Managing the rise of China and managing to play a decent game of basketball

The juxtaposition of the smiling photos from Vice-President Biden’s visit to Beijing and the Chinese fan and players stomping on the Georgetown basketball player in a “friendship” game puts the challenge of managing China’s rise in sharp relief.

China’s rise poses myriad challenges to the existing international order, and especially to the United States, the leading power in the existing system. Three distinct challenges emerge, depending on the time frame considered:

In the long run…the greatest challenge of a rising China would be China’s strength.  If China’s economy continues to grow on its current trajectory, and if China sustains its rapidly growing defense spending and this translates into military colossus commensurate with its economic standing, then eventually China could become the preeminent power in the world.  As Aaron Friedberg has persuasively argued, if this happens without political liberalization of the Beijing regime, the challenge for the international order could be considerable.  In the long run, an illiberal superpower China could be as problematic for the 21st Century as the illiberal superpower Soviet Union was for the 20th.

In the medium run… China’s weakness may pose a bigger challenge than its strength.  In order to reach superpower status, China must overcome numerous domestic hurdles.  The regime must deal with the massive environmental consequences of its economic policies.  It must accommodate the legitimate political aspirations of long-suppressed ethnic and religious minorities.  It must overcome the demographic curse imposed by its one-child policy.  It must deal with corruption, mismanagement, and the perceived extravagances of its pampered ruling class.  It must unwind a real estate bubble that may be as daunting as the one that struck the U.S. economy.  And the regime must do all of this while also finding a basis for political legitimacy more stable than the discredited Communist ideology or (likely unsustainable) recent record of cycle-resistant economic growth.  

In the short run…the most immediate challenge China poses may be a belligerence arising out of hypernationalism, itself a function of the paradox of over-confidence tinged with regime insecurity.  There are many examples of this curious paradox — from the petty pattern of blatantly poor officiating and boorish behavior in international sporting events, to the quixotic suppression of media coverage, to the more consequential bullying in regional and economic affairs.

The United States need not fear  the peaceful rise of a politically reformed China that functions as a responsible stakeholder in the international system. And the United States has no right to be smug, since there are American analogues in history (or even the present) to many of the same problems one sees in China.  But China’s challenges are real, and as today’s stories suggest, those who fantasize about being China for a day may not fully comprehend those challenges.