A System Dynamics Approach to Hegemonic Theory

“When America sneezes, the whole world catches a cold.”

This saying symbolized America’s global hegemony since the Second World War. However, it’s position is threatened by the rapid expansionism of China, a phenomenon commonly referred to as “The Rise of China”. This article develops a quantitative basis for the rise of China, a qualitative analysis using a phase space explaining potential outcomes, and a review of the likelihood that China is the next global hegemon based on a SWOT analysis through the lenses of constructivism and structuralism. Based on which, this article argues that China is likely not going to be the global hegemon because the rate of its power increase is not outpacing that of America’s, and because its strategy of increasing hard and soft power is best met by a bid for regional hegemony instead.

Methodology

Defining Power

This analysis focuses on America and China, and first aims to establish the fact that both countries are increasing their hard power, specifically, military and economic resources (Wilson III, 2008). Power, broadly, is the capacity of one state to make others do what they would otherwise not. We narrow this to power-as-resources to allow for simpler quantitative analysis to measure power, as opposed to power-as-outcomes which requires knowledge of what each country’s preferred outcomes are, and to what extent they shaped those outcomes (Beckley, 2018). The latter is harder to operationalize and is…