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Fareed Zakaria's informative treatise on the rise of China:

China's rise is no longer a prediction. It is a fact. It is already the world's fastest-growing large economy, and the second largest holder of foreign-exchange reserves, mainly dollars. It has the world's largest army (2.5 million men) and the fourth largest defense budget, which is rising by more than 10 percent annually. Whether or not it overtakes the United States economically, which looks to me like a distant prospect, it is the powerful new force on the global scene.
...
When historians look back at the last decades of the 20th century, they might well point to 1979 as a watershed. That year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, digging its grave as a superpower. It was also the year that China began its economic reforms. They were launched at a most unlikely gathering, the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, held in December 1978. Before the formal meetings, at a working-group session, the newly empowered party boss, Deng Xiaoping, gave a speech that turned out to be the most important one in modern Chinese history. He urged that the regime focus on development and modernization, and let facts—not ideology—guide its path. "It doesn't matter if it is a black cat or a white cat," Deng often said. "As long as it can catch mice, it's a good cat." Since then, China has done just that, pursued a modernization path that is ruthlessly pragmatic and nonideological.

The results have been astonishing. China has grown around 9 percent a year for more than 25 years, the fastest growth rate for a major economy in recorded history. In that same period it has moved 300 million people out of poverty and quadrupled the average Chinese person's income. And all this has happened, so far, without catastrophic social upheavals. The Chinese leadership has to be given credit for this historic achievement.

This analysis is particularly interesting:

The Chinese threat or challenge will not present itself in the familiar guise of another Soviet Union, straining to keep pace with America in military terms. It is more likely to be what Ramo describes as an "asymmetrical superpower." It will use its economic dominance and its political skills to achieve its objectives. China does not want to invade and occupy Taiwan; it is more likely to keep undermining the Taiwan independence movement, so that Beijing slowly accumulates advantage and wears out the opponent. "The goal for China is not conflict but the avoidance of conflict," Ramo writes. "True success in strategic issues involves manipulating a situation so effectively that the outcome is inevitably in favor of Chinese interests. This emerges from the oldest Chinese strategic thinker, Sun Zi, who argued that 'every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought'."

At least that's the plan. The trouble is that while maintaining this long-term strategy, China often lapses into short-term behavior that seems aggressive and hostile. Perhaps this is because the rational decision-making that guides its economic policy is not so easily applied in the realm of politics, where honor, history, pride and anger all play a large role. So with Taiwan, last week Beijing was playing out its long-term plan, "normalizing" relations with the island's main opposition party, and smothering it with conciliation. But last month it passed the anti-secession law, which angered most Taiwanese and alarmed Americans and Europeans.

Read the whole thing. And if you'd like to go a little deeper, this 2001 document (PDF) is interesting, highlighting how the Chinese view of international relations differs from American sensibilities:

Chinese worldviews tend to see an ever-evolving, ever-changing nature, without a set beginning and with no “end” to which the world is inexorably evolving; Chinese “analogical” or “correlative” thinking “accepts the priority of change or process over rest and permanence” and “presumes no ultimate agency responsible for the general order of things.”

This philosophical approach sees history more as a dialectical or cyclical, rather than linear, process. Worldviews in the United States, based on Western/Judeo-Christian philosophies and Enlightenment values, tend to presume a philosophical “beginning” and “end” point, that history moves linearly from an initial chaos, anarchy or “law of the jungle” toward a desirable, universalistic end, and that man can shape that destiny through concrete action. In its approach to foreign policy questions, U.S. views would then tend to favor action over acquiescence, regularized, formal, transparent, and predictably ordered relationships, and to mark progress by the steady and timely achievement of binding instruments and arrangements.

Chinese philosophical views spill over into the country’s international relations, and affect understandings of time, relationships and agreements: Chinese interlocutors will tend to take a politically pragmatic, even cynical, “long-term view”, and prefer personal, informal relationships forged on trust and mutually recognized codes of conduct rather than formal, institutionalized relationships based on legally-derived, concrete covenants.

I'd think that such a cynical, fluid worldview presents serious challenges to Western "ends," such as endeavors to "end terror" or "end tyranny," as well as undermines the potential for lasting, firm authority from international organizations like a reformed UN or the WTO. It also supports the idea of an asymmetrical conflict. China should keep the 21st Century interesting.

Posted by Bill at May 9, 2005 09:10 AM | TrackBack (1)

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