In less than a decade China could be the world’s largest economy. But its continued economic success is under threat from a resurgence of the state and resistance to further reform.
AT THE HEIGHT of the Qing dynasty, back in the 1700s, China enjoyed a golden age. Barbarians were in awe of the empire and rapacious foreigners had not yet begun hammering at the door. It was a shengshi, an age of prosperity. Now some Chinese nationalists say that, thanks to the Communist Party and its economic prowess, another shengshi has arrived. Last year China became the world’s biggest manufacturer, displacing America from a position it had held for more than a century. In less than a decade it could become the world’s largest economy. Foreigners are again agape.
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China’s indefatigable rise — especially in stark contrast to sluggish growth in the US, fiscal crisis in Europe and the shrinking of Japan — is helping to spawn an “anti-Fukuyama” school of thought that sees Chinese-style authoritarian capitalism as the next beginning of history.
Stefan Halper has written one of the school’s primers. He borrows a term coined by Joshua Ramos, “Beijing consensus,” to describe the real China threat: a state-led model of developmental capitalism without democracy, and a neo-Westphalian model of international relations where states limit their interactions to pure business. This model, Halper argues, is ascendant across the developing world, displacing the liberal internationalism and economic neo-liberalism of the Washington Consensus.
After finishing Halper, the reader can move on to Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World and Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules — For Now for deeper exploration of how the China model might transform the international system.
China’s economic success has now become so clear that its relation to China’s overall position in the world has become a major topic of international discussion.
For example, the regular column of the Financial Times chief foreign affairs commentator, Gideon Rachman, was recently entitled rather sensationally “When China becomes No 1”. The recent announcement by United States Defence Secretary Robert Gates that the US would increase its military commitment in East Asia, simultaneously with running down its presence in other areas, was interpreted as “countering” China.
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“China is the toughest to beat,” said Saina Nehwal, India’s ace badminton player, just before a match with Lin Wang during the 2009 Badminton World Championship.
While Nehwal lost the match to the Chinese player, her apprehension foreshadowed what was to be a complete sweep of the championships by China, whose players went on to win all the major titles—the men’s single, the women’s single, and the men’s and women’s doubles. Nehwal was perhaps echoing the sentiment of many Indian sportspersons who have had to pit their skills against China’s formidable strength as a sporting nation.
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The incongruous arguments held up by both proponents and opponents of the Western Model’s application have ignored the sequence of development in China.
Two years ago, a British author, Martin Jacques, published a book titled, “When China Rules the World,” which galvanized many to reconsider their notions of China’s strategic development. However, Chinese professor Zhang Weiwei’s recent best-seller, “China Shock” has not created the same shock and intrigue. China’s rise is an indisputable fact. Professor Zhang’s most important contribution in this work is his comprehensive overview of the China Model.
Raising the theme of “rejecting Western influence” to a new pitch, the book’s tone is optimistic. His ideas are part of a larger cavalcade of commentators in recent years, which have warned against the lure of the Western Model. But in all of this, the question of audience is worth asking: Who actually cares so much about the Western model?
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What our country’s nineteenth century experience teaches us about China today
One of the central national security questions of our time is whether a rising China will be a threat to the United States and the American-led international order. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, told Congress recently that China is the main threat to the United States. The Economist has proclaimed that the U.S. and China are “bound to be rivals.” Niall Ferguson decries “the descent of the West” and power shifting to Asia. Martin Jacques’ latest book is titled When China Rules the World. And even level-headed liberal internationalist John Eikenberry considers the rise of China “one of the great dramas of the 21st century.”
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China’s rapid growth since reform and opening-up in 1978 has drawn worldwide attention, yet predictions about the country’s future vary greatly
While some observers predicted that China would follow the former Soviet Union’s path in five years, optimists have spoken louder and clearer.
In his recent work,China’s Megatrends: the Eight Pillars of a New Society, well-known US futurist John Naisbit predicted that the country would evolve into the world’s center by 2050 and challenge Western democracy with its development mode. British scholar Martin Jacques has gone a step further in his book When China Rules the World. He declares the inevitability of China’s ascendancy and the West’s simultaneous decline, thus announcing a nascent superpower in the making.
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A year of exploration in the Far West
In 2009 I left Beijing and moved to New York. It was a return to the United States for me: until 2004 I had lived on the other coast, in San Francisco. Those five years in between in China seemed as long as a century. Not for me, but for the balance of power between Asia and the West. When I left California, China was still a student, busy emulating its American teacher. I returned to find an America exhausted by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis that China avoided, in a masterly way, using the leverage of its state capitalism or “market dirigisme.” And so history had a sudden acceleration. It was clear that the 21st Century would be Asian, but the East’s fast rise soon gave the impression that the die had already been cast. China seems master of its own destiny, set on a fast track to modernization while America laboriously drags itself out of the darkness.
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It was significant but not astonishing news last week that China has eclipsed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy
More surprising is that the great economic strides have given rise to uncertainty about China’s prospects.
Can China hope to maintain its torrid growth, avoiding more of the social upheaval hinted at when sporadic riots broke out among furloughed factory workers during the Great Recession? Can a traditionally frugal 5,000-year-old society transform itself into a consumer economy like the U.S.? Or will continued reliance on exports culminate in the economic stagnation endured by Japan these past two decades?
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The tailored gents marching in perfect step toward the podium have reason enough to smile. Led by Premier Wen Jiabo and Supremo Hu Jintao, China’s gang of nine are entitled to feel pretty satisfied with their nation’s recent economic performance.
Wen’s remarks to the annual National People’s Congress were chosen with care to balance the good news with a warning against national complacency. His talk of destabilizing problems on the horizon, though, could not disguise the self-congratulatory stuff. China is doing very nicely, thank you.
China’s extraordinary statistics tell a decidedly different story from the doom and gloom in Japan and the West. While the G-8 nations fear a double dip recession and voice concerns over happens next once all the massive state funding is removed, China sails regally on.
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