China is now a world power

Timothy Garton

APRIL 2, 2009 may be marked as the day on which, through the catalysis of a global economic crisis, China definitively emerged as a 21st-century world power. Just a few months ago, the talk in Western capitals was still about graciously inviting China to join the Western club of G-7 plus Russia. Now G-20 is widely accepted as the new top table of world politics, and China is already seen as one of the biggest players at that table. The question now is: What kind of world power will China be?

Until recently, China's official policy was of demonstrative modesty - the dragon as gecko. China was outspoken only on issues that related directly to its own economic development and immediate state interests. Now it seems to be moving gingerly beyond the paradigm of developmental modesty. As, in this crisis, the world asks more of it, so it starts to ask more of the world.

The most striking example is a recent article by the country's central bank governor, suggesting the creation of a supra-sovereign international reserve currency "that is disconnected from individual nations". In other words, not the US dollar.

This February Xi Jinping, China's vice president and heir presumptive to Hu Jintao, sounded off to a Chinese audience in Mexico about rich, powerful countries "messing around" with poorer ones. Now who could he be thinking of? Last year a senior official in China's Defense Ministry said the world should not be surprised if China builds its own aircraft carrier. Beijing and Washington have publicly locked horns about the level of Chinese defense spending. At the same time, the Chinese are fascinated by the idea, originally promoted by an American scholar, of a G-2 within the G-20. China and the United States - this Group of Two - should be to the world what the Franco-German couple used to be to Europe.

China is also investing more in public diplomacy, with nearly 300 Confucius Institutes around the world, increased international broadcasting, and Chinese leaders placing Op-ed pieces in Western newspapers. So in all three key dimensions of power - economic, military and soft - China is stepping up its game.

There's many a slip twixt cup and lip. China has so far weathered the economic crisis better than America. But bigger tests are still to come.

In the longer run, the Chinese question of questions remains: Can you continue to combine command politics with market economics? Or, to frame it more positively: can you achieve a controlled, step-by-step evolution of this political system into one that is more responsive, transparent, accountable and therefore durable?

Let us optimistically assume, for the sake of argument, that China masters these domestic challenges and continues its peaceful rise. What then? What kind of world power would it wish to be? Nobody knows, not even the Chinese. The answer will depend on a generation of leaders not yet in power, and on younger Chinese whose views are scarcely formed.

-Arab News