The New York Times reports today that China is starting to become more assertive about being a rising world power:
BEIJING, Dec. 8 ? China?s Communist Party has a new agenda: it is encouraging people to discuss what it means to be a major world power and has largely stopped denying that China intends to become one soon.
In the past several weeks China Central Television has broadcast a 12-part series describing the reasons nine nations rose to become great powers. The series was based on research by a team of elite Chinese historians, who also briefed the ruling Politburo about their findings.
Until recently China?s rising power remained a delicate topic, and largely unspoken, inside China. Beijing has long followed a dictum laid down by Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who died in 1997: ?tao guang yang hui,? literally to hide its ambitions and disguise its claws.
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Yet this tradition of modesty has begun to fade, replaced by a growing confidence that China?s rise is not fleeting and that the country needs to do more to define its objectives.
With its $1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, surging military spending and diplomatic initiatives in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Beijing has begun asserting its interests far beyond its borders. Chinese party leaders are acting as if they intend to start exercising more power abroad rather than just protecting their political power at home.
?Like it or not, China?s rise is becoming a reality,? says Jia Qingguo, associate dean of the Beijing University School of International Studies. ?Wherever Chinese leaders go these days, people pay attention. And they can?t just say, ?I don?t want to get involved.? ?
All of this was, of course, largely inevitable. China is a nation of more than one billion people and home to one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Additionally, the world has essentially been a one-power world since the fall of the USSR, and China has always been the most likely candidate to replace Russia as a superpower. The idea that they would not assert their growing strength was, at the very least, naive. For now, it seems as though China is pursuing its interests economically and through international organizations such as the U.N., which it has become more assertive recently. That doesn’t mean that things will always be peaceful, though
The Central Intelligence Agency says that China?s military spending may be two or three times higher than it acknowledges and that it allocates more to its military than any other country except the United States.
Beijing has cultivated close ties to countries that provide it with commodities and raw materials, regardless of their human rights records. Sudan, Myanmar and Zimbabwe have all escaped international sanctions in large part because of Chinese protection.
China?s increasing international engagement has also stimulated a more robust academic discussion about its global role and the potential for tensions with the United States.
Contrary to what some on the right might thing, conflict between the United States and China is not at all inevitable. We no longer live in the world that saw the rise of powers like Germany to challenge the dominance of the British and French, a rise that led to two of the bloodiest wars in human history. For one thing, the existence of nuclear weapons means that direct military confrontation between world power is exceedingly unlikely to occur. For all the rhetoric of the Cold War, the United States and Russia never fought each other directly. Second, globalization, the international marketplace, and China’s rise as an economic power that needs to sell its products in places like Europe and the United States makes it unlikely that we’d even see something as bad as the Cold War between the US and China — we can’t afford not to have access to China’s goods, and they can’t afford not to be able to sell to us. Finally, it shouldn’t be forgotten that, in some respects, the United States and China have mutual interests that will bring them together on occasion. One example is North Korea. Another is the fight against Islamofacsism, which is undoubtably a concern to China with its massive Muslim population in the West.
Nonetheless, this much is true. We will be hearing from China, and about issues that concern it, in the future.
