The Rise of China and the Decline of the United States: Power Transition and War or Peaceful Change?

Political Science Workshop: The Grand Split? How The World is Dividing
Panel One: What is new in our perceptions of world politics?

Brian Schmidt
The Rise of China and the Decline of the United States: Power Transition and War or Peaceful Change?

The near consensus that China is a rising power, and the United States is experiencing relative decline has led both scholars and policymakers to think carefully about how this dynamic might play out in the near future. The power transition school offers a dire prognosis that a great power war between China and the United States is serious possibility. I will explain the power transition school and why they believe war between China and the United States is a distant possibility. I will also examine a body of literature that looks at peaceful change as a way of accommodating changes in the distribution of power without the mechanism of Great Power War. In this regard, the paper will consider two very different bodies of literature on one of the most pressing issues of the time; namely, the rise of China and what this means for international order in the twenty-first century.