China: What Kind of Superpower?

As nationalist war-mongering goes, the anti-Japanese demonstrations taking place across China have been relatively tame. Chinese authorities have maintained tight control over the protesters, some of whom call for an armed response against Japan over disputed islands in the East China Sea: Plastic bottle-throwing is allowed, glass bottle-throwing discouraged. For all the jingoistic talk, the marches have been largely free of violence. China has far more to lose than gain by going to war. And yet the country’s conflicts with Japan and other Asian neighbors are a reminder of the potential dangers posed by China’s rise to global power.

According to Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China has already surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest economic power, in terms of the size of its gross domestic product. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund suggest that’s probably still a few years off, but either way, China is at least the world’s second-largest economy and its second-biggest military spender as well. Some policymakers in the U.S. and elsewhere, however, fear that China is a “premature superpower”—too underdeveloped and unsteady to act in a responsible manner. According to this line of thinking, an increasingly assertive China will use its clout to support abusive regimes in its own self-interest, threaten war, pursue beggar-thy-neighbor policies, and ignore what should be global goals on issues such as the environment and public health.