China’s rise,the USA and global order: Contested perspectives and an alternative approach

The alarmist school

Jacques, as referred to above, views China’s rise as the signal of a possible death blow to the Western domination of the world that has lasted more than two centuries, first by the British and then by the Americans. Identifying China’s rise as the focal point of a shift in global power from the West to the East, he contends that an economically dominant China will gradually widen and deepen its footprints in the military, political and cultural spheres. That would initiate a remaking of the global order as China would prefer to reorder or reshape the world based on its own interests, image and power. The next century will see a few competing powers but China would eventually emerge as the dominant power (Jacques, 2009: 433). As to the nature of a China-dominated world order, he believes that it would be fundamentally different from the West-dominated world order. China perceives itself as a “civilization state” rather than a nation-state, a specific Europe-centered political arrangement that developed after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. All Chinese governments – imperial, nationalist and communist – saw, and still see, themselves as the guardian of this “civilization state”, which means China is a historical civilization stretching over two millennia, whereas the idea of nation-state, in the Eastern context, is a European colonial imposition. All Chinese governments have also justified their unlimited powers in the name of protecting the Chinese civilization and resisting Western ideas of human rights, democracy and other cultural practices.

Externally, the Chinese civilization, Jacques argues, built around itself a system of international relations what came to be known as the “tributary system”, which declined by 1800. In this system, the neighbors acknowledged China’s cultural superiority, paid tributes and, in turn, got Chinese protection from threats. For the next 150 years from 1800 to the 1949 communist revolution, China succumbed to Japanese and European, primarily British, colonial domination; self-assertion started after the 1949 communist victory leading to Japanese and European exit from China. The current economic resurgence of China, coupled with America’s relative decline, Jacques concludes, may facilitate the return of the tributary system (Jacques, 2009: 14). Finally, China will have as great an influence in world politics as the USA, or even greater, as it is set to capture the commanding heights in the global economy in the next two decades. ³ “Given that China promises to be so inordinately powerful and different”, writes Jacques, “it is difficult to resist the idea that in time that its rise will herald the birth of a new international order” (Jacques, 2009: 16).

Friedberg (2011), writing from a strategic perspective but in a similar tone to Jacques, cautions that China’s growing strength is not only morphing into an unavoidable intense rivalry with the USA, but also Beijing’s non-confrontational strategy is gradually resulting in a China-dominated world. China–US ideological differences and contradictory geopolitical interests, he asserts, will drive them down the road to hostile relationships. China is not solely an emerging economic power; it is also fast developing as a military power threatening the USA in every way. Friedberg refers to Washington’s strategic weaknesses to face the Chinese threats as a prelude to possible outcomes that the USA is displaced, that it becomes incapable of responding to the Chinese threats in a “measured and timely way”. He strongly argues that Chinese threats are potentially more dangerous than the threats posed by the former Soviet Union; Beijing’s sustained economic growth allows it to go for long-term military buildup and thus exerts influence on other nations. Common economic interests, marked by their trade interdependencies or China’s gradual liberalizations, are unlikely to stop Beijing and Washington from sliding into tough competition and eventual confrontations.

The principal difference between Jacques’ and Friedberg’s positions is that while the former focuses on how China’s growing power is seeking to change the rules of global order from a civilizational and cultural point of view, Firedberg exclusively draws American policymakers’ attention, using a realist tone, to China’s strategic approach designed to push the USA out of East Asia and urges a stiff US response to China. Despite analytical merits and contributions to the US’s China policy debates, Friedberg sounds pessimistic about mutual cooperation between rival regimes with differing political, ideological and strategic attributes. That Chinese power is expanding does not necessarily mean impending confrontations between Beijing and Washington, as both emphasize diplomacy and non-military means to avoid any Hobbesian “state of nature” in the future. The possibility that the two competing powers can co-prosper by managing their confrontations and survive together should merit more rigorous academic analyses.

