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During four decades of fast-paced economic growth, China’s ascent has reverberated across the full social spectrum, from international relations to technology, from trade to global health, from academia to climate change. Despite disrupting the long-established cultural and political constructs of the postwar liberal international order, Beijing’s power remains uneven and limited internationally, whereas the rise of China has been the object of much frenzied reaction within Western civil society. The hostility and new cold war with the United States is a major factor in fuelling debate and speculation.
This book explores the uncertainties and dilemmas China’s rise has fuelled for both the US-sponsored liberal order and the Chinese communist elites that are responsible. It provides the tools to understand the contemporary political and media turmoil about China, its causes and its trajectories. It interprets the rise of China through the lenses of global politics and the uneven and combined development of capitalism and its encounter with the authoritarian, one-party system of the Chinese polity.
To most westerners, China is like quantum mechanics: the few who really understand it are often not good at explaining it to the rest of us. So this up-to-the-minute, scholarly but accessible guide to thinking through the number one geopolitical issue of the next decade is greatly to be welcomed.
Introduction
1. China’s rise and state capitalism: an uneven world order
2. "Best of friends, worst enemies": China’s rise and the "blowback" of American grand strategy
3. Successes and limits of China’s engagement with the world economy
4. The dilemmas of China’s engagement with the world
5. Sino-western relations in the post-Trump era
Conclusion