Samuel S. Kim
The question of China's status as a "great power" in the international system seems
elementary enough, yet the answer is far from obvious. During the cold war, assessments of
China's national power ranged from a "sleeping dragon" and aspiring "superpower
candidate" to an actual major power--the much-coveted balancing third force--in global
geopolitics. In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen tragedy, many were prematurely
pessimistic, predicting a declining if not collapsing China. Today a "rising China" has
captured the American public's attention, and with it the question of China's great power
status has resurfaced.
Although there is no "scientific" way of measuring state power and international rank in a rapidly changing world, an assessment of China as a great power must be informed by several factors. First, many states are subject to the relentless twin pressures of globalization from above and substate localization and ethnonational fragmentation from below. As a result, the capacity of states and their leaders to promote human security and well-being within an enclosed territorial space has been weakened. China is not exempt from the sovereignty-diminishing dynamics of globalization from above and localization from below.
Second, assessing Chinese power at this critical juncture in world history is complicated by the profound domestic social, economic, and ecological transformations China is experiencing at a time when the global system of which it is a part is undergoing a structural transformation. In world politics, the perception and credibility of national power matters as much as the reality of it. The perception of what constitutes power has changed significantly with the demise of the socialist superpower and the multipolarizing process in East Asia. And the cold war illusion of a consensus on what constitutes a "superpower" has been shattered by the rise of Japan as a global power of a different kind (a one-dimensional global power), the sudden "third worldization" of the former Soviet Union (South Korea's GNP now surpasses Russia's), and America's heroic but increasingly ineffective claim of global leadership without bearing the costs and the responsibilities.
Third, especially in an era of globalization, power needs to be seen in synthetic terms. The traditional military and strategic concept of power pays too much attention to a state's aggregate power (power potential as inferred from its as yet unconverted resources and possessions) and too little to the more dynamic and interdependent notions of power in an issue-specific domain--that is, power defined in terms of control over outcomes.
How then is a great power defined today? It is a state that easily ranks among the top five in the primary global structures--economic, military, knowledge, and normative--and that enjoys relatively low sensitivity, vulnerability, and security interdependence because of massive resource and skill differentials and relative economic self-sufficiency. A great power is a strong state with the ability to mobilize the country's human and material resources in the service of its worldview and policy objectives. There is also the normative/behavioral requirement of great power status: a great power is and becomes what a great power does.
China's economic power, measured in terms of the aggregate economic numbers, is impressive enough. Post-Mao China established an all-time global record in doubling per capita output between 1977 and 1987. According to the World Bank's purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates, China, with a 1994 GDP of just under $3 trillion, has become the second-largest economy in the world, after the United States. If we accept the projections of a 1995 Rand study, China's GDP will reach $11.3 trillion by the year 2010 (in 1994 PPP dollars) compared to $10.7 trillion for the United States, $4.5 trillion for Japan, $3.7 trillion for India, and $2 trillion for a unified Korea.1
The unpleasant downside is that this remarkable economic growth has been made possible by China's growing involvement in and dependence on the capitalist world economic system. China's expanded involvement in the global political economy more easily translates into greater vulnerability and sensitivity than into greater power. China's external debt stands at about $120 billion and is still growing. While China has had the fastest-growing economy in the world--its total output quadrupled between 1978 and 1995--its external trade dependence, defined as the sum of imports and exports as a percentage of GNP, rose dramatically during the same period, from less than 10 percent to more than 56 percent (Beijing's foreign trade increased more than 13 times during the same period, from $21 billion to $280 billion). That China registered a $39.5 billion surplus in its bilateral trade with the United States in 1996 speaks volumes about Beijing's sensitivity to Murphy's Law.
Forecasting China's future economic growth is difficult because of the twin pressures of globalization from above and localization from below. Post-Mao China, with its opening to the forces of globalization from above and suppression of those associated with ethnonational fragmentation from below, has achieved remarkable economic growth, but its continuing success remains far from assured.
Indeed, because of localizing pressures from below, China will not so easily become the economic superpower that many have predicted. Recent World Bank data and estimates show that a larger part of China's burgeoning population is being left behind than was previously assumed, even as the overall economy continues to register impressive growth. More than one-quarter of all Chinese--about 350 million people--subsist on less than $1 a day; most are concentrated in the peripheral but strategically important areas of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Moreover, for the first time a significant number of urban dwellers--15 million or more--are falling below the poverty line without a state welfare net to catch them. Some 100 million rural Chinese are part of a floating population that drifts from city to city, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese are escaping their homeland in search of better economic opportunities in foreign countries. A growing mismatch between population and resources, and a possible eruption of ethnonational conflict accompanied by domestic, social, political, demographic, and environmental problems, could make Beijing's march to the promised land daunting if not impossible.
