ZHOU Bo: Senior Fellow, CISS, and China Forum Expert, Tsinghua University

The “long peace” is a term coined by Yale professor and Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis in his 1987 book The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. It refers to the fact that, from the end of World War II in 1945 into the 1980s, more than 40 years passed without a third world war between the United States and Soviet Union. For centuries before 1945, great powers fought destructive general wars such as the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II roughly once every generation.

Gaddis is almost right, except that the divide between the Cold War and the outbreak of a hot war was razor thin. During the Cold War, people in the camps led by the two superpowers were preparing for a hot war: an all-out world war III. Proxy wars were easily found on every continent. Nuclear false alarms showed we had a narrow escape from doomsday. Such a long peace looks lucky rather than intentional.

The real long peace is China’s peaceful rise that began in 1978, when Beijing started its “reform and opening up” period. Peace lasting half a century has been a rarity throughout Chinese history. Chinese dynasties are punctuated with discontented peasant groups forcibly toppling reigning dynasties, only for subsequent peasant uprisings to overthrow the regime in a repeating cycle. Even in the early decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, military conflicts still occurred roughly once every decade, including the Korean war, the Sino-Indian war and the Sino-Vietnamese war.

After 1978, the nation shifted its core priority to economic development. Subsequent diplomatic crises, such as Nato’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia and the fatal Sino-US military aircraft collision in the South China Sea in 2001, didn’t distract it from this strategic focus. This era of peace represents one of the longest spans of stability and prosperity across Chinese civilisation.

The question is whether it can continue. In part, the answer lies in whether the third long peace between China and the US that stretches back to the end of the Korean war can continue. SinoAmerican ties before US president Richard Nixon’s landmark visit fell under the broader Cold War framework. Yet even if subsequent bilateral relations resist a simple oneword definition, direct conflict has never broken out between the two nations.

US President Donald Trump’s state visit to Beijing in May marked Washington’s recognition of China as a peer power. Whether the announced strategic stability can be “constructive” is far from certain.

Presumably, it won’t turn destructive in the Cold War style of mutually assured destruction maintained by a nuclear arms race. China has rarely said much about its nuclear ambition. Even if Beijing expands its nuclear warhead stockpile to 1,500 units by 2035, as the Pentagon claims it will, its arsenal will still lag far behind that of the US and Russia.

There is no incentive for China to blindly ramp up its nuclear stockpile, only to scale it back later as the US and Soviet Union did with the New Start treaty when their combined nuclear warhead stockpile surpassed 70,000 in the 1980s.

The Taiwan Strait remains the sole plausible trigger for a direct SinoUS conflict, yet it is not inevitable. As long as Beijing believes peaceful reunification is still possible, it won’t issue a deadline over Taiwan. Short of that, there is no reason for the US to get involved militarily. And would Washington really intervene in a war across the strait?

Trump said of Taiwan in a Fox News interview, “we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I’m not looking for that.” Likewise, his successors would have to do some soul-searching and ask why the US military would fight the People’s Liberation Army in a war far away from its homeland, which it might lose.

A quarter of the 21st century has now passed. Can this peace be longer than the 20th century’s? In the 20th century, only two decades stood between the two world wars. Nuclear deterrence—the factor stressed by Gaddis—explains most of the period of stability during the Cold War.

Wars have not vanished, though, and they probably never will. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that human violence has steadily declined throughout history, driven by growing empathy, self-control and civilised progress. Such a conclusion is comfortable but debatable. The most tangible sign of human progress is that, today, few people will glorify wars of any kind.

Gaddis’ long peace with an absence of direct conflict among major powers is continuing. However, two of the world’s foremost great powers are locked in conflicts against smaller states today. We don’t know how long the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran will drag on, but we do know that Russia’s war in Ukraine—which began in February 2022—has already outlasted World War I and could exceed the length of World War II, which lasted six years and a day.

China’s own long peace is also holding. If its peaceful rise with more than four decades without waging war suggests Beijing rejects hegemonic ambitions, this raises hope that a stronger China can make a difference and foster a world with longer peace. Can China do that, and by what means? This is the defining geopolitical test of our century.

Club Briefing: Zhou Bo, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua University, writes in the South China Morning Post and distinguishes between two forms of “long peace”: the Cold War peace defined by Gaddis as the absence of great-power war, and China’s peaceful rise since 1978. The author argues that the Cold War peace was largely fortuitous, marked by proxy wars and nuclear crises; by contrast, China’s peaceful ascent stands out against a historical backdrop of dynastic upheavals and frequent conflicts. The article further posits that the “third long peace”—the absence of direct Sino-American military conflict since the Korean War—will determine whether China’s path of peaceful development can endure. The Taiwan Strait remains the sole plausible trigger for conflict, yet it is not inevitable. The author concludes that if China’s four-decade peaceful rise signals its rejection of hegemonic ambitions, a stronger China may foster a more enduringly peaceful world.