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.”
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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”.
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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.
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For the growing number of Americans who see China heading for inevitable global dominance, nudging aside the United States, a brief walk down memory lane helps put long-term predictions into perspective. Not so long ago, Japan was seen as the next (economic) number 1. American executives studied the 14 management principles of The Toyota Way, developed by the automobile manufacturer that grew into the world’s biggest car maker and is now recalling millions of defective vehicles.
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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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