The US decision to label China a “strategic competitor” confirms what could no longer be concealed: the world’s two most powerful countries are locked in a fervent rivalry. The question now is how damaging the tussle may become both for the two adversaries and the rest of the world.

Some see the contest inevitably bearing out the deadly prophesies of the “trap” first identified by ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who described how the rise of Athens instilled a fear into Sparta that made war unavoidable. The past five centuries have seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one and in 12 of these cases the result was war, says Harvard professor Graham Allison.

But a deeper view of China’s power accretion reveals strategies that are often more oblique than confrontational. Some of them appear faithful to the guileful lineage of the Chinese “36 stratagems”, a list of political, diplomatic and military tactics that date from around the same time that Thucydides was chronicling the Peloponnesian war in the fifth century BC.