Senior Colonel Zhou Bo (ret) is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University and a China Forum expert.
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. Sino‑American 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 one‑word 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.
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