Will China Be Number 1?

By Paul Bracken

To understand China's role in the world come 2025, it helps to look at the rise of Prussia in the 1870s. It is nearly impossible to imagine a world not led by Western institutions and not dominated by Western values. But China's growing power signifies just such a transition, in much the same way Prussia stripped Britain and France of their leading roles in Europe. The rise of Beijing does not automatically translate into a decline for Washington, but it is a challenge to America's superpower position.

China changes the meaning of being a superpower. At present a superpower is a country with a big economy and global military reach. The word was popularized in the 1960s to fit the U.S., the only holder of the title today. China will have neither the material wealth of the U.S., nor its global military reach. But looking at the rise of China through the narrow framework of numbers of automobiles or Osprey helicopters doesn't come to grips with the country's sources of power. Defining a superpower in terms of economic and military size leaves out the power that comes from being able to upset the system, even when done unintentionally. A new definition of superpower must take account of who can upend an order that has lasted for centuries. On this score, China is a superpower.

With its vast scale, China can upset the global trading rules and security understandings that underwrite the current Western-led system. China's problems with economy, energy and the environment will be the world's problems, because if they are not taken care of, terrible consequences will spill across the map far from China. Perversely, the gap in material wealth and military technology separating China from the West is actually a source of leverage for Beijing. In the West the gap makes China look weak. But the gap actually makes China strong. China has the advantage--the underdog's advantage--that comes from knowing that shutting the country out, trying to hold it down, provokes the resentments the West wants to avoid: resentments that might make Chinese markets hostile to U.S. exporters. When a U.S. bomber accidentally struck China's embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war, protests were heard not just in Beijing but also in other cities around the world. America's image as an overbearing superpower is something the Chinese are only too willing to exploit.

People forget that 500 years ago, China was the world's sole superpower. When many Europeans were living in mud huts and scratching the soil with sticks, China was the greatest economic and military power on earth. A hundred years before Europe began its mastery of Asia and America, China had the biggest and best navy in the world. But for an accident of history, Europe would be speaking Chinese today. China discovered the inventions that would pave the way to world mastery for those who put them to use: the printing press, gunpowder and the magnetic compass. Given this economic, military and technical head start, what happened? Europe, not China, became the world's colonizer and mapmaker. Why did China do so badly in the modern era?

The question is called the Needham paradox, after Joseph Needham, the great British scholar who raised it in his multivolume history of Chinese technology. Needham's answer sheds light on China's ultimate condition, allowing us to sort through the buzz of short-term problems that distract attention from the fundamental change now taking place. Yes, the West mastered the technology that China first discovered. Yet much more important, according to Needham, was that China lost its edge in the 15th century by suppressing entrepreneurs whose power posed a threat to the Emperor. The empire was made safe from within, but at the price of atrophy in the face of the Western challenge. This condition continued under Mao Zedong.

China's current economic growth is brought about by decentralized business forces, not by the state. The conditions of the Needham paradox are ending. As they do, there is reason to believe Chinese capitalism may be especially dynamic. Even though modern capitalism is a Western invention, Westerners are not the only ones who can master it. For cultural reasons, capitalism is in many ways more natural to Asia than it ever was to the West. The devotion to one's task as the hallmark of productive work had to be beaten into a mostly balky peasantry in Europe, even while such dedication flourished under Confucianism. Today the work ethic in China puts the U.S. to shame. Imagine what will happen when technology and innovation join with what some U.S. experts in the 1960s contemptuously called "ant labor" in China.

The West's belief is that globalization will fundamentally change China and minimize the problems of the country's inclusion in the world system. This is the American myth of the 1990s. We Americans, for example, see a rigid trade-off between economic success in the age of globalization and military power. We think other countries can have one or the other but not both. This simplistic view, however, forgets even our own history, as well as the history of other rising states. The rise to superpowerdom in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s was accompanied by sharp growth in economic and military power. Each fueled the other. We forget this because as a status quo power we want to freeze a global order that benefits us. We'd much rather hold to the belief that new powers will be only too happy to continue to be led by a Western club whose historical record of treating non-Westerners has left a grudge we'd also rather forget.

China has no intention of forgetting the past. Indeed, its own complicity in its downfall as a great power makes it useful to blame others. China faced famine repeatedly not because of its enormous population but because of the actions of its leaders. Turning this painful history into a positive asset by stoking smoldering resentments and nationalism can be an effective way for China to get more from negotiations with Washington than it otherwise would. It can also hold the country together as the Communist Party crumbles.

Another challenge to America is a military one. Beijing has started a significant expansion of those parts of its military that will undercut the American presence in Asia unless we spend large sums to counter it. China is turning out hundreds of missiles that threaten the American bases on which U.S. military power is founded. With these bases under threat, our military capacity to be a player in Asia drops sharply. The U.S. may have a "global" military that can't play in the most important part of the world.

The U.S. is a rich and innovative country. China is unlikely to displace the U.S. by 2025. But by changing what it means to be a superpower, Beijing undermines the one country that now holds the title. China can upset the global order without deliberately trying to do so and can check U.S. influence in parts of Asia where we have been for 50 years. One thing can be said for sure: the costs of staying a superpower for the U.S. are about to go up, sharply.

Paul Bracken is a professor at the Yale School of Management and author of Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age