The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

from the Chinese point of view, the era of American
domination in Asia, which was an undesirable accident
in the first place, should be coming to an end.
China’s leaders are [already] asking themselves: Why
should distant, flawed, self-interested America be the
hegemon in a part of the world where for the better
part of two millennia China reigned supreme? As far
as we can tell, the entire leadership in Beijing has by
now been swept into the view represented by that
question. 43
By the same token, the United States will do everything
it can to prevent China from gaining its hegemonic
position in Asia. Mearsheimer said that his theory
did not have any normative or ideological bias; it
was an offensive realist’s account of the brutal nature
of great power politics. In October 2003, Mearsheimer
made a 12-day visit to China (his first), giving his uncompromising
talks to people at China’s prestigious
universities, high-profile policy think tanks, and even
the Chinese Foreign Ministry. He reassured his hosts
everywhere: his talks were nothing personal; he had
nothing against the Chinese people; but the fear of a
China threat was just a natural reaction from the United
States. 44
Huntington, however, framed the China threat in
an entirely different way. First, he rejected the universal
state envisioned by the West and articulated by
successive American leaders, and more forcefully by
Francis Fukuyama in his “The End of History” essay. 45
Huntington argued that Western culture and civilization
were also historical phenomena; their assertions
followed the material success and failure of the United
States and the West, which happened to have been in
undisputed relative decline for quite some time; as the
56