Kang (2007), in a close shot at Jacques’ interpretation of the tributary system and, at the same time, countering Friedberg’s arguments in the East Asian regional context, has examined the question of why the East and Southeast Asian nations accommodate rather than balance China’s rise in the modern context. He acknowledges the power of China’s ideas, culture and knowledge that brought it the central position in the region in the past but offers pure economic and practical political reasons for China’s acceptance by its regional neighbors at present. East Asian states, Kang asserts, see more economic benefits in China’s rise in terms of trade expansions, investments and cooperation to deal with major crises, such as the 1997 economic crisis that seriously shook up their social and political bases. Politically, China is viewed as a stabilizing force; a weak China may open the door for outside powerful states to deeply penetrate and control the region, a stark reference to East Asia’s colonial past. So neighbors, Kang argues, look beyond China’s growing economic and military might and view Beijing more as a benevolent power. He does not, however, move beyond the East Asian region to examine whether distant states in other regions of the world, such as an India-dominated South Asia, perceive and view China in a similar way, since China’s growing power and influence, as spillover effects, are affecting other world regions directly or indirectly.

Jacques’ thesis on the impact of a rising China on the global stage, in contrast to Kang’s arguments, sounds somewhat anachronistic. China is set to rise economically but that does not guarantee it the capacity to rebuild the world order to suit its own interests. It is unlikely that China, despite its phenomenal economic growth of the last two to three decades, except the recent slow growth due to the global economic recession, would quickly surge ahead of the world’s largest economies (USA, India, Brazil and Russia combined) with a wide margin to take over or recreate the international order. In fact, there is less and less scope for China to prosper like the 19th century European colonial powers that developed quickly by exploiting and impoverishing the colonized peoples. Beijing’s prosperity seems to be more linked to the co-prosperity of other global economies, particularly the US economy – China’s largest trading partner. ⁴

China’s weakness is further exposed by its high dependence on foreign resources. Its resource-hungry but booming economy compels it to develop good ties with the Middle Eastern, African and Central Asian oil- and gas-rich countries. Any disruptions in resource supply caused by regional instability or diplomatic manipulations by the USA threaten China’s march toward continued economic modernization. There are some reports that the US-led NATO air operations in Libya and the division of the Sudan in July 2011 leading to the emergence of the new state of South Sudan were aimed at, among other factors, reversing China’s economic expansion (Petras, 2012). Beijing’s multi-billion dollar oil and trade contracts with the Gaddafi regime heavily suffered; in Sudan, where China invested billions of dollars in the oil industry, internal insurgency-related developments seriously hampered its interests. Israel and the West allegedly trained and armed the South Sudanese rebels to attack Chinese oil workers and thus disrupt the flow of oil to China (Cartalucci, 2014). Jacques’ book does not address this important issue. Lastly, China’s recent miraculous economic growth has also brought with it the impending dangers of economic and social inequalities. Any serious political instability spawned by inequalities may threaten the communist regime and derail economic growth. The rising social gaps between rich and poor Chinese pushed China’s Gini coefficient ⁵ to 0.47 in 2012 (Bremmer, 2013). It clearly means social and economic inequalities in China have already reached an alarming level with the potential for mass unrest and violence. Jacques falls short of providing an in-depth analysis of this destabilizing trend in China’s long-term economic expansion, although he does not overlook this issue completely.

Despite shortcomings, Jacques’ provocative thesis has found many supporters. Recently, Cardenal and Araujo (2013) have sounded a note of similar alarm for the West. In their book China’s Silent Army, Cardenal and Araujo make the argument that China is slowly conquering the world, and the West could soon find itself controlled by Chinese overlords. The global economic recession that started in 2008 is facilitating China’s expansion in the West. Chinese investors and entrepreneurs, taking advantage of the economic turmoil, are buying stakes in strategic assets in the West, as in the developing world, and capturing a large share of their markets. Today, Chinese financial magnets control the Greek Port of Piraeus, Portuguese electronic industries and the British Thames Water company, and are riding ahead of the Americans in terms of investments in Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse (Cardenal and Araujo, 2013: xii). Mining and logging industries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are also falling under the sway of the Chinese companies. Beijing’s growing penetrations into all continents and almost every country of the world, they assert, highlight its unstoppable journey to conquer the world, leave behind visible footprints and trap everyone in its sphere of influence. China’s colossal economic expansion, Cardenal and Araujo believe, is “laying the foundation for the new world order of the twenty-first century: a world under China’s leadership” (Cardenal and Araujo, 2013: 4).

