I decided to start a column today to highlight great articles when I run across them and think their insight would be of interest to Kossacks. I'll be writing from time to time when I see a particularly good article.
This idea was motivated by an article I recently read in Newsweek entitled "The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower." It talks about China's rise, and what it means for the United States as well as China's own government and people.
Follow me beneath the fold for some evidence that China is, in fact, a superpower, and what it means...
Shanghai
The leading markers the Newsweek article uses to point out that China is a superpower are:
In 2007 China contributed more to global growth than the United States, the first time another country had done so since at least the 1930s.
It also became the world's largest consumer, eclipsing the United States in four of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities.
And a few months ago China surpassed the United States to become the world's leading emitter of CO2.
Whether it's trade, global warming, Darfur or North Korea, China has become the new x factor, without which no durable solution is possible.
So what does this mean for the United States? Are we in for some big trouble in the global order or do we just need to make sure we play nice?
Some scholars and policy intellectuals (and a few generals in the Pentagon) look at the rise of China and see the seeds of inevitable great-power conflict and perhaps even war. Look at history, they say. When a new power rises it inevitably disturbs the balance of power, unsettles the international order and seeks a place in the sun. This makes it bump up against the established great power of the day (that would be us). So, Sino-U.S. conflict is inevitable.
But, but, but... There's hope.
But some great powers have been like Nazi Germany and others like modern-day Germany and Japan. The United States moved up the global totem pole and replaced Britain as the No. 1 country without a war between the two nations. Conflict and competition—particularly in the economic realm—between China and the United States is inevitable. But whether this turns ugly depends largely on policy choices that will be made in Washington and Beijing over the next decade.
In another Foreign Affairs essay, Princeton's John Ikenberry makes the crucially important point that the current world order is extremely conducive to China's peaceful rise. That order, he argues, is integrated, rule-based, with wide and deep foundations—and there are massive economic benefits for China to work within this system. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons make it suicidal to risk a great-power war. "Today's Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join," writes Ikenberry.
The Chinese show many signs of understanding these conditions. Their chief strategist, Zheng Bijian, coined the term "peaceful rise" to describe just such an effort on Beijing's part to enter into the existing order rather than overturn it.
It was a very good, insightful article. I think everyone should take a minute to read it, as it probably won't be long before this is the central issue of our national foreign policy debate.