although both countries have on paper quite impressive armies and the rest of it, they’re trying to do different things. The United States is a genuine global power and has been for a number of years now. It has something like 750 overseas bases. It has the Seventh Fleet stationed out of Okinawa, and has an extraordinary global reach.

China is still struggling to establish itself as the dominant regional power. Although China does technically have the largest navy in the world, if you count the number of boats, many of them are small boats because you’re dealing with coastal waters. They aren’t aircraft carriers or similar, which the United States totally dominates.

You’re not comparing like with like. The Americans can bounce around what China regards as its backyard pretty much at will. China doesn’t have that same capacity. It has technically a large army, but 99 per cent of the People’s Liberation Army is in China. It’s not anywhere else.

One of the things I’m trying to do with the book is to persuade Americans to stand back and look at this in a slightly less paranoid fashion, that this is some sort of repeat of the Cold War, the US–USSR, which simply isn’t true. 

You also consider the possibility of collaboration. Where might the two countries find incentives to work together?

They both have a vested interest in a benign overall economic order. They’re responsible for 43 per cent of world trade between them, and that number may well rise. They are significant trading partners, but not necessarily bloodthirsty trading rivals.

China is in the midst of a process in which it’s trying to move away from the Deng Xiaoping model of the fastest possible rate of economic growth by route one. The current Chinese leadership do not particularly want to become the world’s largest economy based on selling ever more plastic toys to put in cereal boxes for American children. They would rather be equivalent to a Japan, a South Korea or even a Taiwan in terms of being a high-value rather than high-volume economic actor.

China has at least two economies: a developed one, which is the one you see visibly when you have all those robots dancing around the place, and a huge hinterland which is not a developed economy. I call them the apples and pears economy.

There’s a temptation to look at the robots and think, “Gee whizz”. But then comes the “so what” effect. You look at them and think “gee whizz”, and then “what are they going to do with them?” You’ve got robots that make the late Fred Astaire look like a dunce. So what?

Can Britain and Europe play any serious role in this relationship, and what are you working on next?

The honest truth is that you have to recognise that it is a G2 out there. Europe doesn’t have global reach, even if it pulled everything together, which it won’t. What Europe has to do, and I think it’s a particular challenge for the UK in particular, is to avoid being stuck in the middle, and avoid a world order in which it basically has to be a rule-taker, not a rule-maker.

A true breakdown in the relationship between the US and China, which might lead to an economic Cold War, would be very damaging for Europe indeed, because it would be forced to take sides. It wants to maintain an economic and indeed a political relationship with both, but that’s a very difficult balancing act.

As for my next book, I will try and turn around a book very quickly after the midterm elections, looking at the first two years of the Trump presidency. The tentative title is Second Coming: Trump 2, Part One.