The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower

Political reform is part of the solution to this problem. China needs a more open, accountable and responsive form of government, one that can exercise control in what has become a more chaotic and empowered society. What such reform would look like remains an open question, but one that is being debated within the seniormost levels of the regime. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, John Thornton, an investment banker turned China expert, traces how Beijing is taking hesitant but clear steps toward greater rule of law and accountability.

China's sense of its own weakness casts a shadow over its foreign policy. It is unique as a world power, the first in modern history to be at once rich (in aggregate terms) and poor (in per capita terms). It still sees itself as a developing country, with hundreds of millions of peasants to worry about. It views many of the issues on which it is pressed—global warming, human rights—as rich-country problems. (When it comes to pushing regimes to open up, Beijing also worries about the implications for its own undemocratic structure.) But this is changing. From North Korea to Darfur to Iran, China has been slowly showing that it wants to be a responsible "stakeholder" in the international system.

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 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. The Chinese government has tried to educate its public on these issues, releasing a 12-part documentary last year, "The Rise of Great Nations," whose central lesson is that markets and not empire determine the long-run success of a great global power.