China's Rise, What we can learn from historical analogies

9 May 2014, The Straits Times, Singapore

The use of analogy is popular among policy-makers with limited time and energy to understand the details of specific historical cases in comparison to contemporary events.

Analogies are of critical importance to inductive reasoning. They assume regularities and correlations that occurred in the past will hold in the future. This may, or may not be the case, as Oxford political scientist Yuen Foong Khong argues "The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies". So what then should Beijing take away from the fact that many American and Japanese commentators are seizing on the First World War analogy to explain (and supposedly predict) Chinese behaviour?