The bilateral relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) has rapidly become the most important in the world. The reasons for this pre-eminence are not hard to fathom: the US and China are the two biggest economies in the world, and they are also the world's most consequential strategic actors. Even though China's military capabilities and spending remain a long way behind America's, the PRC's increasingly assertive foreign and security policies are having a major impact on their immediate neighbours and on the United States itself. The ‘rise of China’ not only represents a historically unprecedented material transformation of the international economy; it also poses a direct challenge to America's strategic primacy. In short, Sino-American ties highlight a major structural transformation of the international system and the material distribution of power within it.

As we shall suggest in the first part of this article, such developments come as no surprise to security specialists and International Relations scholars of a realist bent in both the United States and China.1 This is, after all, the very stuff of ‘high politics’ and the expected behaviour of Great Powers as they—inevitably, the argument goes—seek ascendancy in a never-ending struggle for power. But even if we accept such claims and the logic that underpins them, one of the most striking features of the relationship between the United States and China is how much is being played out in what might be described as the ‘ideational realm’. We have become accustomed to thinking of the United States as possessing some sort of ‘soft power’, even if there is heated debate about what this concept might mean and how it might operate.2 What is more unexpected, perhaps, is the idea that China might possess such qualities, too.3 But, as we explain, not only is this idea becoming commonplace, it is increasingly associated with the so-called ‘Beijing Consensus’ and/or a ‘Chinese model’ of development.