Why Nations Rise by Manjari Chatterjee Miller;

Author:Manjari Chatterjee Miller;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Active Rise of China

In 1992, Barber Conable and David M. Lampton published an article in Foreign Affairs that carried a stark warning. They argued that the United States was dangerously underestimating China—that Americans comfortably but erroneously assumed the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that China no longer held any strategic value.1 The following year, New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, in an article titled “The Rise of China,” wrote that the only group in America paying “serious attention” to China was the business community.2 In today’s world, with the 2017 National Security Strategy document of the Trump administration labeling China the United States’ number one adversary, these warnings seem prescient. Even Chinese historians have talked of China’s rise as inevitable, a part of a longer arc of power transition. The historian Wang Gungwu famously observed that this is China’s fourth rise; the sheer size of China and the consequent “political weight” bestowed upon it, he argued, “cannot be wished away.”3 But in the very early 1990s, at the time these warnings were published, any discussion of China’s rise was not only unusual, but also superfluous. For the United States, fixated as it had been on Japan as the next challenger, China was neither an adversary nor even a rival.

Instead, China was a developing country with an authoritarian regime, and beyond that, after the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, also a pariah state. Yet a mere two decades later, in 2008, the New York Times would be pointing out, “No one worries much about Japan taking over the world today. When we wring our hands, it’s China we fear.”4 Thus, somewhere in those years of the 1990s and 2000s, China shifted, in the American mainstream perception, from poor pariah to a “rising economic superpower.”5 By 2002, the journal Foreign Affairs had collected all of its pertinent articles on China and republished them as a volume titled Rising China. The debate was not whether China was rising; rather, it was whether China would be a challenger power or maintain the status quo. And the world, in turn, debated how it should respond: should China be treated as a threat or as an opportunity?6 Buried in such angst-ridden questions about the rise of a possible threatening power lie bigger questions: What categorized China as a rising power? And was its behavior indeed revisionist?

If we look at China in the 1990s we find a shift in both military and economic power. China’s economic reforms, initiated by Deng Xiaoping’s politics of opening and reform (gaige kaifang) in the 1980s, had resulted in a booming economy. China had also begun to expand its military capabilities, and it already owned that ultimate post–World War II military capability—nuclear weapons. But material power was not the only difference between pre- and post-1990s China. China’s behavior on the world stage also began to change. While this behavior was scrutinized as a possible threat to the post–Cold War world, as we will see, much of it was in line with the behavior we have, in this book, come to expect of active rising powers.

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