Whereas Jacques presents a comprehensive discussion of the China threat involving its political, economic and historical dimensions, Cardenal and Araujo primarily focus on China’s growing economic prowess. This narrow focus on China misses a comparative discussion on other rising economic powers, particularly the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries, and where China actually stands compared to its economic peers, including the USA. Definitely, China is already a giant economic power, set to occupy the top position in the list of global economic power rankings in the next 10–15 years but that does not necessarily mean the world is falling deep under Chinese hegemony. Until now China has not been a global military power, has not had an attractive ideology to export to other nations or any alternative model of global governance consisting of a set of international organizations and regimes, rules of participation and resolution of interests-driven conflicts among nations. Cardenal and Araujo’s alarmist message about China loses its credibility as China is nowhere close to turning the world upside down and ushering in a new world order under Chinese leadership.

Hu (2011), a Chinese scholar, has developed the thesis that greatly refurbishes China’s image as a responsible and attractive superpower. China’s continued economic expansion, he believes, would end the era of US hegemony by initiating a power shift by 2020 from the current unipolar to a multipolar world order. Unlike Jacques, Hu sees China not as “the” emerging dominant actor but one of the three dominant actors that are set to shape the future world order – the other two being the European Union and the USA (Hu, 2011: 13). He, however, warns that China’s development trajectory is rife with domestic and international challenges. The list of domestic challenges is quite long with big issues such as maintaining social and political stability, what he calls “great order under heaven” (Hu, 2011: 45), the creation of a strong human resource base to boost industrial outputs and value-added capacities, overcoming the problem of aging population, urbanization, research and development, and so on. On the external front, the greatest problem facing China, Hu believes, is the problem of global climate change. Recent concerns about global warming and multilateral efforts to tackle deteriorating global climate conditions have put enormous pressures on emerging economies such as China and India to cut their emissions. Hu sees this as the main constraint on China’s economic and social development.

Hu’s emphasis on global climate change, it should be easily noticed, shifts attention from the more pressing domestic issues such as China’s institutional development. China is making tremendous advances in the economic realm while upholding its non-democratic, communist political order, which in Western political parlor is dubbed authoritarianism. Lack of political reforms has already created great discontents in the Chinese society that speaks of a China which is not monolithic in terms of social values and political views. In a random sample survey on the role of government and political leadership, conducted in 2008, Chinese respondents expressed differing views. On the question of whether the political leaders, who are assumed to be morally upright, should decide everything in the society, 45.3 percent respondents disagreed (Nathan, 2010). Clearly, there are dissenting views in the Chinese society, although not publicized that much in the outside world.

Shirk’s (2008) work builds on the social and political dissents in China. She has developed a stunning thesis on how Chinese leaders were scared of their country’s economic development, prosperity and dissent. As China grows more prosperous through trade and investment interactions with other countries, the more it becomes open to the outside world. Shirk notes that this openness, coupled with the bitter experience of the 1989 pro-democracy movements, is making Chinese leaders nervous about their own citizens; they are, in fact, haunted by the prospects of more mass protests that may someday bring down the communist system. This fear critically determines China’s overall approach to foreign countries, particularly the USA – a critical point either intentionally missed or ignored by Hu. Weiss (2014) adds further nuance to this important point. She discusses the Chinese government’s policies on nationalist protests taking place between 1985 and 2012 and attempts to demystify the puzzle as to why some protests were tolerated and others suppressed. According to her analysis, the Chinese government allowed as well as quelled nationalist protests to strengthen its hand in negotiations with external powers. For example, in 2005 Beijing allowed anti-Japanese protests to solidify its opposition to grant Japan a permanent seat on the United Nations (UN) Security Council. China’s communist government is, at the same time, scared of the signaling effect of nationalist protests – that demonstrators would someday openly criticize and challenge the government.

