The idea of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ has now established itself quite firmly in the journalistic mind as the defining dynamic of relations between the USA and China; a clear example of the power of the name of ‘Thucydides’, and the ways in which a meme can be created and disseminated in the age of social media. It’s entirely understandable that some people in China are therefore starting to pay a little attention to the topic; I reported on the first stirrings a year or so back (The Tao of Thucydides), and there is now an interesting article on news.xinhuanet.com, taken from ChinaDaily: Thucydides Trap Not Etched In Stone. I’m grateful to Joseph Cotterill (@jsphctrl) for the reference, and for the information that 修西得底斯 (Xiūxīdédǐsī) = Thucydides, 希罗多德 (Xīluōduōdé) = Herodotus and 色诺芬 (Sènuòfēn) = Xenophon. Googling 修西得底斯 produces over 690,000 results; true, most of the first hundred or so are just dictionary definitions, but if Google Translate is to be trusted it does look as if there are some potentially interesting discussions, even if a lot of them seem to be focused on the Thucydides Trap rather than anything more original.
This new article likewise doesn’t have anything much to say about Thucydides (characterised as a “Greek historian and philosopher”), and seems to take it for granted that he does indeed promote such a theory of a rising power making war inevitable because of the fear it inspires in the established power. What the article does offer is quite an entertaining, and not at all unreasonable, critique of the way that the meme is deployed in order to put all responsibility onto China, as it is used to imply that the rising power is always aggressive and seeking to overturn the existing order. “The Thucydides Trap has become a catchword for many commentators because they want to put China in a disadvantageous position and allow the US to occupy the historical and moral high ground.” That may have been true of Athens, but the anonymous author notes that there are other examples where it’s the declining power who opens hostilities; Western scholars ought to shift their focus in that direction, rather than seeing everything in terms of Chinese ambition and expansion. The US is already, through fear, exerting itself in the Pacific, which risks making the Thucydides Trap a reality even though China is doing all it can to avoid conflict; we should instead be hoping for a ‘Xuncius Breakthrough’, named after the C4 BCE philosopher, who argued that “a set of well-planned manners or actions, as opposed to selfish designs, can help avoid conflicts and facilitate cooperation.”
The general tendency seems to be to accept the existence of the Thucydides Trap (and certainly to suggest that it is shaping current Chinese policy, attempting to reassure the Americans that China does not seek confrontation) while questioning its deterministic nature – and above all seeking to return to what could actually be seen as a more Thucydidean reading (though not much is made of this in the article, presumably because Thucydides simply doesn’t carry so much authority in Chinese discourse) in which it is the dynamics of the relationship between the two powers, not the actions of just one of them, that leads to war. It’s interesting as a first (to the best of my knowledge) step in offering a Chinese critique of the idea and its power within Western IR discourse – with the suggestion that discourse alone (that is to say, trying to reassure the US and trying to argue that the Trap can be evaded) is unlikely to be enough – and it will be interesting to see if the ‘Xuncius Breakthrough’ achieves any sort of cultural lift-off. I fear not, or at least not in the West; focusing on alternative readings of Thucydides, whose work is of course vastly more complex and sophisticated than the ‘Thucydides Trap’ meme admits, might be a better option.
Sphinx 
Thanks for the post!
The op-ed engages Graham Allison rather more than Thucydides, and in my judgment the authors have misread him. His original Thucydides trap article did not say that the burden of avoiding a war (or the guilt for starting one) should fall only on the rising power. It was an admonition to both China and America NOT to accept the supposedly Thucydidean idea that a revisionist power cannot rise peacefully. Allison called for concessions on both sides, Americans included: “there is nothing unnatural about an increasingly powerful China demanding more say and greater sway in relations among nations.”
So the Thucydides trap was not meant to be a stick for the West to beat China with, although the op-ed regards it as such.
It is an interesting rhetorical move to argue that Americans are set on war because of the Western intellectual tradition, especially Thucydides and Hobbes. It suggests that China is looking for the moral high ground in case an armed conflict does break out. That wouldn’t surprise Thucydides much.
Thanks for this. I’d be inclined to say that the article isn’t actually responding to Allison, let alone Thucydides, but rather to the increasing number of casual/trite references to the Trap in op eds and blogs, treating it as if it’s a settled thing, almost always in the context of a discussion of supposed Chinese aggression. You’re absolutely right that there is an underlying tendency to imply that the Western tradition is innately aggressive, set against a Chinese one that seeks peace and compromise (but with the warning that such idealism needs to be tempered with realism).
I believe the Chinese translation for Thucydides is 修昔底德 (Xiu Xi Di De) not 修西得底斯 (Xiu Xi De Di Si).
Thank you! As I said, I know absolutely nothing of the language, and am wholly dependent on what other people tell me. The first set of characters (which I simply lifted from a tweet by Cotterill) did produce relevant-looking results in Google – but there could be lots of reasons for that…
And having just done a quick search for 修昔底德, the results look far more promising, so thank you.
True, at least on the basis of Google Translate, they more or less all appear to be repeating the same stories about the Thucydides Trap, but there may be something more interesting buried in there somewhere…
There seems much to be learned from the Greeks great minds whose lessons stay relevant today I feel. As discussed I believe your both right no matter the way you look at it both China and the US are clamouring over each other for the high ground in an age old struggle with such deep roots it’ll be hard to ever ease the tensions they like to lead us to believe are not there.
Well, you can’t really argue that the relationship between the USA and China is age-old with deep roots, given that the former is such a young country and has been involved in a serious way in the Pacific for, what, less than a century? There will always be tensions between major powers whose interests sometimes come into conflict, and no one pretends otherwise, but assuming from the beginning that such conflicts are intractable and can only ever lead to war, sooner or later, is at best pessimistic and at worse likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy…
I agree your right, I apologize I should have been clearer with my definition of deep roots. This conflict has been going on for as you mentioned less then a century. What I’m trying to define is the age old west vs east conflict. Do you feel as if the traditional and often distinctive cultural styles of both countries are influencing how the “Thucydides trap” is being portrayed and interpreted?
Well, I don’t actually believe in the existence of an “age old east vs west” conflict. It’s a powerful idea that plenty of people do believe in – and that means it can influence their actions, and to that extent become a real historical phenomenon – but I don’t believe that it’s a real thing in the way people describe it. ‘The West’ is a fiction, a convenient short-hand; it ignores the amount of diversity between different countries and cultures, and also ignores the amount of influence from and exchange with countries and cultures outside ‘the West’, especially in the early centuries. Ditto with ‘the East’. It suits some people on each side to claim that they are representatives of an age-old homogeneous tradition with specific traits and values, and to set this against another imagined tradition.
Yes thats a really good description, I really like your ideas, thankyou for your time!
No problem – it’s great to have a bit of interaction on here!