On December 10, 2003, Premier Wen Jiabao introduced American audiences to the concept of China’s “peaceful rise” in a speech to students at Harvard University. Pointing out that China was a poor country in per capita terms and a backward economy in many respects, Premier Wen argued that China needed a stable environment in which to rise. He noted importantly that China is rising within the global liberal economic order, choosing participation over the austere autarky of the Mao Zedong era. China’s “peaceful rise” thesis, later adjusted to “peaceful development”, seemed to reaffirm what prominent scholars had been saying for years: Even though the liberal economic order was designed and built in the West, it was an open order. Rising non-Western states could prosper within this competitive environment without contesting its basic rules and principles.1
The argument that China neither wishes nor is able to undermine and transform the international liberal order is persuasive. China has been that order’s greatest beneficiary over the past two decades, and for practical reasons seems locked into it for the foreseeable future. Already the largest trading partner of Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore and Australia, as well as the largest Asian trading partner of America and India, China cannot afford to remove itself from the global trading regime. More important, perhaps, China has not elaborated an alternative concept to the existing order—certainly not a concept other countries would be remotely likely to follow or replicate. Nor is it remotely likely that China could impose a new order on its Asian neighbors. America remains both the preeminent Asian military power and also the preferred security partner for every significant country in the region. In strategic terms, China remains a decidedly isolated rising power despite its growing military capabilities.
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