Hu also applies a narrow approach to analyze China’s rise and its place in the global order. China’s rise is a major global issue but he sidetracks how that affects the grand matrix of interactions between China and the outside world. In addition, it is questionable whether an economically powerful China can be logically called “a new type of superpower”, which Hu has used as the subtitle of his book. He primarily limits his analysis within the parameters of China’s rise in the economic realm while not presenting readers with enough analysis on how he justifies the case for China as “a new type of superpower”, which perhaps refers to China’s image and influence more as a soft power, an important issue extensively analyzed by Kurlantzick (2007) and Li (2009), among others.

Kurlantzick (2007) finds China’s growing use of soft power tools, such as offers of economic aid and cooperation for poor nations with no strings attached, trade incentives, cultural missions and language training institutes in foreign countries, generous scholarships, grants for foreign students and scholars, etc., as contributing to China’s image as a benign global power. The most dramatic impacts this soft power strategy has produced are noticeable in Southeast Asian countries and in other world regions far beyond the Chinese national borders (see, for example, Blanchard, 2011; Holyk, 2011). China is effectively emerging, Kurlantzick concludes, as an Asian soft power to challenge the USA. Li’s (2009) edited book, on the other hand, is an extensive analysis on a wide range of views, domestic as well as international, on China’s soft power and how China uses its soft power tools to cultivate relations with other nations in the world. China’s so-called “peaceful rise” is primarily premised on this soft power strategy. Despite commendable successes, China’s soft power strategy, Li tells the readers, suffers from two major limitations – China, unlike the USA, lacks any exportable political values and it is passing through a transitional phase from communism to a capitalism-oriented communist system. If China is “a new type of superpower”, its major attributes originate from this growing soft power influence.

Subramanian (2011) presents a more nuanced analysis of China’s economic dominance in the world of the 2020s and beyond, although he reaches the same conclusion as the scholars discussed above. His book on China’s economic dominance takes a historical approach to investigate what factors contribute to global economic dominance by a powerful country. He constructs a “new index of economic dominance” by using the three factors of GDP, trade and creditor–debtor status and finds that the three factors determined British dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries and that of the USA in the 20th century. By the same criteria, Subramanian asserts, China will be the dominant economic power by 2030 and he predicts that China’s dominance will be much broader in scope and magnitude. That means an increase in China’s ability to create new rules and exceptions for the global economic and trade order, which the USA, based on its economic clout, has so far done, especially after the Second World War. Subramanian concludes that after 2030 China’s economic preeminence will lead not to a multipolar world but “a near-unipolar world with Chinese economic hegemony” (Subramanian, 2011: 100–101). This remains, however, a conditional scenario. He assumes that the Chinese currency renminbi will attain international status as a reserve currency and that the Chinese society will face no political upheaval, such as the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy mass protests that rattled China in 1989.

The most interesting part of Subramanian’s arguments is that an economically dominant China need not pose any threats to the post-war open and rule-based economic order, since Beijing’s prosperity, like the West’s, depends on its ability to participate in the open economic order. Still, the lack of political reforms and territorial ambitions point to China’s uncertain course of actions at the regional and global levels. The world needs an insurance to tame China down in case it goes awry. “And that insurance”, Subramanian writes, “must take the form of reviving multilateralism and tethering China to it” (Subramanian, 2011: 5). A “China round” of talks under the World Trade Organization (WTO), he opines, is the right approach to tie China down in the rule-based global trading systems to avoid disruptive actions by Beijing. Subramanian did not, however, foresee the US actions designed to undercut China’s influence in Asia. The USA has promoted a new trading bloc – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – that aims at containing China economically in the East Asian region and beyond, an initiative that might make China cautious to participate in future multilateral arrangements under US leadership. The TPP has a membership of 12 Pacific littoral states, excluding China. That the TPP is being used as an anti-China economic bloc was clear from President Barack Obama’s statement: “When more than 95 percent of our potential customers live outside our borders, we can’t let countries like China write the rules of the global economy, we should write those rules…“ (The Diplomat, 2015). Furthermore, Subramanian’s projected economic growth of China fails to critically examine important infrastructural issues, including the availability of water, land, power supply, working-age population, fluctuations in global demand for Chinese exports, environmental hazards, etc., that may considerably constrain China’s future growth.

