The Economist, March 21st-27th 2009
… The rise of China over the past three decades has been astonishing. But it has lacked the one feature it needed fully to satisfy the ultranationalist fringe: an accompanying decline of the West. Now capitalism is in a funk in its heartlands. Europe and Japan, embroiled in the deepest post-war recession, are barely worth consideration as rivals. America, the superpower, has passed its peak. Although in public China’s leaders eschew triumphalism, there is a sense in Beijing that the reassertion of the Middle Kingdom’s global ascendancy is at hand.
Read on…
The cover’s bold. I don’t see things being quite as dramatic as the Economist makes them out to be though.
Yes, America has lost some of it’s edge — being broke will do that to you — but I don’t think we’re quite at seeing the fall of the West. At the same time, I don’t see the problems mentioned in the article as being China’s main hurdles to becoming a full-fledged superpower.
Take the “rumblings of discontent” mentioned (in the 5th para). I don’t think China’s ascent requires a resolution to every national problem. If her economy will hold, her people will.
And when it comes to China’s reluctance to “intervene in other countries’ affairs” (8th para), that is something she’ll get over.
China still needs the cooperation of a West that is already paranoid and looking over its shoulder. A restrained approach to global politics serves the Middle Kingdom well for now, easing the minds of statesmen who’ve rarely been subject to the values of other nations. That will change the moment China is powerful enough to assert her own values.
The thing that the article got right is the question in its title. Yet it reads more like “How Western Countries See China”.
I’d like to know how China’s view of the world will come to impact me, and I think that’s the question on most people’s minds.
No one in the mainstream media has managed to frame this right, and not for a lack of trying. Their titles and opening paragraphs, however, seem to indicate that they’re aware of the questions they should be asking.
It’s amazing to me that they can’t even extrapolate the view from someone else’s window, being too tied to the view from their own.