The quest to secure Middle Eastern oil and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consume much of the foreign policy establishment in Washington today. But in the next decade, more of the U.S.’s attention will shift to the new Middle East: China
Economists have been predicting this shift for decades. China is already the world’s top manufacturer, top auto market, top cement producer and top polluter. Its military and naval capacity is growing. Its construction-driven hunger for natural resources, especially timber and energy, is reshaping the landscapes of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. Experts may argue about the pace of China’s economic ascent — Nobel laureate economist Robert Fogel predicts that China’s economy will be an eye-popping 40% of global GDP by 2040, while others project somewhat more modest growth — but few question that it’s happening dazzlingly fast.
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Some of us still dream of Chindia, an approaching phase of history when China and India will not only be the biggest powers on earth, they will partner each other in running the world, which will regard them as one glorious Asian entity
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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In the US, it is the latest thing to say China will be the country’s undoing. But the countries’ fates are too intertwined
Like his predecessors over the last two decades, US president Barack Obama will meet with the dalai lama on Thursday. As usual, China expressed its “resolute” objections to the meeting. What seems like the routine reaction to a visit by the Tibetan spiritual leader to a head of state has become a symbol of the increasingly strained relations between the US and China.
What is going on?
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The West was fooling itself if it expected Beijing to do its bidding, analysts say
Reporting from Beijing — China and the United States have been referred to as global partners, strategic competitors, outright rivals and “frenemies” — friends who secretly hate each other’s guts.
In recent months, a pretense of cordiality has given way to unusually public squabbling. China is threatening to boycott U.S. defense contractors over arms sales to Taiwan and is loudly protesting President Obama’s meeting this week with the Dalai Lama. The United States and its European allies are angry about what they regard as China’s obstructionist behavior on issues such as global warming and Iran’s nuclear program.
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LONDON — The spats between the United States and China appear to be getting more numerous and more serious. The Chinese objected in strong terms to the U.S.’s latest arms deal with Taiwan and threatened to take sanctions against those firms involved. President Obama recently accused the Chinese of currency manipulation. At Davos, Larry Summers, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, made an oblique attack on China by referring to mercantilist policies.
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It’s become apparent from recent events that America’s political, business and scholarly elites have fundamentally misjudged China. Conflicts with China have multiplied. Consider: the undervalued renminbi and its effect on trade; the breakdown of global warming negotiations in Copenhagen; China’s weak support of efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; its similarly poor record in pushing North Korea to relinquish its tiny atomic arsenal; the sale of U.S. weapons to Taiwan; and Google’s threat to leave China rather than condone continued censorship.
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The middle kingdom is rewriting the rules on trade, technology, currency, climate — you name it
Back when President Obama lived in Indonesia, in the late 1960s, China loomed as a malign force to the north, where communist cadres plotted to export their revolution to the rest of Asia. The Jakarta he’ll visit later this month has an entirely different attitude toward the People’s Republic. Local companies are doing deals in yuan, the Chinese currency, rather than dollars. If Jakarta gets in financial trouble, as it did back in 1997, it will be able to call on a $120 billion regional reserve fund, an Asia-only version of the International Monetary Fund due to be launched this month, bankrolled in part by China’s massive foreign-exchange reserves. Asia’s key economic political issues are no longer being hashed out on trips like Obama’s — between individual nations and the United States — but at summits that include only China, Japan, South Korea, and the Southeast Asian countries. “China has been instrumental in this shift in focus from ‘Asia-Pacific,’ which was largely about the U.S. and Japan, to ‘East Asia,’ which has China at the center,” says Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World.
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The economic bogeyman in America’s competitive future is China, and for those old enough to remember, the fear of China eating America’s lunch as the No. 1 economic power in the world is reminiscent of the day we once feared Japan’s rise.
That fear, popularized in the ’80s, proved short-lived. Today, there is no shortage of experts saying China’s future dominance is certain. “When China Rules the World,” a new book written by Martin Jacques and praised by Goldman Sachs’ chief economist Jim O’Neill, predicts that by 2027 China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s No. 1 economy.
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