Sino-Indian relations are back in public debate
Sino-Indian relations are back in public debate after the New York Times report on Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers in Gilgit-Baltistan, visa denial to Lt. Gen. B.S. Jaswal, General Officer Commanding in Chief (GOC-in-C), Northern Command, and on top of earlier Chinese transgressions like separate paper visas for Jammu and Kashmir residents. Were not the bilateral relations on the upswing since the handshake between Rajiv Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping in 1988?
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Once in a while it is worth pondering whether the conventional wisdom about China’s meteoric rise is right. Is China destined to move beyond its newly won position as the world’s number two economy to become number one? Will the United States be displaced from its primacy in global security? Is the rising power destined to clash with the current leading power? These are the themes of much recent commentary, including journalist Martin Jacques’ new book, When China Rules the World.
Thinking unconventionally necessarily involves speculating about things that are unknowable today. But doing so might prove a useful exercise before we reach conventional conclusions that are expensive, defeatist, or just plain wrong.
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Since the end of WWII, the United States has been the preeminent cultural, economic, and military power in the international system. Even at the height of the Cold War, the United States maintained its supremacy over the Soviet Union, and would continue to do so well into the 21st century.
However, since the late 20th century, a new power has risen, the People’s Republic of China, driven by annual economic growth rates of over 10% in the last three decades. China currently has the second largest economy and the fastest growing economy in the world. It is projected to overtake the U.S economy by 2020. Unlike the Soviet Union, China has emphasized a peaceful approach in its rise. However, questions remain as to what impact China’s ascent will have on the international system, once exclusively dominated by the U.S. but increasingly multi-polar.
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No one wishes for a total Chinese collapse, but certain setbacks should be welcomed
Seven decades ago President Chiang Kai-Shek wrote in a preface to his wife’s book China Shall Rise Again, “For the rebirth of a people certain factors are necessary. Of these one is that the people should go through a period of trials and tribulations.” China had already endured a century of turmoil when Chiang wrote those words in 1941, but more was to come. In contemplating China’s future, we should remember that its modern past includes numerous failures. The Chinese themselves certainly don’t forget. For decades before the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, China was beset by foreign encroachment and farmers’ uprisings, and, after the establishment of the Chinese republic, it experienced the depredations of regional warlords, an invasion by Japan, civil war, the collapse of Chiang’s regime in the late 1940s, and Mao Zedong’s quarter-century of uneven rule (1949 -76).
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The year before the global financial crisis, Goldman Sachs predicted China would surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy in 2027. Journalist and scholar Martin Jacques wants to know just what this world will look like when China is at its economic and political helm.
In When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World, Jacques makes his case for China’s impending rise to the top. The data behind Jacques’ predictions that China will soon be the world’s largest economy is solid—though some may call his forecast conservative when considered alongside recent estimates byPriceWaterhouseCoopers that push the timeline forward to 2020 for China’s ascendancy.
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It is foolish to make concrete predictions about China, due to how often – and how quickly – the country has been proving people wrong
Very occasionally, though, I feel something is such a sure bet that I’m ready to go out on a limb and describe something I’m sure will occur. Here’s my latest example: in the upcoming year or two, we’ll see a lot of new general interest books on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) show up at online sites like Amazon.com and in brick and mortar bookstores. I’ll go further than this and predict that the books will be by varied kinds of authors, from freelance writers to pundits, daily journalists to scholars, like me, who often write for specialized audiences but have decided to try to reach that elusive general educated reader. And one further point, of particular relevance to readers of this site: these books, while focusing on the present, will often make at least some nods to the past, in order to place recent events into historical perspective.
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Is China ready to rule the world? Not quite yet, argues Simon S.C. Tay. Both Asia and America need to be realistic about their limitations (and both sides now have more than a few of those) and concede that the future is not a zero-sum game. If both sides are interested in prosperity, the relationship will have to be more about cooperation than competition. And if our time is in indeed witnessing the long handoff of global power from one empire to another, the smoother the transition, the better.
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Back in the early 1980s, when the Japanese economy was on a roll, the number of books, journal and media articles extolling its strength and impact became almost a weekly staple of publication that the late Dr. Hadi Soesastro remarked at a CSIS Jakarta seminar “I’m going to commit suicide if another speaker is going talk again about the virtues of Japanese economic model.”
It is with the same sense of measured reluctance that I read through China’s Rise by Gary Schmitt, China Megatrends by John Naisbitt and When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques. All this after scanning through The Beijing Consensus by Stephen Halper and, tellingly, during China’s current troubles facing devastating floods, landslides, acute rural and urban problems and lowered pace of economic growth.
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It’s always fun to find out what others are reading and peruse their book shelves. Here’s a glimpse at the summer reading lists of a variety of people from business, nonprofits, and corporate social responsibility
Matthew Bishop, Author, Philanthrocapitalism; U.S. Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist : “I’m reading The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, by Mario Vargas Llosa; and Showing Up For Life by Bill Gates Senior. I am enjoying all of them immensely, but the Gates book most of all – not just because it helps to understand better Gates Junior, but because it serves up lots of practical wisdom about how to live an effective life, from someone who was clearly a big person in his various communities long before his son made his billions.”
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For anyone who thinks China is a superpower in only the political arena, they are missing the larger geopolitical picture. The Internet is the 21st Century’s newest battlefield where countries will fight for dominance over other nations. As content and data-mining transitions from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, or from Social Media to the Semantic Web, most thought leaders are betting on China as the front-runner in leading this charge.
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