What does a Chinese superpower look like? Nothing like the U.S.

Posted by kuailai99 on August 30th, 2018

What struck Wang Wen about Antarctica, beyond the brutality of the December cold, was the scale of U.S. operations in such an inhospitable environment and the American flag fluttering by the sign that marks the geographic South Pole. Observing the academic mission of hundreds of U.S. scientists in a region rich in resource potential, he was determined that China must catch up. To get more chinese news outlet, you can visit shine news official website.

The report Wang wrote this summer for the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China in Beijing, where he’s executive dean, reflects China’s growing dilemma as it muscles its way into an international system it didn’t create. For the first time in its long history, China has in President Xi Jinping a leader with a truly global vision. So, inevitably, Beijing looks to the U.S., the sole superpower, for a yardstick as to what that requires—be it a blue water n .. Whether China does become a superpower and whether it could sustain the costs involved are questions that will impact the world for decades.

They will shape terms of trade, a changing global order, and issues of war and peace. “We don’t know,” Wang said over dinner a few floors below his institute, when asked what Chinese great power will look like. “Anything but America.” Yet to misquote Leon Trotsky, even if China isn’t interested in becoming a superpower, superpower may be interested in it. The U.S., too, began its journey on the world stage determined not to replicate earlier colonial empires.

Today, 11 carrier groups and a network of military bases span the globe to protect its interests. China may be heading down a similar path. An aircraft carrier construction program is underway. Its first overseas military base opened last year, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Spending for diplomatic service is up sharply. Xi’s “Made in China 2025” economic project aims to displace the U.S. as the world’s technological power, while another plan calls for dominance in Artificial Intelligence by 2030. The country raised defense spending from billion in 1990 to 8 billion last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, more than three times Russia’s budget.

The ease with which it did so—the military’s share of overall government spending actually fell—suggests China can be any kind of power it wants. Still, Beijing’s crackdown on free speech and other social liberties doesn’t suggest a self-confident regime. A budding trade war with the U.S. has helped shave about 20 percent off Chinese equities since January, triggering a domestic debate over whether Xi has already overreached by bidding so openly to challenge the U.S. Consider, too, that the average Chinese remains less wealthy than the average Mexican at a time when the population is already starting to age. Some investors wonder about the health of big Chinese banks, whose lending for decades provided the investment-led growth on which the party relies for its legitimacy. If this is a superpower in the making, it may be a fragile one.