Are we in a new Cold War of US-China competition?
John Mearsheimer at the Great Wall, 2001
The rise of the PRC is the key issue of the 21st century. Can China rise peacefully? Has America’s engagement policy created a peer competitor? How should the US respond to Beijing’s island-building in the South China Sea, and its institution-building in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)?
Mearsheimer vs. Nye on the Rise of China (2015, 18min) examines how the personal experiences of iconic IR theorists John Mearsheimer (Chicago) and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (Harvard) on their first trips to China frame their strategic understandings of US-China relations.
Are Offensive Realists like Mearsheimer correct that a rising China is structurally determined to challenge the hegemonic US? Can US-China relations be managed through diplomacy and international organizations, as the Liberal Institutionalists argue? Or does the US’s China policy need a combination of Realism and Liberalism, as Nye suggests?
Credits
Bill Callahan: Director, Producer, Editor, Camera
Festival appearances
Published on The Diplomat Website, July 7, 2015 (5000 views on the first day, over 60,000 by May 1, 2020)
Association for Asian Studies, AAS-in-Asia, Kyoto, June 28, 2016
Association for Asian Studies, Seattle, April 1, 2016
University College London, Diplomacy Society, January 18, 2016
North America Advisory Board meeting, LSE, October 23, 2015
Tsinghua University, Beijing China, October 13, 2015
Renmin University of China, Beijing China, October 12, 2015
