GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 9 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2007—The Rise of China Editor's Note
In recent years, the world has increasingly been obliged to come to terms with an unignorable geopolitical fact: the rise of China as a great power. The foundation of China’s new global weight is phenomenal economic growth. Since it embarked on market reforms more than a quarter of a century ago, the People’s Republic has enjoyed annual growth rates in gross domestic product of around 9 per cent, and it is now the fourth-largest economy in the world. In a decade, it will be the second largest. Its prodigious manufacturing and exporting output has made China, like Britain in the nineteenth century, “the workshop of the world”. It attracts massive sums in foreign investment, and also invests billions of dollars abroad. Its transition from a centrally planned to a “socialist market” economy has pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
The economic transformation of the planet’s most populous country has had multiple, far-reaching consequences, both externally and domestically. To fuel its growing economy, China has had to look abroad for supplies of oil and raw materials, competing with the West for these commodities and occasionally doing business with regimes in Western disfavour. One salient point of Sino-Western tension is the huge trade surplus China enjoys with the United States, its largest trading partner, leading to calls from prominent US voices for punitive economic measures to redress the balance. Underlying Western and American concerns about China is the fear that growing economic power inevitably translates into increased military and political assertiveness, and that a rising China will one day challenge, peacefully or otherwise, the global predominance of the United States.
Within China itself, the stakes could not be higher. One-party rule and a free market make unlikely bedfellows. The emergence of a consumer society and a burgeoning middle class potentially threatens to undermine the hitherto unchallenged writ of the Chinese Communist Party. It remains an open and keenly disputed question whether the party’s authority can ultimately survive China’s turn towards the market, or whether the economic reforms will eventually produce concomitant political changes, leading to the country’s democratisation.
These and other ramifications of China’s rise and reappearance on the international stage as a major player form the theme of this issue of Global Dialogue.
Our first contributor, Edward Friedman of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, considers what China’s “return to global glory” means for both China and the world. Providing a general survey of China’s key foreign and domestic concerns and challenges, he concludes that if China has one overriding policy determinant, at home and abroad, it is hostility to democracy.
Must China’s rise inevitably mean confrontation with the United States? How ought America to deal with the resurgent China? Should containment or engagement be pursued? These questions are addressed by the two articles that follow. James A. Dorn of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., contends that America’s best interests, as well as those of China, lie in “promoting economic liberalism rather than reverting to destructive protectionism”. His view is shared by Zhiqun Zhu of the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. After examining China’s economic performance, military spending, fundamental foreign-policy goals, and the reasons for the enormous US trade deficit with the People’s Republic, he rejects the notion of a “Chinese threat” to the United States. The world’s sole superpower and its largest rising power have no alternative but to co-operate with each other.
The nature of the Chinese economic miracle is investigated by Shalendra D. Sharma of the University of San Francisco. He enquires into its causes, considers whether it can be sustained, asks what lessons it holds for other countries, and looks at the reasons for the growing economic distrust between China and the United States.
The rule of the Communist Party is absolute in China, but that does not mean political debate there is dead. In fact, as our next two contributions indicate, there is lively internal discussion on the best way forward for the country, on the prospects for and mechanisms of reform—a discussion engaged in by numerous intellectuals, writers and thinkers. Gloria Davies of Monash University, Australia, delineates the “liberal”, “new left”, and “third way” positions among China’s reformists. She notes that criticism is permitted in China provided it is “oblique”, i.e., does not openly question Communist Party rule. Feng Chongyi of the University of Technology, Sydney, describes how Chinese liberals have sought to overcome the obstacles to political democratisation presented by nationalism, a powerful force in today’s China.
A notable aspect of China’s current modernising drive has been the surge in Internet use in the People’s Republic—from approximately four million users in 1999 to scores of millions today, served by thousands of indigenous websites. Many Western observers—not least former US president Bill Clinton—have insisted that the Internet poses an insuperable challenge to the Communist Party’s control of information and opinion, and that it will thus prove an agent of democratic change. Just as the Great Wall failed to keep the “barbarians” out of China, the argument goes, so the Communist Party’s “Great Firewall”—its system of Internet monitoring and suppression—will fail to achieve its purposes. Lokman Tsui of the Annenberg School for Communication assesses the validity of such claims. He examines the nature of Internet censorship in China, popular attitudes to this censorship, and the impact of the Internet on Chinese life and society.
In its drive for foreign markets and resources, China has turned heavily towards Africa (the continent supplies some 25 per cent of the People’s Republic’s oil). Garth le Pere of South Africa’s Institute for Global Dialogue traces the main features of China’s economic and political dealings with Africa. Although China has been accused of “resource imperialism”, and of turning a blind eye to political misrule, he finds that its role in the continent has largely been positive, and that co-operation with China holds great promise for African countries.
Another region of growing Chinese involvement is Central Asia, China’s “near abroad”. Niklas Swanström of the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Programme looks at the security, energy, and trade interests that make the area of vital concern to Beijing. He argues that China must do more to increase its “soft power” in Central Asia if it is to consolidate its position there.
In our final article on China, Dru C. Gladney of Pomona College, California, provides a portrait of the country’s substantial Muslim population, describing its various ethnic constituent groups. He also details the situation in the politically sensitive province of Xinjiang, home to China’s Turkic Uighur people. Beijing’s crackdown against indigenous stirrings in Xinjiang for greater autonomy and independence has caused the remote desert territory to be dubbed China’s “Wild West”.
We conclude our issue with a reflection by author and Iran expert, Kaveh Afrasiabi, on how Hollywood in recent years has represented the Muslim and oriental “other”. Two films may be considered as emblematic polar opposites in this regard: the crusader drama Kingdom of Heaven (2005), in effect a cinematic plea for tolerance and understanding, and this year’s blockbuster 300, whose historically licentious demonisation of the ancient Persians amounts to an endorsement of the “clash of civilisations” thesis in its most virulent and extreme guise. Given the current tensions between the United States and Iran, with war an often-mooted possibility, the implications of the US box-office success of 300 are alarming, says Afrasiabi.
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