‘The Dragon’ defined: How three capitals reimagined China

Few things better illustrate how charged the American debate over China has become than the reaction to Jennifer Kavanagh’s recent proposal for a radically different U.S. military posture in Asia.

Kavanagh, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, has argued that Washington should pull most of its forces back from the “first island chain,” which includes Taiwan and the Philippines, toward the more defensible “second island chain,” while narrowing its defense commitments to regional allies and eschewing any commitment to defend Taiwan.

The proposal prompted a sharp backlash from analysts and commentators, with some flinging accusations that Kavanagh and her colleagues are “fifth columnists.”

The episode raises a larger question: how did the American debate over China become so intensely focused on strategic competition – and so resistant to arguments for restraint?

David M. McCourt’s " The Dragon Defined: How Washington, Canberra, and London Reimagined China " is an unusually illuminating account of how China came to be understood as a strategic competitor in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

A professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, McCourt draws on more than 250 interviews with diplomats, strategists, academics, and other participants in the foreign-policy communities of the three countries to provide a rich, transnational account of great help to those seeking to understand the debate surrounding the rise of China.

As McCourt puts it in the preface, “There is no single, real China, only numerous aspects – some inviting, others threatening. What leaders and elites see is largely a reflection of themselves: their hopes and fears for their countries domestically and on the world stage.” It is an apt summary of a sociologist’s perspective – and an especially useful one given the book’s subject: the production and circulation of elite knowledge.

China, in McCourt’s telling, is both an empirical object and a kind of mirror. Its actual behavior matters, but so too do the institutions, professional incentives, domestic political struggles, and national self-conceptions through which that behavior is interpreted. This helps explain the striking transformation McCourt documents. In the 1990s, Washington approached China with considerable confidence that American power and engagement could shape the direction of its rise. By the mid-2010s, that confidence had given way to what McCourt describes as “an insecure, anxious, even fearful US hegemon facing a risen China that has become a near-peer challenger.”

The shift from engagement to strategic competition was consequently not simply a response to an objective change in China. It was also a change in the way American elites understood the United States and its place in the world. ⁠

McCourt focuses on the institutions where foreign-policy knowledge is made – government agencies, think tanks, universities, journalism, and the business community – and, crucially, the individuals who inhabit them.

American readers will recognize many of the names: AEI, CSIS, government agencies, prominent China scholars, journalists, and the revolving door connecting all of them. But McCourt’s comparative approach makes the equivalent institutions in Britain and Australia equally familiar and their relationships intelligible, including Chatham House, the Lowy Institute, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the SOAS China Institute, and the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

For an American reader, the most revealing story is what happened inside Washington. The shift away from engagement did not begin with a single administration, nor did it happen because everyone suddenly reached the same conclusion about China. For decades, American policy had rested in part on an expectation that economic development, integration into international institutions, and the growth of a Chinese middle class would produce some degree of political liberalization and convergence.

McCourt shows that this expectation was never universally shared. The U.S. military, in particular, had long maintained a more skeptical view of China. As one military analyst told McCourt, his organization had “stayed in the same place” while the rest of the China field had “recently ‘come to us.’” The rise of strategic competition was therefore not simply the triumph of a new idea; in important respects, it was the movement of one longstanding interpretation of China from the margins of the policy community toward its center.

A look at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration illustrates the point nicely. Before September 11, 2001, Bush described China as a “strategic competitor.” Of course, the terrorist attacks and the wars that followed redirected American strategic attention elsewhere for years. China did not disappear as a concern, but the question of how to manage its rise drew less attention. When great-power competition returned to the center of U.S. strategy, some of this skepticism reemerged.

The assumptions underpinning engagement became increasingly difficult to sustain. Economic growth had produced a much more powerful China, but not the political transformation many American policymakers had anticipated. President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power, Beijing’s more assertive foreign policy, concerns about technology and economic dependence, human-rights abuses, and fears about the balance of power in East Asia all contributed to a growing sense that the old approach had failed.

McCourt is especially interested in what happened to the people whose professional identities had been built around the older paradigm. One former Engager describes the pressure bluntly: in Washington, “You’re here because you want to influence policy,” which means asking, “how do I stay credible?” The choice, as he put it, was whether to “adjust myself to the metanarrative” or become “a voice in the wilderness.” McCourt’s interviews suggest careerism was not incidental to the production of China knowledge. Scholars, analysts, journalists, and think-tank experts had to connect their work to the concerns of policymakers – and the definition of what counted as relevant policy expertise was itself changing.

At the same time, institutions with reasons to oppose engagement were becoming more influential. The military was hardly alone: hawkish think tanks and national-security officials had long challenged the assumptions of engagement, while parts of the business community became disillusioned with the expectation of an endlessly expanding “China market.” Politicians and strategists from across the political spectrum increasingly emphasized different aspects of the same emerging problem: China’s challenge to American power, its political system, its economic practices, or the security of the U.S.-led order in Asia. Figures such as Kurt Campbell , Ely Ratner , Robert Blackwill , Robert Work , Matthew Pottinger , and Elbridge Colby occupied different positions in this evolving debate, but the larger shift was institutional.

By the early 2020s, the proposition that engagement had failed had hardened into a premise of Washington discourse, even as scholars and former Engagers, such as Michael Swaine and J. Stapleton Roy , continued to dispute the historical record.

This is where McCourt’s comparative cases become particularly instructive. Australia, for example, complicates the assumption that ideas about China simply flow from Washington outward. McCourt shows how Australian analysts and officials helped strengthen arguments that subsequently gained traction among American skeptics of engagement, while initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific concept and AUKUS demonstrate that allies can also shape American strategic thinking.

The point is not that any one of these actors “caused” America to become hawkish on China. It is that the American understanding of China emerged from a field of institutions and individuals whose interests, experiences, and assumptions were changing at the same time.

McCourt’s field theory provides a useful way of understanding these developments without requiring either conspiracy or simplistic material determinism. Individuals occupying similar institutional positions, exposed to similar incentives and professional networks, can come to remarkably similar conclusions. Conversely, individuals situated differently can interpret the same Chinese actions in radically different ways.

That is perhaps the greatest contribution of "The Dragon Defined." It does not require the reader to accept any particular interpretation of China in order to appreciate the importance of understanding how interpretations of China are made.

For anyone interested in the origins of the contemporary turn from engagement toward strategic competition, McCourt has produced an exceptionally rich account. Its many individual case studies and interviews resist easy summary, and the comparative perspective makes the book considerably more illuminating than a study focused exclusively on Washington.

Whatever position one takes on China, American grand strategy, or the wisdom of strategic competition, "The Dragon Defined" offers an important reminder: before asking what China is, it is worth asking who is doing the defining – and why.