Fashioning a moderately cooperative relationship between the US and China – the two great powers in the international system today  – has occupied many minds.  International relations specialists continue to be haunted by ‘power transition’ thesis.  According to this hypothesis, when a rising power challenges the leading status quo power, competition and often conflict follows.  Indeed historical examinations over the last century and a bit suggest that when these conditions prevail, with the most notable exception of the US and Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, these changes in the power distribution among the great powers lead to competition, rivalry and conflict.  It certainly underscores the long standing effort by the Harvard Study Group – the group I have been involved with for a number of years – and many other bilateral US-China efforts to focus their attentions on the changing dynamic of the US-China relationship.  As Beida’s Yiping Huang has written recently:

But times have changed. Today, although the US is still the world’s largest economy, China is already the second-largest and is set to overtake the US with

in the next 10 years. It is, therefore, reasonable for China and other developing countries to want to be part of the new rule-making process. But a transition of global superpowers could make all parties very nervous, as in history it often ended in war. This makes China–US cooperation all the more important, not only to avoid major confrontation but also to build a better world (January 19, 2014 EastAsiaForum.com).

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