China has emerged as an economic powerhouse (projected to have the largest economy in the world in a little over a decade) and is taking an ever-increasing role on the world stage.

China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities is designed to help the United States better comprehend the facts and dynamics underpinning China's rise, which is an understanding that becomes more and more important with each passing day.

Additionally, the authors suggest actions both countries can take that will not only maximize the opportunities for China's constructive integration into the international community but also help form a domestic consensus that will provide a stable foundation for such policies. Filled with facts for policymakers, this much-anticipated book's narrative-driven, accessible style will appeal to the general reader.

The expert judgments in this book paint a picture of a China confronting domestic challenges that are in many ways side effects of its economic successes, while simultaneously trying to take advantage of the foreign policy benefits of those same successes.

China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities from The China Balance Sheet Project, a joint, multiyear project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Peterson Institute, discusses China's military modernization; China's increasing soft power influence in Asia and around the world; China's policy toward Taiwan; domestic political development; Beijing's political relations with China's provincial and municipal authorities; corruption and social unrest; rebalancing China's economic growth; the exchange rate controversy; energy and the environment; industrial policy; trade disputes; and investment issues.

The book's introduction and conclusion address additional issues, such as key trends in China's political decision making and its impact on US interests.

Visit China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities Download Page

You can read or download the publication in PDF format.

By C. Fred Bergsten, Charles Freeman, Nicholas R. Lardy and Derek J. Mitchell
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Peterson Institute; 1 edition (September 23, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0881324175
ISBN-13: 978-0881324174

Introduction

China is not a superpower, nor will it ever seek to be one. If one day China should change its color and turn into a superpower, if it too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to its bullying, aggression and exploitation, the people of the world should . . . expose it, oppose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.
—Deng Xiaoping, speech at the UN General Assembly, April 1974

Twenty-five years ago, in the early years of China’s opening, the cultural, economic, and political gulf between China and the United States was vast. If you were one of the foreigners living in Beijing at the time—one of the lucky 1,200—that gulf could produce its share of quirks. A night out could mean a trip to the “Disco” at Ethnicities Hotel on the western side of Tiananmen Square, where one drank warm beer and watched a handful of local Chinese—typically children of high-ranking officials from the leadership compound at Zhongnanhai—shimmy across the dance floor to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Jingle Bells,” and (endlessly) “Fernando” by the Swedish group ABBA.

Any effort at communication between foreigners and Chinese was quickly rebuffed by conspicuous, leisure-suited representatives of the Public Security Bureau. The city’s streets were deserted after 7 p.m. or so, and one could zoom across town at the end of an evening in a matter of minutes to one’s heavily guarded foreigners-only compound to call it a day.

That Beijing is long gone now. The city’s art and music scenes are vibrant and sophisticated, although one still encounters quirks now and again. Foreigners and Chinese congregate and connect without fear of official molestation. That same trip across town at any time of day or night will take nearly an hour given the traffic in Beijing (1,100 new cars are introduced into the city every day). ...

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