Its growing economic vulnerability and dependence notwithstanding, authoritarian China with a world-class-size economy seems poised to mobilize significant quantities of resources for the exercise of power outside its borders. China is a member of the exclusive nuclear club, possessing the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. It also maintains the world's largest standing army, with 3 million soldiers.
In the early 1990s, Beijing began proclaiming that it enjoyed the best external security environment and the deepest peace ever since the founding of the People's Republic. At the same time it continued to increase its defense budget at double-digit rates and beef up its military power projection capabilities. Using the official exchange rate of 8.29 renminbi to the dollar, China's announced defense budget for the 1996--1997 fiscal year stands at $9.72 billion. The actual amount devoted to military spending is generally estimated to be at least four to five times greater than an official defense budget; this means that China's total military spending for the 1996--1997 fiscal year is between $38.6 billion and $48.25 billion (it is not possible to give an accurate and universally accepted figure because of the lack of transparency and the differences and discrepancies in the categories of inclusion and exclusion).
Translating military expenditures into military power projection capabilities is even more difficult and controversial than estimating actual military spending. Most analysts warn against overestimating China's military power in terms of high-tech sophistication and power projection capabilities. They note that as much as 30 percent of China's military expenditures are used to subsidize inefficient military industrial enterprises; that China's ambitions run ahead of its limited capabilities; that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is not in a position to project its air and naval power in sustained combat for more than 90 days in the South China Sea; that the PLA's weapons systems are roughly 10 to 20 years behind the state of the art in almost all categories needed for the kind of war the PLA wants to fight and win within a few days--high-tech, high-firepower, rapid-reaction local peripheral wars; and that an unfolding military revolution based on the application of information technology to weapons could put the already dominant United States far ahead of its allies and adversaries alike.
Whatever the actual numbers, size, and sophistication, it is clear that China's military power in quantitative and qualitative terms is growing. For a more accurate and comprehensive account of China's overall military power, however, other factors need to be considered. One of these is the belief that military power is the most important component of "comprehensive national strength" (zonghe guoli), which is viewed as indispensable in China's attempt to regain its status as a leading world power and to defend against any threats, actual or imagined, to its territorial sovereignty and political integrity. Without sufficient military power, it is argued, China will not be able to successfully project its national identity as a great power or to play a more decisive role in world affairs. The idea that sufficient military power buys both deterrence and status reflects and effects internal debates about why China needs more and better high-tech weapons systems.
One of the most remarkable and potentially dangerous developments in the post--cold war era is the rise of the concept of haiyang guotu guan (sea as national territory). The Chinese people have been prodded to cultivate and cherish haiyang guotu guan in order to direct their attention to the unpleasant fact that it is China's maritime interests that have been encroached on in recent years. Chinese strategists now also discuss the need for shengcun kongjian (living space) and for strategic frontiers that extend into the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and East China Sea, and even into outer space. A recent internal Chinese document states that the disputed island groups in the South China Sea, some of them situated nearly 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) south of China's Hainan Island province and most of them subject to conflicting jurisdictional claims, could provide lebensraum for the Chinese people.2 Consonant with these concepts, China's naval military doctrine has shifted from the coastal defense of the mainland to active defense of maritime economic and strategic interests. In line with the new doctrine, Beijing's naval exercises, gunboat diplomacy, and creeping maritime expansionism have extended outside coastal waters in the 1990s.
The irony is that the West has begun to sing the rise of China chorus at a time when Chinese leaders, bereft of their vaunted geopolitical swing value, are shifting from the pretense of being a global power to becoming the dominant regional military power in Asia. From Beijing's post--cold war perspective, Asia is the center of Chinese power and influence, the nucleus of ever-expanding circles radiating outward in all directions. Today, China relies on Asia, we are constantly told, for its status and role as "a special power in the world."
Changes in science and technology have transformed the global structures of economic and military competitiveness, productivity, and hierarchy. Knowledge power--also called "skill power"--is believed to be increasingly more significant than "hard power" in the conventional sense. The changes in the nature and distribution of knowledge power between and among various social actors at all systemic levels, and how best to initiate or adapt to such changes, will have a direct bearing on China's march to great powerdom.
China is relatively weak and vulnerable in knowledge power. In the realm of ideas and information, China takes rather than creates, importing far more than it exports; China is not even among the top 15 patent powers in the world. Virtually all of China's futuristic writings and policy pronouncements in the post-Mao era incorporate a hard technocratic globalism based on a nationalistic viewpoint that emphasizes the determining role of science and technological power in the rise and fall of great powers. According to this view, China has to be knowledge competitive with the stronger military and industrial powers if it is to beat them at their own game. A country's success in global competition is also said to depend on the development of its high-tech industries. If China is to become a world power, it must attend to these industries, as it once did to the development of nuclear weapons and satellite programs.
