The latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine carries an article on the inevitability of China becoming the next superpower, one of a mounting cascade of articles on America’s decline and China’s rise. For many Chinese, it is high time for their country to regain its rightful place in the world, after a century and a half of humiliation, beginning with the Opium War of 1839-1842 and culminating with the invasion and occupation of much of China by Japan 100 years later.
As Martin Jacques explains in his bestselling “When China Rules the World:” “China had already begun to acquire its modern shape in the centuries leading up to the birth of Christ” and, a millennium ago, it was “the greatest maritime nation in the world.”