[Dean's World] Dave Price: The Delicate Giant

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
The Delicate Giant
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1198444357.shtml


   [1]Great essay from Fareed Zakaria on China's strength, weakness,
   liberalization, and future:

     On issue after issue, China has become the second most important
     country on the planet. Consider what's happened already this past
     year. In 2007 China contributed more to global growth than the
     United States, the first time another country had done so since at
     least the 1930s. It also became the world's largest consumer,
     eclipsing the United States in four of the five basic food, energy
     and industrial commodities. And a few months ago China surpassed
     the United States to become the world's leading emitter of CO2.
     Whether it's trade, global warming, Darfur or North Korea, China
     has become the new x factor, without which no durable solution is
     possible.
     ...
     So far Beijing has managed to balance economic growth and social
     stability in a highly fluid environment. Given their challenges,
     China's political leaders stand out for their governing skills. The
     regime remains a dictatorship, with a monopoly on power. But it has
     expanded personal liberty in ways that would be recognizable to
     John Locke or Thomas Jefferson. People in China can now work,
     travel, own property and increasingly worship as they please. This
     is not enough, but it is not insignificant, either.
     ...
     In another Foreign Affairs essay, Princeton's John Ikenberry makes
     the crucially important point that the current world order is
     extremely conducive to China's peaceful rise. That order, he
     argues, is integrated, rule-based, with wide and deep
     foundationsâand there are massive economic benefits for China to
     work within this system. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons make it
     suicidal to risk a great-power war. "Today's Western order, in
     short, is hard to overturn and easy to join," writes Ikenberry.

   A lot of people, especially on the right, worry about China's rise,
   but that nation's emergence looks very similar to Japan's postwar
   rise; export-driven growth building internal wealth linked to
   relationships with the West. Their economic growth is largely
   dependent on liberalization and integration, and as they liberalize
   and integrate the possibility of conflict becomes ever more remote.
   We have largely moved past the nationalism and ideological struggles
   behind the major wars of the twentieth century, not becoming "global
   citizens" so much as Western citizens, as the ideals of liberty first
   articulated thousands of years ago by [2]an odd little group of
   city-states along the Aegean are more and more widely understood as
   both the most moral and the most practical paradigm under which
   societies can function.

References

   1. http://www.newsweek.com/id/81588
   2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece