From Chinese Press

China's reemergence as a major power doesn't challenge US

By Joseph Nye, Jr. (Caixin Online)
Updated: 2010-05-07 14:10

In a long-term view, the rise of China is to be welcomed, but today China remains what the journalist Martin Wolf calls a "premature superpower."

China's current reputation for power benefits from projections about the future. In one poll, 44 percent of respondents mistakenly thought that China already had the world's largest economy, compared to 27 percent who accurately picked the United States (which is three times larger). Martin Jacques even entitled his recent book "When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order."

Some people draw analogies to the rise of Germany a century ago, and predict a coming conflict with the US like that between Germany and Britain. Fortunately, these fears are exaggerated.

While most projections of Chinese power are based on the rapid growth rate of gross domestic product, China has other significant power resources. In terms of basic resources, its territory is equal to that of the United States and its population is four times greater. It has the world's largest army, about 200 nuclear weapons, and modern capabilities in space and cyber space (including the world's largest number of Internet users.)

In soft-power resources, China still lacks cultural industries able to compete with Hollywood or Bollywood; its universities are not yet the equal of America's; and it lacks the many non-governmental organizations that generate much of America's soft power.

However, it is making major efforts to increase it soft power. China has always had an attractive traditional culture, and it has created several hundred Confucius Institutes around the world to teach its language and culture. The enrollment of foreign students in China has tripled from 36,000 to 110,000 over the past decade, the number of foreign tourists has also increased dramatically, and China Radio International has increased its broadcasts in English to 24 hours a day. China has also adjusted its diplomacy to use more multilateral arrangements to alleviate fears, and reduce the likelihood of other countries allying to balance a rising power.

While China has impressive power resources, one should be skeptical about projections based solely on current growth rates, political rhetoric, military contingency plans, and flawed historical analogies. In both China and the US, perceptions of the other country are heavily colored by domestic political struggles, and there are people in both countries who want to see the other as an enemy.

Even without such distortions, the military on both sides would be seen by its countrymen as derelict in its duties if it did not plan for all contingencies. As for historical analogies, it is important to remember that by 1900, Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial power, and the Kaiser was pursuing an adventurous, globally oriented foreign policy that was bound to bring about a clash with other great powers.

In contrast, China still lags far behind the United States economically, and has focused its policies primarily on its region and on its economic development. While its "market Leninist" economic model (the so-called "Beijing Consensus") provides soft power in authoritarian countries, it has the opposite effect in many democracies.

Nonetheless, the rise of China recalls Thucydides' warning that belief in the inevitability of conflict can become one of its main causes. Each side, believing it will end up at war with the other, makes reasonable military preparations which then are read by the other side as confirmation of its worst fears. This would be a major loss for both sides.

In fact, the "rise of China" is a misnomer. "Reemergence" would be more accurate, since by size and history, the Middle Kingdom has long been a major power in East Asia. Technically and economically, China was the world's leader (though without global reach) from 500 to 1500 AD. Only in the last half millennium was it overtaken by Europe and America, which were first to benefit from the industrial revolution.

After Deng Xiaoping's market reforms in the early 1980s, China's high annual growth rates of 8 percent to 9 percent led to a remarkable tripling of its gross national product in the last two decades of the 20th century, and this pragmatic economic performance, along with its Confucian culture, enhanced China's soft power in the region.

China has a long way to go to equal the power resources of the United States, and still faces many obstacles to its development. At the beginning of the 21st century, the American economy was about twice the size of China's in purchasing power parity, and more than three times as large at official exchange rates.

All such comparisons and projections are somewhat arbitrary. Even if Chinese GDP passes that of the United States around 2030, the two economies would be equivalent in size, but not equal in composition. China would still have a vast underdeveloped countryside, and it will begin to face demographic problems from the delayed effects of the one-child-per-couple policy it enforced in the 20th century.

Moreover, as countries develop, there is a tendency for growth rates to slow. Assuming a 6 percent Chinese growth and only 2 percent American growth after 2030, China would not equal the United States in per-capita income until sometime in the second half of the century.

Per-capita income provides a measure of the sophistication of an economy. In other words, China's impressive growth rate combined with the size of its population will surely lead it to pass the American economy in total size at some point. This has already provided China with impressive power resources, but that is not the same as equality. And since the United States is unlikely to be standing still during that period, China is a long way from posing the kind of challenge to American preponderance that the Kaiser's Germany posed when it passed Britain at the beginning of the last century. The facts do not at this point justify alarmist predictions of a coming war.

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