Until the global financial crisis, few in the United States believed the country was in decline. A minority now recognize this might be the case. The challenge to America’s position as premier global power comes from China. The fact it is only a developing country, with an economy much smaller than America’s and far less advanced, persuades many than this is a distant prospect.
China’s reemergence as a major power doesn’t challenge U.S.
BEIJING (Caixin Online) — In a long-term view, the rise of China is to be welcomed, but today China remains what the journalist Martin Wolf calls a “premature superpower.”
China’s current reputation for power benefits from projections about the future. In one poll, 44% of respondents mistakenly thought that China already had the world’s largest economy, compared to 27% who accurately picked the United States (which is three times larger). Martin Jacques even entitled his recent book “When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order.”
On his first visit to China late last year, Barack Obama stuck closely to the script mapped out by his predecessors George W Bush and Bill Clinton.
He asserted that America welcomed China’s growing wealth and power. Relations between the US and China were not, he insisted, a “zero-sum game”. America was comfortable with a rising China.
Stefan Halper, a senior research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, is having none of it. He believes that the coming decades will see an increasingly overt competition between the two nations. China, he asserts, “poses the most serious challenge to the United States since the half-century cold war struggle with the Soviets”. What is more, Halper is not particularly optimistic about America’s chances in this new struggle. His book is subtitled “How China’s Authoritarian Model will Dominate the Twenty-First Century”.
American elite opinion has been, for the most part, dead wrong about China. The People’s Republic is not liberalizing and it is not aligning itself with the West to resolve the world’s most pressing problems
Back in February, Robert Samuelson, one of America’s top economic commentators, began his Washington Post column with a critique of China:
Samuelson is neither an alarmist nor a reflexive China basher. He is calling it like he sees it. And I think he is correct. American elite opinion has been, for the most part, dead wrong about China. The People’s Republic is not liberalizing and it is not aligning itself with the West to resolve the world’s most pressing problems. Its military build-up is destabilizing and, in many cases, it is not playing by the rules of international trade.