Ikenberry (2011) has been arguing for quite some years along the lines Subramanian has argued in his book about China’s interests to operate under the US-created world order. He maintains that China has little incentive to overthrow the existing liberal international economic order because China’s unprecedented growth in the last two to three decades has been directly caused by its being plugged into the existing world economy and its acceptance of the basic norms and rules developed, shaped and nurtured by the USA. He believes that China’s future growth will continue to depend on it. So, there can be little motivation on China’s part to overthrow an economic order that has been so helpful to its great economic strides – one in which it is performing better than all its competitors.

Ikenberry’s arguments to some extent also complement Johnston’s (2007). Johnston scrutinizes the effects of socialization of China in international relations from a constructivist perspective and his findings seem to rule out the proclivity of a rising China to throw out the current liberal global order. He examines how the attitudes and ideas of Chinese diplomats active in international arms control negotiation processes and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum changed in the period from 1980 to 2000 and concludes that Chinese diplomats proved more cooperative and self-restraining in their dealings with international security institutions. It can be extrapolated from Johnston’s arguments that as China gets more involved in multilateral institutions the more it gets socialized, producing a restraint on the disposition to use force to realize national interests. Of course, critics can still point out that Johnston’s findings are primarily drawn from security regimes and they may not hold true for other regional and global organizations. He is also frank enough to admit this: “This learning process appears to have moved faster in China’s arms control and development diplomacy than in other areas of foreign policy” (Johnston, 2007: 68). Beijing’s cooperative behavior with security institutions may not be, however, separated from its overall cooperation patterns developed over the past more than three decades since reforms kick-started in 1979. China is no longer the pre-reform Maoist China when it either ignored or approached international institutions with great trepidation. Johnston’s analysis of China’s socialization in the international security regimes remains very important, but a slew of other critical factors, such as China’s domestic political and economic dynamics, high risks of great power conflict, the wiggle room in diplomacy and negotiations China’s rise brings for it, etc., should have drawn his attention.

The school of deniers

Jacques and the likeminded China watchers’ alarmist theses on China’s rise are effectively countered by Nathan and Scobell (2012), as well as Goh (2013), who offer more nuanced analyses of what China’s rise means for the global and the East Asian regional order. Nathan and Scobell, while explaining the geostrategic challenges that make China vulnerable to regional and global foes, hurl up a rebuttal to scholars and commentators who portray China as a behemoth bent on driving the USA out of Asia. They argue that China’s security policy mirrors its weaknesses and vulnerabilities to threats – a serious issue that drives Beijing to pursue defensive foreign and security policies. Chinese leaders hardly act from an already “fixed blueprint”; rather, Chinese foreign and security policies keep developing as reactions to how the policies of other countries affect China and its interests (Nathan and Scobell, 2012: xxii). China’s gradual opening to the outside world and ideas under the processes of globalization have subjected it to external penetrations, Nathan and Scobell aver, with unavoidable consequences for its domestic legal, judicial, banking and administrative systems, requiring Beijing to yield some of its autonomy (Nathan and Scobell, 2012: 275). This has prevented Beijing from becoming an international trouble-maker, if it had any such intentions at all. In addition, three critical factors – an aging population, serious environmental pollution and crisis and water shortages – what they call “time bombs”, would deny China any opportunity to go hegemonic in its dealings with the external world. Nathan and Scobell also take note of China’s growing military power, which they project as basically defensive, but assert that Beijing can hardly match the military capabilities of other great powers and impose its will on East and Southeast Asian countries.

Two important points, however, should merit the attention of Nathan and Scobell. Firstly, if China, being the preponderant power in the East and Southeast Asian regions, suffers from so many insurmountable vulnerabilities, what about the other regional states? Is Taiwan more or less vulnerable than China, when juxtaposed to each other? The concept of vulnerability, which also applies to other great powers, should be analyzed in more rigorous and comparative perspectives. Secondly, China’s foreign and security policies have not always been defensive. Recent tensions with Japan over the scramble for island territories in the East China Sea clearly point to China’s offensive military postures and assertive foreign policy that considerably undercut Nathan and Scobell’s argument that China’s foreign and security policies are defensive in orientations and purposes.

