Among the doves and hawks in Washington, America has long fretted about how to manage China’s rise. The myriad options range from peaceful coexistence and economic cooperation to the third world war.

But China and the world need to take back this narrative monopoly. World peace depends on it. We cannot wait for America to decide whether it needs to treat China as “an existential threat” or a country it can do business with. Every sign already points to the former.

Wise and erudite Western scholars such as Hugh White, a former senior Australian defence official, and Graham Allison, of Harvard University, have long warned of the dangers and counselled on how to avoid escalation and confrontation. They have drawn deeply from the intellectual and cultural resources of Western history, political philosophy and long experience in official policy formulation.

But more urgent than ever, China needs to deploy its own incomparably rich cultural resources to articulate a path to peace. America may have democracy at home but it is the most warlike nation on Earth. China may be an authoritarian “communist” state but its rulers have always tried to avoid external military entanglement. And just because China is not a Western-style democracy is no excuse for America to wage war, either a hot and/or an ideological one, against it.

The East and the West have long had vastly different experiences of war. In China’s long history, it has always been about genocide, wholesale destruction, national humiliation and territorial dismemberment. It’s all that, too, for Western modernity but also much more – advances in industry and finance, science and technology; and expansion in the reach and efficiency of the state and its bureaucracy. That is why Chinese fear war much more than Americans. They understand the so-called Chinese dream can easily turn into a nightmare.

China may be a rising power, which according to Western experience as argued by Allison, tends to upset the international order. But we must never underestimate the irrational destructive potential of a declining hegemon when it would rather drag the world down with it than lose dominance.

America has been prone to war and always needs an enemy to fight against, whether its Soviet communism or radical Islam; China needs to act and react wisely in the decades ahead to avoid being made the bogeyman for Americans. The real threat to world peace is more likely to be America’s hegemonic decline than China’s rise.