EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No. 19

Author
Jianwei Wang, Professor of Political Science and past recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Grant, is an expert on U.S./China relations. Dr. Wang has made frequent trips between the United States and China to do research and to promote mutual understandings between the two countries. He has appeared nationally as an expert on China on media outlets such as PBS News Hour, FOX, National Public Radio and Nightline. Wang is associated with the Atlantic Council, a prestigious foreign affairs think tank and the Voice of America regularly flies Wang to Washington to participate in roundtable discussions that are broadcast to the Far East. This year he gave a paper at a conference celebrating 30 years of U.S.-Chinese relations and met with President Bush. Dr. Wang regularly takes students to the annual National Model United Nations (UN) conference in New York City.

This paper was submitted to "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia" supported by the Henry Luce Foundation based in New York. All papers are available only through the online database.

China’s rise as a leading economic and military power is among the most epic phenomena in the 21st century. Since the Chinese leadership made a strategic choice to reform its economic system and to open up to the world economy in the late 1970s, China has sustained an average annual economic growth of about 10 percent for thirty years, the fastest in the world and unprecedented in world history of economic development. In 2005, China surpassed Japan as the largest holder of foreign exchange reserve. In 2007, China overtook Germany to become the 3rd largest economy and 2nd largest trading nation in the world. In 2008 China’s GDP reached to 4.5-6 $ trillion moving closer to the 2nd largest economy in the world--Japan. As the largest creditor of the sole superpower.United States by holding more than $720 billion of the US treasury bonds, China began to be called “Bank of America.” It is widely projected that China will replace the United Sates as the largest economy by 2025-2040

China’s emergence as a global power has become one of hottest topic of academic and policy research triggering heated debate in the United States and elsewhere in the international community. Over years the focus of the debate has shifted from “whether China will rise” to “how China will rise” and what are the implications of its rise to the United States’ interest in particular and to the existing international system and international order in general.

Along with China’s take-off as a rising power came the perception of “China threat” which has been prevalent in West since the 1990s. Embedded in the logic of traditional realist Western IR theories, this perception argues that as an unsatisfied rising power, China is bound to challenge the dominant position of the United States and to disrupt the international status quo. History has witnessed numerous wars for hegemony between a dominant power and a rising power. If that is the case, China’s rise tends to pose a threat the United States and the status quo in the international system and consequently U.S.- China relations could be put on a collision course. The authoritarian nature of the political system in China further deepens people’s wariness of China’s international behavior when it becomes strong and powerful. 

To alleviate these concerns and suspicions, Chinese political elites in recent years coined a so-called “theory of peaceful rise.” This theory argues that for various reasons China could take a route very different from other major powers in history. China’s rise will be peaceful and beneficial both to the Chinese people and the rest of the world. The United States and other nations should have nothing to fear from China’s rise. In other words, China’s rise is more an opportunity than a threat to the world. 

My study attempts to look into this critical question of how the international community has perceived and reacted to the theory of China’s “peaceful rise” in particular and China’s accelerating rise in recent years in general, and whether it has been effective in dispelling the perception of “China threat” in the international community. To answer these questions, I take the United States as the major case study as the United States is supposed to be one of the original and main sources of “China threat” and therefore became the main target for China’s effort of persuasion with the “peaceful-rise” theory. However to make the study of America’s perception more interesting and meaningful, I try to setup a system of reference for the American cognition of China’s rise. For that purpose I choose China’s two major neighboring countries--Japan and South Korea to find out how they have reacted to China’s rise and “peaceful rise”? Are their reactions similar to or different from the American ones and why? 

The rationale for the selection is that historically China’s neighbors were under the cultural sphere of influence of the Chinese rule as characterized by the “tribute system.” Naturally they tend to have some deep-rooted uneasiness and suspicions about China’s long-term intension in the region. My assumption is that comparing the Western and non-Western reactions to China’s rise could yields some interesting insights about China’s potential and limitation in cooperating with these countries in particular and with the international community in general.

While comparing perceptions of and reactions from three countries regarding China’s “peaceful rise,” I also attempt to explore the sources of their perceptual similarities and differences by taking a number of variables that might impact their reactions to China’s rise. Some tentative hypothesis will be suggested for empirical testing and analysis. Finally the effectiveness of China’s marketing strategy to permeate its “peaceful rise” will be discussed...(Continued)