China's Global Strategy

Posted by: Good Samaritan
on April 12, 2005 @ 02:38 PM EST

James Pinkerton sees the new entente bewteen China and India as an ominous development. He has noted before that China today resembles the Kaiser's Germany, looking for "a place in the sun." China has also been expanding its investments in Latin America, and courting Cuba.

China's rise has pushed Japan to embrace the US, so that Junichiro Koizumi rivals Tony Blair as Bush's chief ally abroad. Japan is a wealthy democracy, but it is also a former imperialist aggressor whose victims still hold a grudge. The Japan/US duo does not, perhaps, unambiguously enjoy the moral high ground.

China's growing soft power comes partly from being the world's biggest consumer (and gaining) for many commodities. But China's economic model is also attractive. While the US remains the world's richest country (not counting Luxembourg), China has been the world's most successful developing country over the past two decades. MORE...

Attempts to jump feet first into US-style laissez faire capitalism have mostly, in post-Soviet Russia in elsewhere, ranged from disappointing to disastrous. The Chinese have been successful without America's built-in, non-transferrable advantages, which range from the dollar to English to the thousand-year-old tradition of British common law. They have done so by letting property rights evolve organically from the rules already in place (a "two-track system"), rather than attempting to create them ex nihilo.

I prefer to see China as a future benign hegemon, taking the scepter of world leadership from America peacefully, as America took it from Britain. But a darker scenario is possible, and all depends on Taiwan. If China acquiesces in Taiwan's independence, it will become a peaceful economic giant, whose neighbors need not fear it. If China conquers Taiwan, it will generate military momentum that will put all its neighbors at risk and may lead to world war.

Will Bush craft an adequate response to the China threat? There seems to be a pattern: each president who boldly faces down one global threat is feeble in the face of the next one. Reagan stood tall against communism, but was weak in the face of the new Islamist threat: he fled from Lebanon when suicide bombers destroyed the US Embassy and Marine barracks there. When future historians look back on Bush, will they say that he shattered the radical-Islamist threat, only to flounder in the face of the global challenge from China?

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