China: Asia's Emerging Superpower

▪ 2000

by Dali L. Yang

      By conventional measures China should not have inspired the thriving cottage industry writing about its place in the world. China has the world's largest population (close to 1.3 billion), but its gross domestic product (GDP), translated into dollars, was only the world's seventh largest in 1998. In the same year, China's share of world merchandise exports was 3.4%, which gave it a ninth-place ranking, behind, for example, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and The Netherlands. Military spending, officially $9.8 billion for 1997, was dwarfed by U.S. expenditures of about $250 billion—even if the Chinese figure is significantly understated. Most military analysts note that China has only limited power-projection capabilities and is simply not in the same league as the United States, which has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. According to Bates Gill and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., “China owns considerably less top-level military equipment than medium military powers like Japan and Britain.” By these measures China is still a middle power. It deserves attention, but probably not much more than India, its southern neighbour, which has spent aggressively on military modernization and whose population is projected to surpass China's sometime in the next century.

      The question of China's rise to great power status is a comment not merely on China's present but also about its past and its future potential. For centuries, as the late Joseph Needham chronicled in Science and Civilization in China, China as a secular and bureaucratic empire led the West by most measures of development, providing major inventions such as paper. The early Ming dynasty saw China launch grand seafaring ventures that predated those of Columbus and reached all the countries around the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. As historian Daniel Boorstin points out, at the time when the pope was putting Galileo on trial in Rome, Jesuits were preaching the Galilean gospel in Beijing.

      It was not until the early 19th century that economic leadership passed from China to Western Europe. Whereas China was stuck with Confucian orthodoxy, the West thrived on modern science and industry. According to economic historian Agnus Maddison, China's share of world GDP shrank from 32.4% in 1820 to only 5.2% in 1952. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, China went through a century of humiliation, buffeted by domestic strife and foreign aggression. It was forced to cede territories and pay huge indemnities to foreign powers, including Great Britain, Russia, Germany, and Japan.

      China's very survival was at stake. Mao Zedong rose to power against this background. The era of Mao, however, was a mixed blessing for China. China's international profile rose, not the least owing to its confrontations with the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet China also isolated itself and suffered wrenching political calamities such as the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).

      Maoist excesses provided incentives for change. Since Mao's death in 1976, China has opened up to the world and adopted market reforms. As a result, the Chinese economy has shown much dynamism. Between 1978 and 1995, China's share of the world GDP more than doubled, rising from 5% in 1978 to 10.9% in 1995. Although still poor in per capita terms, this awe-inspiring performance, against the backdrop of what China was able to accomplish centuries earlier, has triggered considerable speculation about China's future. Even assuming a substantial slowdown of GDP growth to 5.5% per year, China's GDP will likely reach par with the United States by around 2015.

      The rapid growth of China's GDP has raised questions—especially in the United States—about how China might use that power. For decades Americans projected their idealistic fantasies and fears onto the Sino-American relationship, casting China as either an enemy or a dear friend. Even though the Chinese society and economy have liberalized, China remains a nondemocracy. Most disturbing to some, China stood firm and retained its commitment to socialism even as the Soviet Union fell apart. Democracies are not known for being generous toward nondemocracies. Will China be a responsible member of international society? Will it instead use its growing wealth to fund an expansion of its military might and challenge American hegemony?

      States must make reasonable provisions for defense. This is all the more so for China. Formidable powers such as Russia, Japan, and India surround it. It is therefore to be expected that China will strengthen its military as its economy permits. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that China's international behaviour has moderated substantially over time. In the 1980s China, under Deng Xiaoping, sharply curtailed military spending in order to focus on economic development. Internationally, the days when China sought to export revolution are a distant memory only. A nuclear power and permanent member of the UN Security Council, China has become a member of most international organizations. It has also signed international agreements on nuclear nonproliferation as well as human rights. Amid the Asian financial crisis that precipitated currency collapses in Russia and other countries, China maintained its currency peg and introduced decisive economic policies to stimulate the economy rather than pile on the bandwagon of devaluation.

      China's leaders have also been preoccupied with domestic challenges. In just two decades China has witnessed a dramatic growth in its population, rapid urbanization, the transition from planning to market, and integration into the global economy with remarkably little disruption to the global system. The draconian population-control program, while unpalatable to some in the West, nevertheless points to a striking determination to resolve China's population and resource imbalance within China's borders. Moreover, China's construction of huge dams and other facilities and the proposed relocation of its space launch site to the island of Hainan suggest a leadership that does not anticipate a major war that would make all these facilities easy strategic targets.

      However well-intentioned Chinese leaders may be, they are cursed by the legacy of a divided country. The international community will be hard-pressed to differentiate between a China that develops its military might to safeguard national sovereignty and pursue national reunification and a China that may become a threat to other countries. In fact, by selling arms to either side of the Taiwan Strait, the United States and others have fueled an arms race between China and Taiwan, accentuating perceptions of China's unruliness.

      In short, in spite of Chinese growth, it will be a long time before China can truly rival the heavy-spending United States in military terms. For now, the U.S. and China have learned to live with each other and cooperate on various issues despite their differences. In 1999 the Sino-U.S. relationship weathered the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugos., and the alleged theft by China of U.S. nuclear weapons secrets to return to negotiations over China's bid to join the World Trade Organization. In the meantime, China's integration into the global system and its own behaviour point to an emerging and responsible power. Yet the question of Taiwan, to which the United States has made a special commitment, may yet spoil China's appearance.

Dali L. Yang is associate professor of political science and director of the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. Among his books is Calamity and Reform in China.

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