The Contest of the Century Read Free

modern China.
    The first is what one might call the Davos view, after the home of the World Economic Forum, the contention that China’s leaders are so obsessed with economic development at home that they have little time for or real interest in getting too involved in the affairs of the world. Even if they did want to push harder against the U.S., so the argument goes, they would soon be confronted with the reality of the enormouseconomic interdependence between the two countries. It is easy to see why such a view would take hold. Achieving high rates of growth has been the singular achievement of China’s Communist leaders over the last two decades and their principal justification for maintaining an iron grip on power. And for Davos optimists, globalization has transformed international politics, creating a web of economic connections and dependencies that prevent any country from rocking the boat. Geopolitics, with its emphasis on competition and struggle between nations, has been rendered unnecessary by the multinational global economy. In China, there is a cottage industry of scribes developing slogans to impress the rest of the world with how unthreatening its rise really is—from the “Shanghai smile” and “win-win” economic cooperation to “peaceful development.” (“Peaceful rise” was taken up at one stage, but then dropped when it was deemed to be too threatening.) In
The Post-American World
, which is in some ways the most influential international-relations book of recent years in the West, Fareed Zakaria writes that the Chinese are too pragmatic to let the vanities of power politics damage their economic interests.“The veneration of an abstract idea is somewhat alien to China’s practical mind-set,” he writes.
    Yet, when even the most materialistic countries arrive at a certain scale and economic reach, they feel they have no choice but to try and influence events beyond their shores. China’s epic urbanization push is being fueled by goods from the four corners of the earth—by oil from Saudi Arabia, by coal from Indonesia, by iron ore from Brazil, and by copper from the Congo. For the first time in its millennial history, China’s economic interests are genuinely global, and it needs a foreign policy to match them. Deng Xiaoping’s “hiding the brightness” is no longer sufficient. To keep its economy humming, China feels it needs to start molding the world it is operating in. China’s economy relies on the continued safety of seaborne trade—something which has been guaranteed since the end of the Second World War by the navy of the United States, the country which the Chinese elite mistrusts the most (with the possible exception of Japan). Like other great powers before it, China is building a navy to take to the high seas because it does not want to outsource the security of its economic lifelines to someone else. The problem-solving China so heralded at Davos is being replaced by something with much harder edges. In short, geopolitics is back.
    The second brand of conventional wisdom holds that the regime in Beijing is too insecure about its hold on power at home to think seriously about challenging the U.S. The brittleness is everywhere to be seen, from the heavy-handed security at the 2009 National Day parade to the periodic arrests of dissidents to the opacity of the political process. One of the most commonly cited factoids about modern China is that Beijing actually spends more money on internal security than it does on its defense budget, even though military spending has been rising sharply. But what this explanation misses is that domestic insecurity is feeding, not inhibiting, the desire to stand tall overseas. In one way or another, the Chinese Communist Party has been suffering a legitimacy crisis since it abandoned Marx and embraced the market in the late 1970s, and that crisis has been more acute since the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. The party has tried to fill