– China, Growing Superpower
 

China's Star is Rising as a World Superpower
By Georgie Anne Geyer

WASHINGTON -- The White House and the State Department, curiously, recently sent letters to the American ambassadors assigned to Latin American countries. In them, they asked for the ambassadors' best assessments of how China is rising in the region. As one diplomat told me, "We're very eager to hear back from them."

Giving the discussion a touch of the legend of the Abominable Snowman or Great Yeti, many analysts are increasingly concerned about China's new "footprint in the world." So I listened in on some conferences; here's what our best experts are saying:

China is now one of the world's three superpowers.

As Fred Bergson, the brilliant director of the Institute for International Economics, said at a recent China meeting at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: "We should change our thinking of the world, because today there are basically three economic superpowers -- the U.S., the European Union and China. It will soon be the third-largest trading partner in the world, and it is already the largest recipient of foreign investment." He went on for 10 minutes listing all of China's superior economic data.

At the same time, added Bates Gill, holder of the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the center: "China clearly has become more multilateral than the U.S. -- in peacekeeping, in the U.N., in the last few years in its increased relations with its Southeast Asian neighbors ... It has been waging joint military exercises with foreign militaries, including Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Australia and the United Kingdom.

"As it has expanded relations across the globe in a very short time, we see 'China's New Security Diplomacy.' China wants to marshal its great wealth and power, but it understands that it must do so through China's 'peaceful rise philosophy.' And it is getting a full court press across the world. It is simply unprecedented."

The administration understands this well, representatives told me, and in sharp contrast to other areas, President Bush well understands China. He calls it a relationship that should be "constructive, cooperative and candid" -- but he is not at all willing, as the Chinese would like, to establish an American/Chinese condominium in Asia and abandon traditional friends such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore. He also knows that the "Chinese miracle" is really the "Asian miracle" -- between 60 percent and 70 percent of the goods produced in the hard-working Chinese coastal zones originate from foreign capital.

When it comes to Taiwan, there seems to be a surprising agreement among scholars and diplomats that Taiwan's security needs and relative independence can no longer be assured by military means, and that it may eventually merge in some manner with the mainland.

David "Mike" Lampton, director of the China Studies program at Johns Hopkins University, said: "Five percent to 6 percent of Taiwanese are now permanent mainland residents. Their investments are huge. History has passed them by. If Taiwan could get the same relationship to China as Hong Kong but keep their democracy, what price would Americans be willing to pay?"

There is a deep sense among experts that Japan/China relations constitute the most dangerous flashpoint in East Asia today -- even more than North Korea.

"When I discuss Japan with the Chinese, the veneer comes off immediately -- and the young are as vehement as the older Chinese, so the feelings are not fading with generations," one American diplomat mused with me. "The Japanese, meanwhile, have not found a way to exorcise the ghost of World War II; yet at the same time, young Japanese feel put-upon, that they didn't do anything. It needs something like a truth commission."

What overlying ideas did I take out of all the discussion about China?

China is indeed rising as a superpower, albeit a dangerously unbalanced one economically and socially. Nevertheless, in its "rise" (the word everyone uses nowadays), it is rapidly (and ironically, given its secluded and fearful past) taking over the multilateral, peacekeeping, good-neighbor role that America always played in the world. It is changing America's relations everywhere, whether in Africa, the Middle East, Iran, Central Asia or Latin America, where, for instance, it is wooing Venezuela for oil and the Dominican Republic for access to American markets. (Thus, the letters to the American ambassadors; unfortunately, they underline the fact that we have no policy there ourselves.)

China is the first country in history to become a superpower while being poor, not a democracy, and with basically a non-market economy. Yet, that vulnerable creature is daily disproving another of the most basic precepts of Vice President Dick Cheney and his team, along with the reasons for the Iraq war, for instance -- that unilateralism would assure the world that no other single power or grouping of powers could challenge America.

Amazingly, China, for most of its history, was an intensely paranoid and inward-looking country. The United States should grasp this moment to get China integrated into international institutions as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the moment comes as the administration is dissing and even threatening to dismantle those very institutions. It is a Chinese puzzlement.