Not only is technology accepted by Beijing as a marketable commodity, but it is often treated as a kind of global collective good--the more free rides China takes, the better. Nearly all the UN system's multilateral economic, science, and technology regimes have been reconceptualized as cost-effective "deliverymen" for global information and innovations. They have been allowed to enter, some by design and others inadvertently, the castle of Chinese sovereignty as conceptual Trojan horses. There they influence the process by which Chinese national interests are redefined and Chinese national priorities are restructured to better fit the logic of the global situation.
The concept of a great power has always implied a synergy of two kinds of power: material power and normative power. To say that China is a great power is to say not only that it has special rights and privileges and commands formidable muscle power, but also that it has corresponding special duties and responsibilities and behaves like a responsible great power.
The apparent paradox of a China seeking great power status and attacking great power politics at the same time is explained by the Chinese differentiation between great power and hegemonic power. Hegemony is defined by China in motivational and behavioral terms rather than in terms of the general criteria and attributes of a great power. This explains why China attacks hegemonic behavior rather than the great power state per se. Unlike imperialism, hegemonism is said to carry no special implications for the social system or class character; that is, hegemonism has nothing to do with the attributes of a national power but has everything to do with the nature of state behavior. The irony is that the world's principal aspirant to great power status has been none other than the world's principal critic of superpower hegemony, and that the world's principal antihegemonic champion has become the principal security and economic beneficiary of America's hegemonic structural power. Thus China's identity as a great power may be divided into two symbolic and substantive components: great power identity as defined by what China is, and great power identity as defined by what China does.
The UN Security Council, as a formalized institutional expression of great power cooperation in settling international disputes and enforcing international peace, allows us to assess China's normative power in world politics. China, along with the other four powers granted a permanent seat on the Security Council at the end of World War II, was endowed with special rights and privileges (for example, permanent membership and veto power). The five permanent members enjoyed these rights and privileges--even though they ran counter to the principle of state sovereignty and equality--because they were believed to be in a position to make special contributions to the maintenance of international peace and security. In the post-Mao era, China has cultivated a self-image as a great power with China-specific rights and entitlements--but not the duties and responsibilities--commensurate with its status, based on Deng Xiaoping's simple sinocentric logic that "the stronger China grows, the better the chances are for preserving world peace." Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to find evidence of any symmetry between China's special rights and China's special duties that come with its status as one of the permanent five on the Security Council.
Consider Chinese financial contributions to the UN system. As if to add more credibility to China's much touted national identity as the only third world country that gave but never received any bilateral or multilateral aid during the post-entry Maoist period (1971--1976), Beijing, in a move unprecedented in the history of UN budgetary politics, requested in 1973 to have its UN assessment rate raised from 4 percent to 5.5 percent. This was a dramatic way of demonstrating China's self-ascribed preeminent status in the global community during the Maoist period, a period that saw China's leaders demonstrate an impressive capacity to wield influence in global politics without the full trappings generally associated with a great power.
In sharp contrast, Deng's China made a U-turn, pursuing a realpolitik of reaping maximum benefits with minimal financial responsibility. In a dramatic if not unprecedented move, China in late 1978 abandoned its policy of self-reliance by requesting aid from the United Nations Development Program, the largest multilateral technical aid organization. A year later China asked the UN to decrease its assessment rate (based on its own "complete national income statistics"). Despite the controversy surrounding the accuracy of the Chinese statistics, China's assessment rate was reduced from 5.5 percent to 0.79 percent; it now stands at 0.72 percent. This has decisively changed the cost-benefit calculus for Chinese participation not only in the UN proper but also in the UN system as a whole, since all the specialized agencies follow the scales of assessment determined by the General Assembly.
Currently, China is the largest recipient of World Bank multilateral aid (about $3 billion per year), even though the World Bank ranks it as the world's second-largest economy. As one of the permanent members of the Security Council, China should be contributing a significant percentage of the peacekeeping budget, certainly more than 0.978 percent. The United Kingdom, with the second-lowest assessment rate (6.372 percent) among the five permanent members, contributes nearly seven times as much as China. At the regular budget assessment rate of 0.72 percent, China's contributions to the UN regular budget are surpassed by other third world member states such as Brazil (1.62 percent), South Korea (0.80 percent), Saudi Arabia (0.80 percent), and Mexico (0.78 percent). In short, China today is a UN financial regime taker, not shaper, because what it gains from the UN in multilateral financial and technical assistance far exceeds what it contributes to the UN's regular and peacekeeping budgets.