In some striking similarities to Nathan and Scobell, Goh (2013) critically develops the argument that China, instead of challenging the USA as a rising power contender in Asia or the world at large, has facilitated, in complicity with other key regional states, the establishment of US hegemony in East Asia. She extensively analyzes the post-cold war East Asian regional order and attempts to answer why and how China contributed to US dominance in East Asia and thus counters the prevailing view that overestimates China’s capacity to rebuild the East Asian regional order in its own image. Goh employs the concept of the “parallel resurgence” narrative to reconsider China’s role in East Asia and finds that Beijing at times even allowed “itself to be coopted partially” by the USA (Goh, 2013: 207). Clearly then, as she argues, US hegemony in East Asia is not an outcome of its military preponderance, but the willingness of key regional states “to sustain a regional order underpinned by US primacy and leadership” (Goh, 2013: 5). Furthermore, Goh talks of an “order transition”, in contrast to a “power transition” in East Asia which the USA, China and other regional states are renegotiating as a “social contract” to stabilize the East Asian order. In this new bargain, China is placed at the level of a constrained regional power subordinate to the USA. Goh’s provocative thesis on China’s rise thus clearly nullifies all prophecies of an impending clash with the incumbent hegemon.

Shambaugh’s book China Goes Global, referred to at the beginning of this review essay, seems to present a more powerful anti-thesis to all “China dominance” views and theories, particularly Jacques’ and Cardenal and Araujo’s. It scrutinizes China’s global rise in its entirety –economic, diplomatic, cultural and military dimensions of power, presents readers with an analysis of recent advances in Chinese power but boldly concludes that China is not a global power as is conventionally believed; it is, at best, a partial global power with far less influence around the world. Shambaugh writes: “The elements of China’s global power are actually surprisingly weak and very uneven. China is not as important, and it is certainly not as influential, as conventional wisdom holds” (Shambaugh, 2013: x).

Shambaugh defends his “partial power” thesis by making a series of provocative arguments. He categorically states that China presents no “alternative model” to other nations, although its “footprint” is expanding in different world regions. Unlike other great powers, China falls short of living up to its global responsibility, often dithers to deal with global security challenges and overlooks global governance issues. Most notably, China suffers serious weaknesses in the soft power area, since it has little to offer to other nations in terms of arts and culture, movies, literature and education. In the military arena, China’s presence is hardly felt beyond its immediate neighborhood. These are simply the characteristics, Shambaugh contends, of a partial power (Shambaugh, 2013: 7).

Shambaugh’s thesis on Chinese power, if examined closely, fails to satisfy the queries of inquisitive readers, however. His thesis is largely undercut by some unresolved methodological issues, and information that contradicts the thesis. He labels China as a partial global power without providing readers with a rigorous theoretical framework to examine a partial power and how to differentiate a partial power from a complete or dominant global power. In the absence of a theoretical framework, the thesis fails to pass the test. Another big problem is his fixated mindset that denies a linear timeline to fully grasp the meaning of China’s rise. Compared to the USA’s lengthy economic progression from 1870 to 1913, China’s rise is recent. The miraculous advances Beijing has made in a rather short time period deserve more scholarly attention; China has not reached the end of the development continuum since it is grappling with issues of poverty, low wages, environmental hazards, etc. It may be safely said that China’s march toward modernity has started and is simply continuing. As China keeps moving ahead, its development will create more impacts for the entire world. Although China is not the dominant global power now, nobody can logically deny that it could not be the dominant global power in the near or distant future.

Unlike Shambaugh but arguing from the same angle, Steinfeld (2010) takes up the same issue of China’s growing economic ascendance and possible impacts on the West but restricts his analysis entirely to the economic realm. He admits China’s economic preeminence but refuses to see China as an impending threat to the West-dominated international order or as capable of offering the world an “alternative model”, a position that relates to Shambaugh’s but in a completely different way. In Playing Our Games, Steinfeld departs from the geopolitical approach to Chinese power and instead examines China’s rise in the context of globalization, a massive process centered on cross-border production, investments, markets and distribution systems. China participates in the global production and trade order based on regulatory rules and systems created by the West, more specifically by the USA (Steinfeld, 2010: 24); in that sense, as Steinfeld argues, China is an “institutional converger” or a “capitalist enabler” and poses no threats to the West. China is no longer a country that primarily reassembles toys or finished products, it is a giant hub for high-tech manufacturing in advanced electronics, software, pharmaceuticals and information technology (Steinfeld, 2010: 27). However, Chinese manufacturers do not make the rules of economic and trade transactions, they simply follow and implement the rules made mostly by the USA.

