Giant Awakes: The Chinese Challenge to East Asia‪.‬

THE RISE OF CHINA UNDENIABLY poses a problem for East Asian security. Those who suggest that there is not a problem are either strategically myopic or have prematurely capitulated to the notion of a Sinified East Asia. The real question is how to define the nature and extent of the Chinese challenge. Although China is often compared to the Soviet Union, a more appropriate comparison might be to Japan or Germany in the 1930s. China is undergoing far-reaching and destabilizing social and economic reform, while its authoritarian leadership is losing its ability to control China's rapidly changing social, economic and political system. Meanwhile, China is spending increasing amounts (in absolute terms) on its armed forces. Most importantly, China, like 1930s Germany or Japan, is a non-status quo, increasingly nationalistic power that seeks to change its frontiers and to reorder the international system. These trends do not necessarily prove that China is a threat. But it is instructive that these are precisely the characteristic of great powers in the past century that have posed the biggest challenge to their neighbors and to international order. If these fundamental features of China are not cause enough for concern, consider China's past and present weight. For centuries China was the world's greatest civilization. It is still the world's longest lasting empire. Until 1850 it was the world's largest economy. In short, there is nothing extraordinary about the current rise of China, for in fact it is the re-rise of China. As a result, there is nothing especially odd about the people who live close to China deciding that when China is strong, they must accommodate rather than confront their giant neighbor.