Normative power can also be defined as the ability to define, control, and transform the agenda of global politics and to legitimate a new international order. Not surprisingly, few of the UN conventions and agreements on a wide range of global issues and problems--and few of the many UN reform proposals currently afloat--bear Chinese initiative or sponsorship. As China's economy began to boom in 1991, Beijing adopted a more assertive strategy in the quintessentially normative domain of global human rights politics. In the wake of the publication of its first White Paper on human rights in October 1991--which acknowledged that the best defense is a good offense--China assumed a more offensive posture by positioning itself as the third world's most vociferous champion of cultural relativist human rights.
The allure of China's cultural relativist line--that protecting human rights should be keyed to and decided by each individual state in the light of its own history, tradition, and level of cultural and economic development--is obvious for any authoritarian or repressive state. But cultural relativism in both theory and practice is deeply flawed. It proceeds from the dubious premise that what is done in various countries in varying cultural and developmental conditions should be accepted as international norms and standards. To accept varying human rights conditions and practices in a multicultural world as empirical reality is one thing, but to accept multiple, culture-specific government practices as normative reality is something else--namely, to have no international standards.
In practice, China adopted a regional approach as part of a divide and conquer strategy in the un, the logic of which was to slice up the concept of universal human rights little by little, region by region, until there was scarcely anything left of the UN human rights regime. Yet, the UN Development Program's 1991 human freedom index, which measured 88 countries against 40 different indicators of human freedom (for example, the right to travel; the right to use an ethnic language; freedom from capital punishment; freedom to express political opposition and maintain an independent press; the right to free legal aid and to an open trial), put China near the bottom--it was ranked 84th--with only 2 of the 40 key human freedoms enjoyed by the Chinese people.
Thus, despite the prominence accorded human rights internationally in the 1990s, China seems to be doing more and more to achieve less and less. Lacking co-optive soft power and ideological appeal in a postcommunist era, Beijing instinctively invokes the pre-Holocaust and pre-Nuremberg principle of state sovereignty as a kind of sword with which to ward off external human rights pressures.
By conventional measurements of the rise and fall of great powers (in terms of shifts in the international military and economic power balances), China is a rising great power. Yet it remains an incomplete great power in a rapidly changing world where transnational nonmilitary challenges to and soft sources of power are becoming increasingly important. Thus, China's future as a complete great power remains indeterminate, if not foreclosed.
Paradoxically, China is at once a growing and assertive regional military power in its near abroad and a weak state at home pretending to be a strong state. Despite its remarkable foreign policy achievements during the post-Mao reform era, China does not seem to be a fully satisfied status quo power. Its assertive unilateral realpolitik may be seen as a function of a regime with weak legitimacy trying hard to bring about national reunification and restore what Chinese of every political coloration believe to be China's natural and inalienable right to great power status. Herein lies the logic of Chinese "exemptionalism": China-specific exemption in the global human rights regime and China-specific entitlement in global security and economic institutions, all in the service of restoring China's great power status.
While post-Mao leaders succeeded to a remarkable degree in making their country materially rich and militarily strong, gaps still remain between actual and perceived power and between hard and soft power. Moreover, post-Mao leaders have left their country largely unprepared for dealing with the changing sources of power and with the challenges of globalization from above and localization from below. Indeed, one of the central challenges--perhaps the challenge--confronting post-Deng leaders is how to manage the tensions emanating from substate ethnonational fragmentation and localization, East Asian regionalization, and globalization. Encouraging China's constructive and positive participation in the shaping of a more just, humane, and peaceful world order is a clear and continuing challenge confronting the world community today, and will remain so in the coming years.
Ultimately, the critical question in assessing China as a great power is behavior. What matters most is not so much the growth of Chinese power but how and for what purposes a rising China will actually wield its putative or actual power in the conduct of its international relations. Despite realpolitik in global institutions, a policy of multilateral integration coupled with multilateral containment is a more feasible and desirable option than a policy of bilateral engagement. Enmeshing China more fully in a global network of mutually interactive and beneficial multilateral regimes could more easily contain and even possibly transform from within China's unilateral free-riding or defective behavior. Here the United States has an important role to play in Chinese global learning: not by asking China to follow what it says, nor what it actually does, nor by endlessly debating how to engage or contain China, but by shifting its own post--cold war foreign policy from a unilateral to a multilateral cooperative security approach--indeed, by acting like the responsible great power that it wants China to become.
Samuel S. Kim is adjunct professor of political science and senior research scholar at the East Asian Institute, Columbia University. He is the editor of China and the World, 4th ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, forthcoming 1998).
1Charles Wolf, Jr. et al., Long-Term Economic and Military Trends, 1994-2015: The United States and Asia (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand, 1995), pp. 5-8.
2See "South China Sea: Treacherous Shoals," Far Eastern Economic Review, August 13, 1992; and John W. Garver, "China's Push Through the South China Sea: The Interaction of Bureaucratic and National Interests," The China Quarterly, no. 132 (December 1992).