Steinfeld mentions that China’s widening base of high-tech productions and integration in the global economic system is impacting its domestic economic and political systems as Beijing is internalizing some Western values and norms, such as protection of individual rights, rules to promote accountability and a gradual move toward a law-based society. Although the USA is the leading player in global production and innovation, China participates and collaborates with the USA to reap maximum benefits and they support each other’s continued drive toward modernity. There is no winner or loser in the China–US global cooperation scheme; they are simply essential partners in the process. So, China’s rise is to be celebrated, not feared. Finally, Steinfeld writes: “China today, after nearly a century of upheaval, is recapturing its identity and sense of self-worth not by lashing out but instead by attaching itself to an existing global order, our order” (Steinfeld, 2010: 229).

Definitely, the most notable point in Steinfeld’s book is its view of China as a friendly partner that plays our game, takes rules from, and internalizes, the West’s norms and values faithfully. However, it presents a one-sided approach to understand and explain China’s participation in globalization under Western rules and practices. China is simply seen as a subservient actor playing second fiddle to the USA. A legitimate question is: How do China’s internal political dynamics, conflicts and competitions between economic groups, cultural values and practices shape and condition Beijing’s participation in a globalization-driven world economic and trade order? Steinfeld flatly ignores this point and unreasonably privileges Western values and rules of the game, while some other scholars, particularly Wang and Zheng (2008), have analyzed this point with much importance from Chinese viewpoints.

Wang and Zheng’s edited book China and the New International Order reflects on the domestic–global nexus and examines how China’s domestic factors influence global developments and, in turn, how the global order affects China’s domestic political balance. As in the Western democracies, a plurality of voices seeks to influence China’s responses to external developments, although they are sharply divided over China’s participation in and linkages to the West-dominated liberal world order. A globalizing China is making rapid advances in the economic, technological and military sectors giving rise to economic inequalities, tensions between the center and the periphery and between China and its neighbors or external powers, growth of nationalistic attitudes, social grievances, and so on. Different domestic groups (poor laborers, the military, civil bureaucracy, academics and others) have different takes on all these important issues. In particular, there exist, at least, seven different domestic groups on China’s role in relations with the outside world – the Nativists, the Realists, the Major Powers School, Asia First, the Global South School, Selective Multilateralists and the Globalists (Shambaugh, 2013: 26–43). All the schools of thought project China’s involvements in the world in different ways but they converge on one point – China must act to protect and maintain its range of interests in the world, although they differ on whether the area of foreign policy focus should be Asia, the Global South, the major powers only or the whole world. Each school exerts considerable influence in Chinese domestic politics and presumably has some impact on China’s foreign relations.

Still a serious issue not much discussed by Wang and Zheng or Shambaugh is the impact of evolving Chinese leadership on foreign policy – how top Chinese leaders have developed their attitudes and ideas about the external world, especially since 1979, what strategies they are executing to move China ahead and how they look at the challenges China faces today. Lampton (2014) fills this research gap. Based on extensive interviews spanning four decades, he attempts to explain the linkages between China’s domestic and foreign policies by principally focusing on domestic reactions to economic progress that worry the Chinese leaders. Lampton develops his major argument that China’s economic successes make it vulnerable on the political front, creating anxieties for the Chinese leaders. In the past four decades or so, a specter of divergent forces, armed with information, mobility and connections, has greatly flourished with clear influence on Chinese society and governing structure. This is what encumbers on Chinese leaders’ so far uncontested decision-making capacity that has propelled rapid economic growth but has also made the overall system unsustainable. Lampton suggests a shift from China’s economic growth-oriented governance system to a reform-based legitimacy system to ensure China’s survival, but falls short of a explaining how to manage the risks and chaos associated with such a major shift and how the Chinese communist leaders would respond to the unfolding threats to their leadership, when their memories of what happened in Russia in the 1990s and beyond are not supposedly blunt.