Use Fearon (1995)’s “rationalist explanation of war” to explain the causes of this hypothetical war in the South China Sea.

It corresponds to the hypothetical war where an escalation of war declaration between China and the US in the South China Sea is at stake. This is vesting from the Chinese invasion of Taiwan territory as part of their reunification campaign. Driven by such an intention, (Fearon, 1995) mentioned three explanations for war. ‘These include private information misrepresentation, commitment problems and issue of invisibility, respectively’. This essay will mostly be about private information to misrepresent and how it can be applied to the context of a hypothetical war between the Chinese and Americans. Meanwhile, I will suggest why the other two explanations of war are not suitable for elaborating on this issue. Finally, I shall conclude with some suggestions of what can also be done to advance this literature. On the one hand, ‘rational leaders' tend to miscalculate their abilities to fight against their adversaries. Due to such a miscalculation, more risk of losing the war is generated because one side may underestimate or overestimate the capabilities of their rivals. As a result, one’s behaviour will automatically change either in a positive way or severely negative’, according to (Fearon, 1995). Meanwhile, it might be argued that during the turn of the twentieth-first century, China was becoming more and more powerful both financially and militarily. This can be seen from the (OECD, 2022) data presented below: Such an analysis represents the economic outlook of the second triennial, where the Chinese economic size ranked above the world's average Gross Domestic Product or GDP as of 2022. Moreover, the Chinese's GDP outperformed the so-called 'tiger countries', five developed nations in Asia. The reason for the statistics mentioned above is that many political scholars underestimate the Chinese economy as a relatively weaker country than the US and other Asian nations. They did not expect rapid economic expansion, such that boost from an agricultural-based government to become one of the most powerful countries with high technological advancement in the present. Therefore, this is connected to the miscalculation of the adversary since the Western countries often reflect themselves as superior to the Eastern countries, including the People's Republic of China. If the US and Western countries continue to underestimate China, this trajectory can bring about the actual states of war where both sides will use whatever means possible to fight. However, I suspect China will be the next world's dominant after the US era on the condition that the US and Western underestimate their counterpart. Whilst the second explanation of war suggested commitment problems. Specifically, it is a scenario where mutually beneficial agreements are almost impossible to reach because one or more states are incentivised to break the deal as (Fearon, 1995)argued. For instance,